How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Kepler — Vinoo Ganesh

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It's kind of an emotional thing to hear uh series of folks who've kind of been talking about how Palenter used to do things. Um it's funny in the olden days and this what this talk will be about is largely uh Palin's focus of FTE became a go-to market strategy but it wasn't that

in the beginning how we were figuring out how to build foundry was through the lens of a product strategy and so my talk is going to be how we used FDE as a product strategy in 2013 to make the data platform that enabled Palunteer to then become the thing that Kevin Nat and

all these folks were able to build on and it ultimately comes from like the background of something pretty simple. So my background is uh I started my career at Palanteer as a software engineer um really focused on horizontally scalable and storage solutions at a high level. Uh when we say forward deployed um I forward

deployed to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. That's me in Bram. It's no longer there anymore. Uh but the idea was how do we take software and build it in the most critical environments to make it actually work for people that needed it the most. So forward deployed is actually a military term and we took

it very seriously. Um my claim to fame from Palanteer is I built something called project frontline which was the rotation program that took our software engineers and made them forward deploy engineers. So the folks that you see at OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, a lot of the FDs, about 350 of them went through a training program for how we