The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

With AI agents, there is no incumbent product. And so that I think is why you're seeing the FTE model taking off because there's so much product discovery to do. You want to drive the contract size up. So you're doing more and more valuable work for this customer and also for future customers. The FD

model effectively is doing things that don't scale at scale. [Music] Hello and welcome back to another episode of the light comb. Gary wasn't feeling great today and couldn't be here, but we're thrilled to be joined by Bob Mcgru. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palanteer, and was recently chief research officer

at OpenAI, where he led the development of chat GBT, GPT4, and the 01 reasoning model. Now, he's exploring the future of AI and has an exciting new role with the US Army that we'll get to in a bit. Bob, thanks so much for being here. It's >> great to be here. >> So, Bob, I've been particularly excited

to sit down with you to talk about the Ford deployed engineer model because this is a topic that keeps coming up in our lives. It is a really hot topic in Silicon Valley right now and especially among the AI agent companies that we've talked about on this podcast a lot. You were in the room when it all got started

and so you know like you're exactly the right person to explain it. You were actually telling me a a funny story. uh you were at an AI conference that YC organized a few months ago and you expected that all the founders would come up to you to talk to you about you know inventing chat GPT and instead what

all of these AI startup founders wanted to talk to you about was the Palunteer 4 deployed engineer model >> well and it it's really true it hasn't hasn't just been that one conference uh as I've been advising startups this last year I would say that a lot of them are pretty much exclusively trying to learn