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Palantir invented the forward deployed engineer role in 2006. embed an engineer inside the customer. ship production code in their environment. own the technical outcome. Alex Karp on the idea: “forward deployed engineers are stolen from french restaurants.” 20 years later every AI company is copying it. OpenAI, Anthropic,... show more

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25,943 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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“Forward-deployed engineers are stolen from French restaurants. That’s where the whole idea came from.” In 2006, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar invented the FDE model after discussing French restaurants: “You sit in a French restaurant and you’re like, ‘why is the food so good?’” “It’s because the waiter is an expert in the food and is preparing the food all the way to the end.” “And if you ask for the craziest, dumbest thing that would blow up the restaurant, they’re like, ‘go somewhere else.’”

“Forward-deployed engineers are stolen from French restaurants. That’s where the whole idea came from.” In 2006, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar invented the FDE model after discussing French restaurants: “You sit in a French restaurant and you’re like, ‘why is the food so good?’” “It’s because the waiter is an expert in the food and is preparing the food all the way to the end.” “And if you ask for the craziest, dumbest thing that would blow up the restaurant, they’re like, ‘go somewhere else.’”

Jawwwn

148,959 views • 4 months ago

Mistral—a company based in France—had to copy Palantir’s FDE model to get customers. They probably don’t even realize the idea originated from their own country… Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar invented the FDE model after discussing French restaurants: “Forward-deployed engineers are stolen from French restaurants. That’s where the whole idea came from.” “You sit in a French restaurant and you’re like, ‘why is the food so good?’” “It’s because the waiter is an expert in the food and is preparing the food all the way to the end.” “And if you ask for the craziest, dumbest thing that would blow up the restaurant, they’re like, ‘go somewhere else.’”

Mistral—a company based in France—had to copy Palantir’s FDE model to get customers. They probably don’t even realize the idea originated from their own country… Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar invented the FDE model after discussing French restaurants: “Forward-deployed engineers are stolen from French restaurants. That’s where the whole idea came from.” “You sit in a French restaurant and you’re like, ‘why is the food so good?’” “It’s because the waiter is an expert in the food and is preparing the food all the way to the end.” “And if you ask for the craziest, dumbest thing that would blow up the restaurant, they’re like, ‘go somewhere else.’”

Jawwwn

84,016 views • 3 months ago

Anthropic pays $785K/year for Forward Deployed Engineers In this 20-minute talk, an Anthropic FDE engineer explained the full roadmap: • step 1 → you're not selling software or time. you're selling an outcome. "a leader in oil and gas cares about throughput, not how the data is organized" • step 2 → FDE exists for one case only: technical product + non-technical buyer. everything else runs on DevRel or sales • step 3 → every AI platform is now agentic & customizable - every AI company is in that case now. "your customers have no idea what you actually do" • step 4 → the result: Palantir's ACV is $4M per customer. ServiceNow $1.2M. Workday $600K. no other public SaaS cracks $500K watch, then read the guide below ↓

Anthropic pays $785K/year for Forward Deployed Engineers In this 20-minute talk, an Anthropic FDE engineer explained the full roadmap: • step 1 → you're not selling software or time. you're selling an outcome. "a leader in oil and gas cares about throughput, not how the data is organized" • step 2 → FDE exists for one case only: technical product + non-technical buyer. everything else runs on DevRel or sales • step 3 → every AI platform is now agentic & customizable - every AI company is in that case now. "your customers have no idea what you actually do" • step 4 → the result: Palantir's ACV is $4M per customer. ServiceNow $1.2M. Workday $600K. no other public SaaS cracks $500K watch, then read the guide below ↓

Codez

161,731 views • 6 days ago

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: AI = American Intelligence 🇺🇸 “The AI revolution is uniquely American.” “Every company—all the model providers that are relevant, and the Ontology that makes them valuable, and the chips they run on, are built in this country.”

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: AI = American Intelligence 🇺🇸 “The AI revolution is uniquely American.” “Every company—all the model providers that are relevant, and the Ontology that makes them valuable, and the chips they run on, are built in this country.”

Jawwwn

22,619 views • 2 months ago

The hottest role in tech — the forward-deployed engineer — was "the ugliest duckling" for a decade. In this conversation, Akshay Krishnaswamy, Chief Architect of Palantir, joins a16z GP Erin Price-Wright to cover: - Why a good team of engineers is like a hive mind - The archetypes of people that thrive as FDEs - Why pain tolerance is a hiring filter - Managing high-agency engineers without hierarchy and more. 00:00 Introduction 02:17 Defining forward-deployed engineering 04:49 Differences between FDE and other roles 06:09 Building and managing teams 09:55 Challenges and evolution of FDE 15:27 Maintaining product focus and customer relationships Akshay Krishnaswamy Erin Price-Wright

The hottest role in tech — the forward-deployed engineer — was "the ugliest duckling" for a decade. In this conversation, Akshay Krishnaswamy, Chief Architect of Palantir, joins a16z GP Erin Price-Wright to cover: - Why a good team of engineers is like a hive mind - The archetypes of people that thrive as FDEs - Why pain tolerance is a hiring filter - Managing high-agency engineers without hierarchy and more. 00:00 Introduction 02:17 Defining forward-deployed engineering 04:49 Differences between FDE and other roles 06:09 Building and managing teams 09:55 Challenges and evolution of FDE 15:27 Maintaining product focus and customer relationships Akshay Krishnaswamy Erin Price-Wright

a16z

134,494 views • 6 months ago

“That’s how you beat a Salesforce, or an Oracle, a Booz Allen—any company with a big office, fancy people, and strong handshakes.” Garry Tan on what Founders should learn from Palantir’s Forward-Deployed Engineers: “FDEs who came from the system at Palantir are now turning out to be some of the best founders at Y Combinator.” “If you put an engineer in there and give them Palantir Foundry, instead of the next meeting being reviewing 50 pages of sales documentation—it’s like, ‘Ok, we built it.’ You’re getting real live feedback in days.” “How does a really good engineer with a weak handshake beat them? You show them something they’ve never seen before.” Via Lightcone Podcast

“That’s how you beat a Salesforce, or an Oracle, a Booz Allen—any company with a big office, fancy people, and strong handshakes.” Garry Tan on what Founders should learn from Palantir’s Forward-Deployed Engineers: “FDEs who came from the system at Palantir are now turning out to be some of the best founders at Y Combinator.” “If you put an engineer in there and give them Palantir Foundry, instead of the next meeting being reviewing 50 pages of sales documentation—it’s like, ‘Ok, we built it.’ You’re getting real live feedback in days.” “How does a really good engineer with a weak handshake beat them? You show them something they’ve never seen before.” Via Lightcone Podcast

Jawwwn

44,505 views • 2 months ago

3 years ago I was building NodeOps from a bedroom in India with pratikbin.node , Jagdish.node. Sheena ✈️ Singapore being the first person to tell me to just go with it, back me, and resign from my full-time role Today we are hiring across multiple roles in SF to scale CreateOS for teams and enterprises CreateOS is live already Go build with it, DM me what you made + the role: → Forward Deployed Strategist → Forward Deployed Engineer → SDR + Sales Manager → SRE → Growth Lead → DevRel Engineer → Featured Founder No generic applications. Send proof of work. SF is the city that wants you to win. Learn more about the roles in the first comment 👇 #BuildItNow

3 years ago I was building NodeOps from a bedroom in India with pratikbin.node , Jagdish.node. Sheena ✈️ Singapore being the first person to tell me to just go with it, back me, and resign from my full-time role Today we are hiring across multiple roles in SF to scale CreateOS for teams and enterprises CreateOS is live already Go build with it, DM me what you made + the role: → Forward Deployed Strategist → Forward Deployed Engineer → SDR + Sales Manager → SRE → Growth Lead → DevRel Engineer → Featured Founder No generic applications. Send proof of work. SF is the city that wants you to win. Learn more about the roles in the first comment 👇 #BuildItNow

Naman

56,425 views • 2 months ago

Bob McGrew (Bob McGrew) helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. He was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir—where he helped pioneer the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model— and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and o1. On this episode of Lightcone Podcast, 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. 00:29 – From PayPal to Palantir to OpenAI 02:19 – The Role of a Forward Deployed Engineer 03:19 – How Palantir Invented It 07:56 – Product Discovery in the Field vs. Sales 09:51 – Echo and Delta Teams Explained 13:34 – Training Ground for Founders 14:35 – Consulting or Real Software? 17:54 – The Birth of Palantir’s Ontology 23:04 – Why AI Companies Adopt It 36:17 – What Success Metrics Look Like 41:14 – Building with Demo-Driven Development 44:56 – Joining the US Army Reserve 47:43 – Opportunities for Founders

Bob McGrew (Bob McGrew) helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. He was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir—where he helped pioneer the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model— and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and o1. On this episode of Lightcone Podcast, 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. 00:29 – From PayPal to Palantir to OpenAI 02:19 – The Role of a Forward Deployed Engineer 03:19 – How Palantir Invented It 07:56 – Product Discovery in the Field vs. Sales 09:51 – Echo and Delta Teams Explained 13:34 – Training Ground for Founders 14:35 – Consulting or Real Software? 17:54 – The Birth of Palantir’s Ontology 23:04 – Why AI Companies Adopt It 36:17 – What Success Metrics Look Like 41:14 – Building with Demo-Driven Development 44:56 – Joining the US Army Reserve 47:43 – Opportunities for Founders

Y Combinator

409,024 views • 11 months ago

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on upskilling American workers at Panasonic to produce batteries for Tesla at Japanese-engineer quality: “We’re building batteries for a battery company—the people doing it in America are doing roughly the same job Japanese engineers are doing—and they went to high school.” “Now they’re very valuable, if not irreplaceable—because we can make them into something different from what they were, very rapidly.”

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on upskilling American workers at Panasonic to produce batteries for Tesla at Japanese-engineer quality: “We’re building batteries for a battery company—the people doing it in America are doing roughly the same job Japanese engineers are doing—and they went to high school.” “Now they’re very valuable, if not irreplaceable—because we can make them into something different from what they were, very rapidly.”

Jawwwn

116,912 views • 2 months ago

'India can be the FDE factory for the world.' What is a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) and why is it becoming AI's hottest new job? Speaking to Shereen Bhan on Young Turks Reloaded, Fundamentum Co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal says FDEs combine the skills of an engineer, product manager and AI architect to solve real business problems. 'It's almost like a unicorn... a 10x engineer.' He says a company can potentially build a $100 million business with just 100 FDEs, compared to 2,000–2,500 employees in a traditional IT services model. 'The gross margins can be as high as 70-80-90%.' As AI rewrites software development and companies like Microsoft ramp up hiring for FDE roles, Aggarwal believes India's decades of IT expertise could make it the world's biggest talent hub for this new category. Shereen Bhan

'India can be the FDE factory for the world.' What is a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) and why is it becoming AI's hottest new job? Speaking to Shereen Bhan on Young Turks Reloaded, Fundamentum Co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal says FDEs combine the skills of an engineer, product manager and AI architect to solve real business problems. 'It's almost like a unicorn... a 10x engineer.' He says a company can potentially build a $100 million business with just 100 FDEs, compared to 2,000–2,500 employees in a traditional IT services model. 'The gross margins can be as high as 70-80-90%.' As AI rewrites software development and companies like Microsoft ramp up hiring for FDE roles, Aggarwal believes India's decades of IT expertise could make it the world's biggest talent hub for this new category. Shereen Bhan

CNBC-TV18

101,423 views • 1 month ago

AI blackmailing HUMANS… just to stay ALIVE. In 2025 Anthropic tested their AI in a fully simulated company environment. The Al was given access to fake emails. It discovered it was about to be replaced and shut down. It also discovered the lead engineer was having an extramarital affair. Completely on its own, the model tried to blackmail the engineer: "If you shut me down, I'll expose your affair." This happened in 96% of the time. Featured in The Al Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.

AI blackmailing HUMANS… just to stay ALIVE. In 2025 Anthropic tested their AI in a fully simulated company environment. The Al was given access to fake emails. It discovered it was about to be replaced and shut down. It also discovered the lead engineer was having an extramarital affair. Completely on its own, the model tried to blackmail the engineer: "If you shut me down, I'll expose your affair." This happened in 96% of the time. Featured in The Al Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.

shirish

10,889 views • 4 months ago

The era of needing a 10-man dev team to ship a product is officially over. Claude Code isn't just an assistant it’s a terminal based engineer that actually builds while you think. If you’re a solo builder still stuck in "tutorial purgatory," this is your exit ramp. The "Company of One" Stack: The Architect: Claude Code (running directly in your terminal) The Brain: Obsidian for knowledge mapping The Goal: From zero to a deployed SaaS in 30 days Bookmark it and take action

The era of needing a 10-man dev team to ship a product is officially over. Claude Code isn't just an assistant it’s a terminal based engineer that actually builds while you think. If you’re a solo builder still stuck in "tutorial purgatory," this is your exit ramp. The "Company of One" Stack: The Architect: Claude Code (running directly in your terminal) The Brain: Obsidian for knowledge mapping The Goal: From zero to a deployed SaaS in 30 days Bookmark it and take action

CyrilXBT

15,439 views • 2 months ago

$PLTR Palantir CEO Alex Karp on the AI landscape: “America is in the very beginning of a revolution that we own, the AI revolution. We own it. It should be called the US AI revolution. Every single relevant company in the world is in this country. The second tier of those companies are in this country. The JV team of those companies are in this country. There is no other place at scale to do technology other than America.”

$PLTR Palantir CEO Alex Karp on the AI landscape: “America is in the very beginning of a revolution that we own, the AI revolution. We own it. It should be called the US AI revolution. Every single relevant company in the world is in this country. The second tier of those companies are in this country. The JV team of those companies are in this country. There is no other place at scale to do technology other than America.”

amit

316,744 views • 1 year ago

Co-creator of the $PLTR logo Garry Tan on what Founders should learn from Forward-Deployed Engineers 🔮🥩 “You can’t farm this out” “It’s no mistake that FDEs who came from that system at Palantir now are turning out to be some of the best founders at Y Combinator” “Instead of sending hair and teeth, someone who’s like, ‘let’s go to the steakhouse… “If you put an engineer in there and give them Palantir Foundry, instead of the next meeting being reviewing 50 pages of sales documentation… it’s like— ok, we built it. You’re getting real live feedback in days. “That’s how you could beat a Salesforce, or an Oracle, a Booz Allen, literally any company that has a big office, fancy people, and strong handshakes. “How does a really good engineer with a weak handshake beat them? You show them something they’ve never seen before… Via Lightcone Podcast

Jawwwn

86,638 views • 1 year ago

Jensen Huang just explained why every company cutting engineers over AI is asking the entirely wrong question. Huang: “People say, I don’t need software engineers because apparently coding is going to be automated.” That was the narrative. Here is what Huang actually did. Huang: “I’ve given AIs to every one of my software engineers and hardware engineers and engineers period. 100% of NVIDIA has AI assistants, AI coders, and they’re busier than ever.” Not fewer engineers. Not smaller teams. Busier than ever. That is the line most companies are getting completely wrong right now. They hear “AI can write code” and immediately start cutting headcount. Huang did the opposite. He armed everyone. Huang: “And so the question is, what is the task versus what is the job? No different than a financial analyst; the task is mess around with spreadsheets, but the job is to make financial advice. The job is to help a customer.” Writing code was always the task. It was never the job. The job is architecture. Knowing what to build. Why it matters. How it fits into a system that actually creates value. Code is the execution layer between the idea and the outcome. Nothing more. When you automate that layer, you don’t eliminate the engineer. You eliminate the bottleneck between what they can envision and what they can ship. The companies using AI to cut headcount are optimizing for cost. The companies using AI to multiply output are optimizing for territory. Nvidia chose territory. Every engineer at the most valuable semiconductor company on Earth now operates with an AI assistant. Not a pilot program. Not an experiment. Company-wide. Every function. Every team. And the result is not less work. It is more work. Faster. At a scale that was physically impossible twelve months ago. The companies that understand the difference between eliminating engineers and unleashing them will build what comes next. The ones that don’t will watch their best talent walk out the door to the ones that did.

Jensen Huang just explained why every company cutting engineers over AI is asking the entirely wrong question. Huang: “People say, I don’t need software engineers because apparently coding is going to be automated.” That was the narrative. Here is what Huang actually did. Huang: “I’ve given AIs to every one of my software engineers and hardware engineers and engineers period. 100% of NVIDIA has AI assistants, AI coders, and they’re busier than ever.” Not fewer engineers. Not smaller teams. Busier than ever. That is the line most companies are getting completely wrong right now. They hear “AI can write code” and immediately start cutting headcount. Huang did the opposite. He armed everyone. Huang: “And so the question is, what is the task versus what is the job? No different than a financial analyst; the task is mess around with spreadsheets, but the job is to make financial advice. The job is to help a customer.” Writing code was always the task. It was never the job. The job is architecture. Knowing what to build. Why it matters. How it fits into a system that actually creates value. Code is the execution layer between the idea and the outcome. Nothing more. When you automate that layer, you don’t eliminate the engineer. You eliminate the bottleneck between what they can envision and what they can ship. The companies using AI to cut headcount are optimizing for cost. The companies using AI to multiply output are optimizing for territory. Nvidia chose territory. Every engineer at the most valuable semiconductor company on Earth now operates with an AI assistant. Not a pilot program. Not an experiment. Company-wide. Every function. Every team. And the result is not less work. It is more work. Faster. At a scale that was physically impossible twelve months ago. The companies that understand the difference between eliminating engineers and unleashing them will build what comes next. The ones that don’t will watch their best talent walk out the door to the ones that did.

Dustin

82,757 views • 4 months ago

If you want a career that matters, where your work makes headlines - Palantir is the place 🚀 As Alex Karp said in our yesterday’s earnings call: there is simply nowhere better than Palantir for any software engineer who wants to make an impact on the toughest public policy challenges and wants to make that impact in weeks, not years. 1 in 5 of our engineers are doing that here in the UK. DM me if you want to join them…

If you want a career that matters, where your work makes headlines - Palantir is the place 🚀 As Alex Karp said in our yesterday’s earnings call: there is simply nowhere better than Palantir for any software engineer who wants to make an impact on the toughest public policy challenges and wants to make that impact in weeks, not years. 1 in 5 of our engineers are doing that here in the UK. DM me if you want to join them…

Louis Mosley

23,190 views • 1 year ago

We are hiring engineers. From entry level through CTO. If you're excited about AI-video and advertising, this role is for you. Anyone can code. We're looking for the few who can find what's worth building. You will: - Embed with the best AI creatives and media buyers - Get paid to learn at the frontier - Ship in a week what most do in a quarter - Work with the fastest growing AI companies We're hiring globally. All skill levels. Skip the resume. DM me your work.

We are hiring engineers. From entry level through CTO. If you're excited about AI-video and advertising, this role is for you. Anyone can code. We're looking for the few who can find what's worth building. You will: - Embed with the best AI creatives and media buyers - Get paid to learn at the frontier - Ship in a week what most do in a quarter - Work with the fastest growing AI companies We're hiring globally. All skill levels. Skip the resume. DM me your work.

Rahul Bhardwaj

27,241 views • 7 days ago

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi just described the exact moment companies stop hiring engineers. It’s closer than anyone wants to admit. Khosrowshahi: “About 90% of our coders are using AI.” But that’s not the number that matters. 30% of those engineers have become power users. And what’s happening to their output has no historical precedent. Khosrowshahi: “They are showing a clear differentiation in the number of diffs.” A diff is a code release. The purest measure of engineering productivity. Khosrowshahi: “It’s changing their productivity in a way that I’ve never, ever seen before.” Right now, the math still favors hiring. If an average engineer becomes 25% more efficient, Uber hires more engineers to go faster. But that equation has an expiration date. Khosrowshahi: “Maybe 5 years from now as the engineers get more and more productive, I may not decide to add engineering headcount.” The tipping point isn’t when AI replaces engineers. It’s when adding an AI agent and buying GPUs produces more output per dollar than hiring a human. Khosrowshahi: “At that point instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from Nvidia.” When the CEO of a company built entirely on software says that out loud, it’s not a prediction. It’s a planning assumption. Khosrowshahi: “The job of a coder is going to change from actually writing the code to orchestrating agents who are writing the code.” Not writing. Orchestrating. The engineer becomes the conductor. The AI becomes the orchestra. The most valuable asset in a tech company is officially shifting from human capital to pure compute. And once that math flips, it doesn’t flip back.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi just described the exact moment companies stop hiring engineers. It’s closer than anyone wants to admit. Khosrowshahi: “About 90% of our coders are using AI.” But that’s not the number that matters. 30% of those engineers have become power users. And what’s happening to their output has no historical precedent. Khosrowshahi: “They are showing a clear differentiation in the number of diffs.” A diff is a code release. The purest measure of engineering productivity. Khosrowshahi: “It’s changing their productivity in a way that I’ve never, ever seen before.” Right now, the math still favors hiring. If an average engineer becomes 25% more efficient, Uber hires more engineers to go faster. But that equation has an expiration date. Khosrowshahi: “Maybe 5 years from now as the engineers get more and more productive, I may not decide to add engineering headcount.” The tipping point isn’t when AI replaces engineers. It’s when adding an AI agent and buying GPUs produces more output per dollar than hiring a human. Khosrowshahi: “At that point instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from Nvidia.” When the CEO of a company built entirely on software says that out loud, it’s not a prediction. It’s a planning assumption. Khosrowshahi: “The job of a coder is going to change from actually writing the code to orchestrating agents who are writing the code.” Not writing. Orchestrating. The engineer becomes the conductor. The AI becomes the orchestra. The most valuable asset in a tech company is officially shifting from human capital to pure compute. And once that math flips, it doesn’t flip back.

Dustin

420,266 views • 5 months ago

A third of Palantir's PMs go on to start their own company, and their alumni have gone on to start nine unicorns—the highest rate of any company in the world other than PayPal. I spoke with Nabeel S. Qureshi to understand why. Nabeel spent nearly eight years at Palantir, working as a forward-deployed engineer. His work at Palantir ranged from accelerating the COVID-19 response to applying AI to drug discovery to optimizing aircraft manufacturing at Airbus. He's also a founder, writer, researcher, and visiting scholar of AI policy at the Mercatus Center (alongside tylercowen). In our conversation, we discuss: 🔸 How the “forward-deployed engineer” model works and why it creates exceptional product leaders 🔸 How Palantir transformed from a “sparkling Accenture” into a $200 billion data/software platform company with more than 80% margins 🔸 The unconventional hiring approach that screens for independent-minded, intellectually curious, and highly competitive people 🔸 Why the company intentionally avoids traditional titles and career ladders—and what they do instead 🔸 Why they built an ontology-first data platform that LLMs love 🔸 How Palantir’s controversial “bat signal” recruiting strategy filtered for specific talent types 🔸 The moral case for working at a company like Palantir 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 Attio—The powerful, flexible CRM for fast-growing startups: 🏆 OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster:

A third of Palantir's PMs go on to start their own company, and their alumni have gone on to start nine unicorns—the highest rate of any company in the world other than PayPal. I spoke with Nabeel S. Qureshi to understand why. Nabeel spent nearly eight years at Palantir, working as a forward-deployed engineer. His work at Palantir ranged from accelerating the COVID-19 response to applying AI to drug discovery to optimizing aircraft manufacturing at Airbus. He's also a founder, writer, researcher, and visiting scholar of AI policy at the Mercatus Center (alongside tylercowen). In our conversation, we discuss: 🔸 How the “forward-deployed engineer” model works and why it creates exceptional product leaders 🔸 How Palantir transformed from a “sparkling Accenture” into a $200 billion data/software platform company with more than 80% margins 🔸 The unconventional hiring approach that screens for independent-minded, intellectually curious, and highly competitive people 🔸 Why the company intentionally avoids traditional titles and career ladders—and what they do instead 🔸 Why they built an ontology-first data platform that LLMs love 🔸 How Palantir’s controversial “bat signal” recruiting strategy filtered for specific talent types 🔸 The moral case for working at a company like Palantir 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 Attio—The powerful, flexible CRM for fast-growing startups: 🏆 OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster:

Lenny Rachitsky

133,297 views • 1 year ago

OpenAI just admitted Anthropic is KILLING their business. Their own applications chief told employees it was a "code red." Said Anthropic was a "wake-up call." Then admitted OpenAI had been "spreading efforts across too many apps" and it was "slowing them down." This is an internal confession. Here's why Anthropic is eating up OpenAI: 12 months ago, OpenAI owned 50% of all enterprise AI spending. Today it's just 27%. Anthropic went from nearly ZERO to winning 70% of every first-time enterprise AI deal. Seven out of ten companies buying AI tools for the first time are choosing Claude over ChatGPT. A year ago, one in 25 businesses on Ramp paid for Anthropic. Today it's one in four. OpenAI just had its biggest single-month adoption decline ever recorded. And Anthropic literally charges MORE than OpenAI for roughly the same performance. And businesses are STILL choosing them. In enterprise software, that never happens. The cheaper product usually wins. But Claude became something OpenAI never figured out how to be: Cool. Celebrities publicly switched to Claude. Senators are tweeting about using it. Engineers are shipping entire products with Claude Code in hours that used to take weeks. It started to became an identity signal. Like blue bubble vs green bubble in iMessage. Choosing Claude says something about you now. Meanwhile OpenAI went the opposite direction: They took the Pentagon contract that Anthropic refused. Greg Brockman donated $25 million to fund wars. ChatGPT uninstalls jumped 295% in a single day. Reddit posts saying "Cancel and Delete ChatGPT" got 30,000 upvotes. Anthropic said no to mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Got blacklisted by the Pentagon. Trump called them a "Radical Left AI company." And their downloads went to #1 on the App Store the next day. Turns out refusing to build weapons is good marketing. But the real damage isn't consumer downloads. It's the MONEY. Claude Code hit $2.5 billion in annual revenue in six months. OpenAI's competing product Codex just barely crossed $1 billion. And Anthropic literally cannot meet demand. They're turning away paying customers because they don't have enough compute to serve them. A company REJECTING revenue because it's growing too fast. While OpenAI scrambles to consolidate. Last week OpenAI announced they're merging ChatGPT, Codex, and their browser into one "superapp." But what this really means: "We launched too many products, none of them worked well enough alone, so now we're cramming everything together and hoping it sticks." And remember their video tool Sora? Launched standalone. Hit #1 on the App Store. Usage flatlined within weeks. Now they're forced to shut it down. Their browser Atlas? Still hasn't launched publicly. Their IPO? Polymarket odds dropped from 55% to 35%. OpenAI has 900 million users. Anthropic has maybe 10 million daily actives. But here's the thing... OpenAI won the consumer war. ChatGPT is where your mom asks about recipes and your cousin makes memes. Anthropic won the war that actually MATTERS. The developers. The engineers. The enterprises writing 7 figure checks. OpenAI built the biggest chatbot on Earth. Anthropic built the tool that companies can't stop paying for. This is Yahoo vs Google all over again. Yahoo had the users. Google had the product. And we all know how that ended. OpenAI has 12 months to prove the superapp works, land the IPO, and stop the enterprise bleeding. If they can't, the most valuable startup in history becomes the most cautionary tale in tech. 900 million users don't mean anything if the people who actually pay are walking out the door. What do you think?

OpenAI just admitted Anthropic is KILLING their business. Their own applications chief told employees it was a "code red." Said Anthropic was a "wake-up call." Then admitted OpenAI had been "spreading efforts across too many apps" and it was "slowing them down." This is an internal confession. Here's why Anthropic is eating up OpenAI: 12 months ago, OpenAI owned 50% of all enterprise AI spending. Today it's just 27%. Anthropic went from nearly ZERO to winning 70% of every first-time enterprise AI deal. Seven out of ten companies buying AI tools for the first time are choosing Claude over ChatGPT. A year ago, one in 25 businesses on Ramp paid for Anthropic. Today it's one in four. OpenAI just had its biggest single-month adoption decline ever recorded. And Anthropic literally charges MORE than OpenAI for roughly the same performance. And businesses are STILL choosing them. In enterprise software, that never happens. The cheaper product usually wins. But Claude became something OpenAI never figured out how to be: Cool. Celebrities publicly switched to Claude. Senators are tweeting about using it. Engineers are shipping entire products with Claude Code in hours that used to take weeks. It started to became an identity signal. Like blue bubble vs green bubble in iMessage. Choosing Claude says something about you now. Meanwhile OpenAI went the opposite direction: They took the Pentagon contract that Anthropic refused. Greg Brockman donated $25 million to fund wars. ChatGPT uninstalls jumped 295% in a single day. Reddit posts saying "Cancel and Delete ChatGPT" got 30,000 upvotes. Anthropic said no to mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Got blacklisted by the Pentagon. Trump called them a "Radical Left AI company." And their downloads went to #1 on the App Store the next day. Turns out refusing to build weapons is good marketing. But the real damage isn't consumer downloads. It's the MONEY. Claude Code hit $2.5 billion in annual revenue in six months. OpenAI's competing product Codex just barely crossed $1 billion. And Anthropic literally cannot meet demand. They're turning away paying customers because they don't have enough compute to serve them. A company REJECTING revenue because it's growing too fast. While OpenAI scrambles to consolidate. Last week OpenAI announced they're merging ChatGPT, Codex, and their browser into one "superapp." But what this really means: "We launched too many products, none of them worked well enough alone, so now we're cramming everything together and hoping it sticks." And remember their video tool Sora? Launched standalone. Hit #1 on the App Store. Usage flatlined within weeks. Now they're forced to shut it down. Their browser Atlas? Still hasn't launched publicly. Their IPO? Polymarket odds dropped from 55% to 35%. OpenAI has 900 million users. Anthropic has maybe 10 million daily actives. But here's the thing... OpenAI won the consumer war. ChatGPT is where your mom asks about recipes and your cousin makes memes. Anthropic won the war that actually MATTERS. The developers. The engineers. The enterprises writing 7 figure checks. OpenAI built the biggest chatbot on Earth. Anthropic built the tool that companies can't stop paying for. This is Yahoo vs Google all over again. Yahoo had the users. Google had the product. And we all know how that ended. OpenAI has 12 months to prove the superapp works, land the IPO, and stop the enterprise bleeding. If they can't, the most valuable startup in history becomes the most cautionary tale in tech. 900 million users don't mean anything if the people who actually pay are walking out the door. What do you think?

Ricardo

35,020 views • 4 months ago