Eric Siu explains the forward-deployed engineer model used by Palantir and Anthropic, where engineers embed into client organizations and integrate deeply with their systems. He proposes a similar approach for marketing: embedding skilled marketers to build custom agent stacks tailored to each client instead of selling generic tools everyone else uses.
Like I've been talking more about this forward-deployed marketer model similar to Palantir, right? Or similar to Anthropic. Like they put forward-deployed engineers in. Wait, can you explain it? Because I have no idea what you're talking about. A forward-deployed engineer. Palantir. I've always wondered, I'm like, what the heck do they do, right? They make so much money. And so what they do is they embed the engineer into your company. So that's a forward-deployed engineer. Okay. FDE. And then what happens is they already have their stack Foundry, and that's the base software stack that they have, but they customize it for different government agencies that they work with or whatever client they're working with. Right. So Anthropic did this too recently, which is why the government didn't want to turn off of them necessarily. They were negotiating so much because they were so entangled with their 4 deployed engineers and all their software was in all the government systems, right? It was hard to rip it out. So I think we're calling it single brain where we're taking things. We're going to have 4 deployed marketers, like really smart marketers that are not just like maybe you're only good at one channel. You're like a more well-rounded marketer. Like I would consider us a little more well-rounded in our careers now. And then you have— they're working with the custom agent stack that you built and they're customizing for the clients, right?
