Everyone Wants FDEs But Almost Nobody Is Using Them Right
Two years ago I joined HappyRobot as the first FDE hire, before the role was even called FDE. Since then I've seen the company scale to 60 FDEs and to a $1.2B valuation. In that time, "FDE" went from a word I had to explain in every interview to one of the hottest titles in tech. Every agentic startup now wants a forward-deployed team. Almost none of them have thought clearly about why.
What changed when we went from SaaS to AI agents
SaaS was about digitizing the way we do work. Salesforce gave you a digital interface: a place for people to put in data, collaborate, and then route that data along defined paths. The work itself stayed human. Because the work stayed human, the software could be standardized (to the greatest extent; Salesforce and ServiceNow do have systems integrators and configurators). Every company's sales team basically does the...
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