Jason Lemkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And these forward deployed engineers, is that just another name for sales engineer or is that a different sort of background? It can be. And I think all this nomenclature is confusing, man. All this orchestration and ingestion. I think Palantir is obviously the single most successful public B2B company at the moment. Maybe Databricks and a few others will beat them in the next wave of IPOs, but their idea for forward deployed engineers is similar, but these are nine figure deals. Most of us aren't doing $100 million deals. So the idea that you'll have Garry Tan and an army of folks out in the office for six months getting the software to work, that sort of inspires the idea, but it's really, sure, it could be a sales engineer or solution architect. But the difference is the SEs that a lot of us worked with in the days were resources. And often, there was also a classic resource of like eight sales reps to one SE. So the eight reps, there'd be a pod and one SE would be responsible and you'd kind of have to fight to get Jason or Lenny's time to help the eight reps. This is inverted. The FDE is number one job is to make the customer a success. Okay? I was literally the other day doing a presentation in an AI leader that closed a $3 million deal. The FDE did it all himself. Sales wasn't even involved in the deal. They went on site, they got the deployment going, they tuned it everything. All sales did was manage it through the procurement process. Okay? That's pretty different than a guy answering some questions for the humans. So it is a combination of customer success and SE or whatever, but it is really... I mean, frankly, it's just being a classic consultant that gets the product done on day one, on day one. That's the difference is that when you go live, it works. When you go live, it works. And it's a fancy name for a bunch of folks on your team that when it goes live, the AI agent actually works. So you have 100% success rate instead of like the 5% rate of 2024. So those people, but they do need to be technical. I don't know if they need to be engineers. It can really vary based on... I love it when they're like mediocre engineers that are in love with the product. That's my favorite type of FDE. They don't really want to code much anymore, but they did code and they just love your product. But I don't think it can be someone with no product chops, but all different folks can work, but they've got to know the product cold. But yeah, startups, I mean, the term is thrown around. You need four folks that will just make sure that on go live, the product works, your agentic product works. That's what you need. I think what might be useful to close out this conversation is to go through what are the things that are changing, like maybe a handful of things that are changed that are now going to be different in the world of sales go-to-market, and what are a few things that are just going to stay the same?…

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