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The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

Y Combinator Startup Podcast
Sep 8, 2025 51 min
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About this episode

<p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today&#39;s startups, why &quot;doing things that don&#39;t scale at scale&quot; works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI.</p>

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