Nabeel S. Qureshi: belief

Transcript context

…So say someone was, "I want to try this sort of thing in my company," what would be a few bullet points if things they should get right? You're describing the spectrum of what people describe as forward deployed engineers, if they were to try to do this, what do you think they need to most do correctly for it to be successful? The key things that made our model work well, one, they were actually real engineers who could build product themselves. That's a very big difference. I think a lot of the time companies will say, "This person's a forward deployed engineer," but actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions architect, or they're not necessarily building anything to know, but they're just listening and trying to find a way of deploying the existing product. They're not empowered to do new product. So the really radical thing Palantir said was, "No. Go in and if you need a completely new product to do this, you can go ahead and build it." And I think that's really the key difference. The other stuff I've already mentioned, the value of being in person, and I think building close personal bonds with your customers. I do think the better founders do this anyway. They're on texting terms with their buyers, they become friends with them outside of work, and they see them as humans who they're trying to help. I think this is very motivating, gaining a really deep understanding of the business that your customers are in and knowing how those dynamics work. So a simple example might be, say hospitals in America. It's very counterintuitive to think of a hospital as a business. People think of it as it's a place where you get healthcare, but actually if you view it the way a COO or CMO views it, it's going to look very, very different too. As a very simple example, sorry, this is a little bit dark, but how restaurants want to turn over tables as fast as possible in order to maximize for the day? Hospitals actually want to do the same with patients. They would like to treat you and then get you out of a bed so they can free up the bed to get a new person in there. So that's not super intuitive, unless you think hard about how the revenue for that hospital works. But then once you think about it, you're like, "This has a bunch of problems associated with it." And you start to go into really interesting... ... problems associated with it, and you start to go in really interesting directions. There's just like the words and memes, and take you a long way working and understanding it.…

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