The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew
About this episode
Bob McGrew discusses the Forward Deployed Engineer model and its significance in AI startups.
Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 ,and the o1 reasoning model.During his time at Palantir, he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today. On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups, why "doing things that don't scale at scale" works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI.
More episodes of Lightcone Podcast
- What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs
- AI Is Eating Logistics
- Inside The MIT AI Study Everyone Misunderstood (And What It Means For Startups)
- Unpopular Ideas That Became Billion-Dollar Businesses
- The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups
- Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Lightcone Podcast podcast page.