The FDE Playbook for AI Startups

Bob (cold open): "With AI agents, there is no incumbent product. And so that I think is why you're seeing the FDE model taking off — because there's so much product discovery to do."

Bob(冷开场):"在 AI agent 这个领域,根本没有'被替代的现有产品'。我觉得这正是 FDE 模式正在爆发的原因——有海量的产品发现工作要做。"

"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."

"你要把合同规模做大。给这个客户、给后来所有客户,你做的活儿都得越来越值钱。"

"The FD model effectively is doing things that don't scale at scale."

"FDE 模式本质上就是——把'不可规模化的事情',规模化地做下去。"

Host: "Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Lightcone. Garry wasn't feeling great today and couldn't be here, but we're thrilled to be joined by Bob McGrew."

主持人:"欢迎回到《The Lightcone》新一集。Garry 今天身体不太舒服,没能来录制,但我们非常高兴邀请到 Bob McGrew。"

"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."

"Bob 早期是 PayPal 的工程师、Palantir 的早期高管,最近一份工作是 OpenAI 的首席研究官——主导了 ChatGPT、GPT-4 和 o1 推理模型的研发。"

"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."

"现在他在探索 AI 的未来,而且最近加入了美军一个挺有意思的岗位——这个我们等会聊。Bob,非常感谢你来。"

Bob: "It's great to be here."

Bob:"很高兴来到这里。"

Host: "So Bob, I've been particularly excited to sit down with you to talk about the Forward Deployed Engineer model — because this is a topic that keeps coming up in our lives."

主持人:"Bob,我特别期待跟你坐下来聊 Forward Deployed Engineer 模式——这个话题在我们的工作生活里反复出现。"

"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're exactly the right person to explain it."

"它现在是硅谷最热的话题之一,尤其在我们节目反复聊到的 AI agent 创业公司里。你当年就在'这件事开始的那个房间'里——所以你是最合适来解释它的人。"

"You were actually telling me a funny story — 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 about, you know, inventing ChatGPT. And instead, what all of these AI startup founders wanted to talk to you about was the Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer model."

"你之前还跟我讲过一个有趣的事——几个月前 YC 办了一场 AI 大会,你以为创始人都会围上来跟你聊'你怎么参与造出 ChatGPT 的'。结果他们全都跑来问你 Palantir 的 Forward Deployed Engineer 模式。"

Bob: "Well, and it's really true. It hasn't just been that one conference. As I've been advising startups this last year, I would say that a lot of them are pretty much exclusively trying to learn how the FD strategy works."

Bob:"是真的,而且远不止那一次大会。过去一年我接触的 startups 里,绝大多数想跟我聊的话题几乎只剩一个——FDE 战略到底怎么跑。"

Host: "Yeah, so there's this intense topic of fascination, and it's super timely — because it's actually become, I think, the dominant way that the AI agent startups are organizing themselves."

主持人:"对,大家对这个话题极度着迷,而且非常应景——它已经变成 AI agent 创业公司主流的组织方式。"

"I was looking earlier today, and if you look at the YC job board, there's over 100 YC startups that are hiring for a job with the title 'Forward Deployed Engineer' — up from basically zero 3 years ago."

"我今天早上翻了一下 YC 的招聘板——现在有 100 多家 YC 创业公司在招'Forward Deployed Engineer'。三年前这个数字几乎是零。"

"Perhaps before we get really into it, for anybody who doesn't already understand — can you just explain what a forward deployed engineer is and how it's relevant today?"

"在正式开聊之前,先给不了解的听众做个解释:Forward Deployed Engineer 到底是什么?为什么在当下重要?"

Bob: "So a forward deployed engineer is someone, typically technical and an engineer, who sits at the customer site and fills the gap between what the product does and what the customer needs."

Bob:"Forward deployed engineer 是一种工程师,通常有技术背景,常驻在客户现场,填补'你的产品能做什么'和'客户真正需要什么'之间的鸿沟。"

Host: "And how does this play out in practice?"

主持人:"实际操作里这是什么样?"

Bob: "You'll have a product and you go to a new customer. You start working with a new customer, and the problem that they want you to solve is not a problem that you've ever solved before."

Bob:"你带着自己的产品进入一个新客户。开始合作时,他们让你解决的问题,你以前没解决过。"

"But you believe that it's one that with a little bit of work, maybe a lot of work, you can solve for this particular customer, and you'd be making a huge impact for them. You'd be delivering an outcome to them that would be extremely valuable for them."

"但你判断——多投入一些精力(甚至大量精力),这件事是能给这个客户做成的;一旦做成,你会给他们带来极大的影响,交付给他们极有价值的'outcome'。"

"So you take the product that you have, and the FDE with help from the product team figures out how to deliver that outcome — how to build that use case, how to deliver the piece of software that you've built in a way that actually works for the customer."

"你把现有产品拿过来,FDE 在产品团队的支援下想出'怎么把这个结果交付出去'——怎么把这套 use case 搭起来,怎么把已经做出来的软件改成在这个客户场景里真正能跑的样子。"

Host: "To go all the way back to the beginning — you were there at Palantir when this whole model that is now exploding in Silicon Valley was invented. Can you talk about how it all got started?"

主持人:"咱们一直追溯到源头——你当年就在 Palantir,这套现在在硅谷爆炸的模式就是在那儿被发明的。能讲讲它最初是怎么开始的吗?"

Bob: "The interesting way to think about the beginning of Palantir is that when we got started, the focus of our company was to build software for the intelligence community — specifically, software for spies."

Bob:"理解 Palantir 起源的最有意思的角度是——我们刚开始的时候,公司目标是为情报机构做软件,更具体地说,为间谍做软件。"

"And so one of the challenges in building software for spies is that I don't know any spies. You probably don't know any spies either."

"为间谍做软件有一个挑战——我不认识任何间谍。你大概也不认识。"

Host: "Nope."

主持人:"没错。"

Bob: "And if you happen to find a spy and you go and ask them 'so what is it exactly that you do?' — they're not usually going to tell you."

Bob:"就算你真找到一个间谍,问他'你究竟在做什么',他通常也不会告诉你。"

"And so we had to take an approach that was sort of very unusual at the time. But effectively, we started by building a demo, and we took that demo to potential customers in the intelligence community."

"所以我们当时采取了一种相当反常的做法——先把一个 demo 做出来,然后把这个 demo 拿到情报圈的潜在客户面前。"

"Stephen Cohen very famously did this, one of the founders of Palantir. He showed them the demo and he said, 'You know, well, what do you think?' And they said, 'Well, this is terrible. This isn't related to what we do at all.' And he said, 'Oh well, how would you like it to be different?' And then they would say, 'Oh well, could you make this change and this change?' He's like sitting there writing all of this down."

"Palantir 联合创始人之一 Stephen Cohen 这件事做得很出名。他把 demo 拿给对方看,问'你觉得怎么样?'对方说'糟透了,跟我们做的事八竿子打不着。'他就接着问'那你希望它怎么变?'对方就说'你能不能改这里、改那里。'他坐在那儿一字不落地记下来。"

Host: "So far this story feels very much like the standard advice you would give to founders today, right? That you have to go make something people want, you have to get out of the building, you have to go talk to customers."

主持人:"听起来这就是今天给创业者的标准建议——'造人们想要的东西、走出办公室、去和客户聊'。"

Bob: "We were doing this back in the mid-2000s. And so there's a little bit of that meme where, like, 'I spent years mastering this technique, and Paul Graham just tweeted it out for everybody.'"

Bob:"我们这是在 2000 年代中期就在干这件事。所以那个段子说得对:'我花了好多年才悟出来的方法,Paul Graham 一条 tweet 就广而告之了。'"

Host: "Mhm."

主持人:"嗯。"

Bob: "But the thing that changes — and that really causes the FD strategy — is that what you expect, and the standard thing you expect, is that you spend a lot of time early on, you know, doing things that don't scale, going out and visiting customers, getting very close to the customers, and then you discover product-market fit."

Bob:"但真正让 FDE 战略诞生的变化是——大家原本预期的剧本是:你早期花大把时间做'不可规模化的事',跑出去拜访客户、靠得很近,然后找到 PMF。"

"And once you discover product-market fit — and this is class, if you read Crossing the Chasm or any of these books — once you discover product-market fit, you do something entirely different."

"一旦找到 PMF——这是教科书写的,你读《Crossing the Chasm》之类的书都会看到——接下来你要做的事完全不一样。"

"So instead of staying deep with the customers, doing as much as you can to really understand the customer — instead you want to embrace distance from your customer. And all you want to focus on is scaling. How do you sell more? How do you treat all customers exactly the same?"

"也就是——不再深扎客户、不再花最多精力去理解他们,而是要'拥抱与客户的距离',只聚焦 scaling。怎么卖更多?怎么把所有客户当一样对待?"

"And I think I want to say that if you're in a business where this is working for you, that's great. Don't do the FDE strategy. You have been given an amazing gift."

"我想强调一下——如果你的生意里这套打法是 work 的,千万别走 FDE。你已经拿到了一份难得的礼物。"

"If you have the opportunity to just scale, treat all the customers the same, go ahead and do that."

"如果你能直接 scale、把所有客户一视同仁——就这么干。"

"But it didn't work for us. And I think this is where Shyam Sankar — who's a very early employee, you know, now I think the president and CTO of Palantir — he really invented the FDE strategy."

"但 Palantir 跑不通这条路。这时候 Shyam Sankar——他是非常早期的员工,现在是 Palantir 的总裁兼 CTO——发明了 FDE 战略。"

"And the basic thing we found was that the customers that we had — the product that they needed was slightly different at every place. So we moved from one customer building a product for them, we went to the next customer, we saw they had something slightly different."

"我们的发现是——每个客户需要的产品都有'一点点不一样'。我们给一个客户做了一份产品,到下一个客户那儿,需求又变了一点。"

"And instead of sort of building two products, or building the exact right feature for each of them at each site, we built something that was more a platform than a product — that had a lot of ability to be customized at each site."

"我们没有去做'两个独立产品',也没有为每个客户精准定制功能。我们做了一个更像'平台'而非'产品'的东西——它能在每个客户现场被深度参数化、定制化。"

"So when you do that — well, okay, you need to bring someone to the site to understand what the users are doing, and build customization. And historically that's been understood as services, right? So that's something you want to minimize. You don't want to be doing a lot of work per customer in this, you know, product-market fit world."

"这么干就意味着,你需要派人到客户现场理解用户怎么工作、并做出定制——历史上这叫'service(服务)',是大家想极力压缩的。在'追求 PMF'的标准世界里,你恨不得每个客户都尽量少干活。"

"And what Shyam realized was that you can actually flip this around and make it valuable."

"Shyam 的洞见是——你完全可以把这件事反过来,让它变得有价值。"

"So what he realized we needed was for the FDEs to act as product discovery. So they would go to the site, they would take the product as it was, and they would fill the gap between what the product did and what the users needed."

"他意识到我们真正需要的是——让 FDE 承担'产品发现'的角色。他们到客户现场,带着现状产品,亲手填上'产品现在能做的'和'用户真正需要的'之间的缺口。"

"So the FDE goes and builds like a gravel road to where the product needs to go. And then the role of my team — of the product and engineering team — was to look at that and basically figure out how that should generalize to the next 5 customers or the next 10 customers, and then turn that gravel road into like a paved superhighway."

"FDE 先在客户现场修一条碎石路通向'产品该去的地方'。我所在的产品和工程团队的工作,就是看着这条路,想清楚:怎么把它推广到下 5 个、下 10 个客户,把碎石路升级成柏油高速公路。"

Host: "I feel like sales is product discovery is a concept that's not new. It was certainly around before Palantir, but typically the view used to be — you had your salespeople that went out and did the sales and talked to the customers, and they came back and reported to the engineers. But it seems like at Palantir it was like the engineers were doing that work. Was that a conscious decision, or how did that come about?"

主持人:"'销售本身就是产品发现'这个概念其实不新——Palantir 之前就有人讲。但传统的看法是:让销售出去聊客户,他们回来告诉工程师。Palantir 似乎反过来——直接让工程师干这件事。这是有意为之的吗?是怎么发生的?"

"Especially when you're selling into like the government and defense — like, you would imagine the natural inclination is to go hire some experienced salesperson who's got a history of selling into the government, and —"

"尤其是卖给政府和国防部门——按常理你会去找一个经验丰富的、在政府体系里有销售背景的人——"

"Some, like, Don Draper-like, who wears a suit and worked in the DoD for 20 years, and like takes generals out to steak dinners and things like that. And that's actually not what you guys did, right?"

"——某个像 Don Draper 那样、穿西装、在国防部干过 20 年、爱请将军吃牛排的人。但你们不是这么干的对吧?"

Bob: "Well, I mean, there's two angles. The one is — we talked to a lot of those people early on, and they said, 'Why the hell would I work with a Silicon Valley company when I could work with a big-five defense prime?'"

Bob:"这要从两个角度看。第一,我们早期跟很多这类人聊过,他们说:'我为什么要跟一家硅谷公司合作?我可以去那五大防务巨头啊。'"

"And then even when we talked to people who seemed like they might be successful in this role, it was just very clear to us that they wouldn't mesh with our culture and they wouldn't actually be successful. And when we tried doing something like this, it almost never worked."

"哪怕我们找到了看起来'可能干得好'的人,也很清楚他们和我们的文化合不来,最终也成不了事。我们试过几次,几乎都失败了。"

"And so what we found was very different. And I think the difference between sales-led product discovery and FDE-led product discovery is that — sales-led product discovery, you're talking to people from the outside. And again, this is important very early on, but it's not as effective as the FDE product discovery, where you're solving these problems from the inside."

"我们的发现完全不同。我觉得'销售驱动的产品发现'和'FDE 驱动的产品发现'的区别是:销售驱动是'你站在外面跟人聊'——早期有用,但远不如 FDE 驱动那样'坐在客户内部把问题干掉'来得有效。"

"So the scope of a traditional implementation might be — you start with something that's pretty close to what the product does, but you want to be solving one of the key problems that leadership has identified."

"传统打法的起点会是——你先做一件离自己产品现有能力比较近的活,但目标必须是'客户领导层认定的关键问题之一'。"

"If you're not solving one of the top five priorities for the CEO, it's probably not going to work. They probably won't have the energy to persist through the much more challenging route of getting effectively a new piece of the product built in a way that worked for them."

"如果你不在 CEO 关心的前 5 个问题里,这事大概率推不动。他们没耐心陪你走'专门给他们做一块新功能'的那条更难的路。"

"Then once you've solved that first problem, then the FDEs can identify other key problems in the enterprise — sometimes much more valuable problems than the ones that you were first targeting, that maybe it's not obvious that Palantir could have solved those problems, or that your company could solve those problems."

"第一个问题解决之后,FDE 就能在客户内部识别出其他关键问题——往往比一开始锚定的问题更值钱,而且乍一看 Palantir 似乎根本解不了。"

"But once you're there, you can see through product insight that you can actually do this. And then you go and solve those problems."

"但你人都在里面了,靠对产品的洞察就能看出'这事我们其实能做'。于是你就去把它做掉。"

"And so it switches from, you know, how do I sell the same thing to each customer to how do I land and expand."

"整个动作就从'怎么把同一件东西卖给每个客户',转成了'怎么 land and expand'。"

Host: "Bob, can you lay out sort of exactly how the FDE model works at Palantir? Like, if you were giving people almost an instruction manual — here's how we did it."

主持人:"Bob,能不能给我们一份'操作手册级别'的描述——Palantir 的 FDE 模式具体怎么跑?"

Bob: "Yeah. So I think a starting point is to think about how the team was structured."

Bob:"我会从'团队是怎么搭起来的'讲起。"

"And of course there's many different iterations, but I think this is the key thing that remains constant — that the two key roles are those of what we call the Echo team and the Delta team."

"当然这套体系迭代过很多版,但有一件事一直没变——两个最核心的角色,我们叫 Echo team 和 Delta team。"

"The Echo team were embedded analysts. So they would go to the customer site, they would speak to the users, they would try to figure out what demo or what use case really made sense for the users at this site. What was the key problem that could be solved?"

"Echo 团队是'嵌入式分析师'。他们去客户现场,跟用户聊,搞清楚'在这个客户身上,哪个 demo 或者哪个 use case 真正成立?那个能被解的关键问题到底是什么?'"

"And they would also be the account managers. So they would also be the people managing the relationships at the customer site."

"他们同时也是 account manager,负责打理客户那边的关系。"

"And the Delta team — the deployed engineers — were effectively software engineers typically very good at writing code extremely quickly. Eating a lot of pain, as we put it."

"Delta 团队是 deployed engineer——本质上就是能极快写代码的软件工程师。我们当时常说他们要'eat a lot of pain'(扛得住痛苦)。"

"And they would be the ones who sort of took those ideas and brought them into the real world and built a solution, a prototype — but something that could actually work, and then deploy that for the customer."

"他们的任务就是把 Echo 带回来的想法变成现实——写出一个真能用的 prototype/方案,再部署给客户。"

"And all of this would come in a very short period of time. So you go in with an idea for what you're going to work on. You set up, a few months in, that you're going to have a presentation with leadership to show them your progress. And then if that presentation goes well, then you're going to actually deploy and go organization-wide."

"这件事的节奏极快。你带着一个'要做什么'的想法进去;预设几个月后给客户领导层做一次进展汇报;汇报顺利就正式 deploy,在整个组织内推开。"

Host: "The interesting thing about these two roles is they're very different kinds of people and profile. How would you even go about finding the right person to be in these roles?"

主持人:"有意思的是,这两类岗位的人画像差别极大。你怎么招到合适的人?"

"Because it's not just a regular engineer that could fit FDE. They needed to have more of that talking to users — or the echo team also have to be more technical. It wasn't just an account manager. How did Palantir build this early team?"

"普通工程师并不适合做 FDE,他们要更愿意和用户聊;Echo 也不是普通 account manager,得有一定技术功底。Palantir 早期是怎么搭起来这个团队的?"

Bob: "Yeah, so the Echo team — a classic profile for someone to join your Echo team would be someone from the domain you're working in. So possibly a former army officer, or someone who worked deeply in healthcare. So they have deep domain knowledge."

Bob:"Echo 团队——典型的人选是从你要进入的领域里出来的人。比如前陆军军官,或者在医疗系统里深耕过的人。他们有深入的领域知识。"

"But — and this is really important — they need to be rebels."

"但有一个非常关键的点——他们必须是'反叛者'。"

"Or Shyam would probably call them heretics. They need to be someone who understands how things are done right now, and recognizes that it's insufficient — that it doesn't work."

"Shyam 大概会叫他们'异教徒(heretics)'。这种人既懂行业现状,又清醒地知道'当下这套是不行的'。"

"Because if their perspective is — they come from this world, it's great — then they're never going to be able to figure out the step function change that the new software has to be able to make."

"因为如果他们觉得'我来自这个行业,这一行挺好',他们就永远做不出新软件本该带来的阶跃式提升。"

"Because if you can't make some sort of 3x or 10x change within that organization, then there was no reason to go through all the effort of doing this. You might as well have sold some sort of very simple piece of software."

"如果你不能给这个组织带来 3x 或 10x 的提升,那花这么大力气干嘛?不如卖一份普通软件算了。"

"So that's the key profile for the Echo."

"这就是 Echo 的核心画像。"

"And then for your Deltas — you want someone who's really good at prototyping. So the wrong profile for a Delta would be someone who's a craftsman, who really loves making sure the abstractions are exactly right, that they're building software that's going to be maintainable for a dozen years, right? Because that's not the role. That's not the job."

"Delta 这边——你要的是非常擅长 prototyping 的人。错的画像是'工匠型'——痴迷于让抽象层完全正确、写出能维护十二年的代码。这不是这份工作的形态。"

"And what you want is someone who can go in, write some rough-and-ready code. Sometimes that code is beautiful if you get the right person, right? But usually not. That again, that's not the key portion of the job."

"你想要的是能进去就 hack、写出粗糙但能跑的代码的人。运气好遇到那种'代码也写得很漂亮'的人,自然好——但通常不会有,这也不是这份工作的重点。"

"But someone who can go actually deliver that outcome in the form of software, on a timeline. And then it may be the case that the first version they write has to be thrown away. Maybe they write a complete second version. Maybe someone else writes a second version, depending on that person."

"重点是'能按 deadline 把结果交付出来'的人。第一版可能要扔掉、整段重写;有时候是这个人自己重写第二版,有时候得换一个人写。看人。"

"But those are the key sets of skills."

"这是核心技能集。"

Host: "It does sound a lot like a founding team."

主持人:"听起来非常像 founding team。"

Bob: "Yes."

Bob:"对。"

Host: "It sounds a lot like a founder."

主持人:"也很像一个创业者。"

Bob: "Yeah. Would you hire former startup founders and turn them into these roles, or did it go mostly the other way?"

Bob:"对。是说你们会把前创业者招过来当 FDE,还是大多数是反过来——FDE 后来变成创业者?"

Host: "I mean, I think it's no coincidence that Palantir has spun off like an incredible number of startups, because this FDE training is exactly the training to become a startup founder. You're learning all the startup founder skills, right? But did you go in the other direction too?"

主持人:"我想绝非偶然——Palantir 出了大量创业者,因为 FDE 训练本身就是'怎么当创业者'的训练。但反过来——你们也会从创业者池里招人吗?"

Bob: "You know, back in the day when we were getting this started, there was not a huge supply of founders for us to pull from. Maybe that's the opposite now."

Bob:"在我们最初干这件事的时候,可供我们挑选的创业者池子并不大。现在可能反过来了。"

"But I think you're actually quite right. What you're doing in each of these new environments, at each of these customer sites, is a little bit like being a startup founder — but you're a startup founder where you have access to some very powerful piece of product leverage that makes your job easier."

"但你说的没错。你在每个新环境、每个客户现场做的事,就是一个微型创业者——只不过你手里多了一个非常强的产品杠杆,让你的活儿更顺。"

"This is great training, and like you said, this is why you see so many startups from Palantir founders."

"这是绝佳的训练,也正如你所说,这就是为什么 Palantir 出了那么多创业者。"

Host: "So the common knock that you hear on this from people who don't really know what they're talking about is — like 'oh, it's just consulting dressed up with fancy marketing speak.' Why is that wrong?"

主持人:"圈外人最常用来攻击它的说法是——'这就是穿了营销马甲的 consulting。'这个说法为什么是错的?"

Bob: "I think — before I say — I don't want to tell you glibly why that's wrong, because I think there's actually a real risk that it's right."

Bob:"我先把话说清楚——我不想轻飘飘地告诉你'这种说法错了',因为它有可能是对的,而且风险真的存在。"

"If you go back to 2015 and you talk to people about Palantir, maybe you would hear two things. One — that Palantir is evil. But the second thing you hear is that it's a consulting business that is never going to scale."

"你回到 2015 年问别人对 Palantir 的看法,大概会听到两句话。一是'Palantir 是邪恶的';二是'它是一家永远 scale 不起来的 consulting 公司'。"

"You know that it's actually like a bad business. It's not a software business. And we spent a lot of time trying to understand whether that was a correct characterization or not."

"也就是说,它是一门'糟糕的生意',不是软件生意。我们花了很多时间去严肃地琢磨:这个判断到底对不对?"

"From a business model perspective, one of the key things that you will see, that you should see, is that it may be the case that when you go in — you do a new deployment at a customer — that you're actually losing money early on."

"从商业模式的角度看,你会发现(也应该发现)的一个关键现象是——你给一个新客户做新部署的早期,可能是亏钱的。"

"As the longer you're at the customer, the first thing is your product — because of the product discovery — gets better suited to what the customer does. And so you no longer need a large team of people at the customer site figuring out what the customer is doing, paving, writing that code."

"在客户那儿待得越久,第一件发生的事是——你的产品因为产品发现而越来越贴合客户的业务。于是你不再需要一支大团队常驻现场,去摸清客户在做什么、去铺路、去写代码。"

"The second thing is that you should be earning the right, as Shyam would put it, to have access to more important problems at the customer site."

"第二件事——用 Shyam 的话讲——你在'挣到(earn the right)'进入客户内部更重要的问题的资格。"

"And so you should see basically that your cost per value of the outcome you're delivering is going down. And so your profit margins start off negative but then ultimately become positive after some period of time — maybe a year, maybe multiple years at the customer site."

"所以你应该能看到的现象是——你交付价值的单位成本在下降;毛利率从负数一步步走到正数——可能一年,可能在这个客户身上待好几年。"

"And if you look at it from that perspective, you can see that you're actually delivering, you know, real repeatable value."

"从这个视角看,你交付的就是真实、可重复的价值。"

Host: "I guess one fascinating piece to make this work and drive the cost down is really the product team. So how does the product team fit in and work with the FDE team?"

主持人:"让这套模式 work、把成本压下来,产品团队是关键拼图。产品团队怎么和 FDE 团队协作?"

Bob: "I think on the engineering side, it actually — my job as an engineer was actually not so bad. Because early on in the early days of Palantir, we were doing this founder-led discovery, and we were building new products. And later on, at the later days of Palantir, we were still doing that — we were still building new products. This felt great, right?"

Bob:"工程师视角,其实——我作为工程师的工作并不糟。Palantir 早期我们做'创始人驱动的产品发现',造新产品;后期还是这样,继续造新产品。这种状态挺好。"

"But the roles that were really different are the FDE team — but then also the product management team."

"真正变化大的角色是 FDE 团队,以及——产品管理团队。"

"And so the product that you're building, instead of being highly verticalized — 'this is one flow that millions of people are going to be going through, like if you're building Airbnb' — instead, the role of the product team is really to hold the product vision."

"你做的产品,不是高度垂直化、'一条 flow 几百万人都要走'(像 Airbnb)的形态。产品团队真正的角色,是'守住产品愿景'。"

"And so you have to think — when I see this new problem that we're seeing at a customer site, what is the generalizable version of this that applies to the next 10 customers?"

"你要不断追问:'我在这个客户那看到的新问题,它的可泛化版本,对下 10 个客户来说应该长什么样?'"

"Because there's a classic failure mode here, where the FDE implements something for one customer, and you say great, well that's how you should do it. And you bring it directly into the product. And it turns out if you do that, you're building something that's over-specialized for one customer."

"有一个经典失败模式——FDE 给一个客户做了某个实现,你拍板'就这么干',直接塞进产品。结果你造出的东西只为这一个客户量身定做。"

"And so part of the magic here is being able to build the kind of product — and with the kind of product people — that they can look at that and sort of guess the correct problem that you're solving, which is always a little bit more general than the problem that the customer is coming in with."

"这门艺术的一部分,就在于你能不能造出'对'的产品、招到'对'的 PM——他们能看着这个具体实现,猜出'真正在解决的那个更通用的问题'——它一定比客户最初提的问题更抽象一层。"

Host: "So there was some wisdom to figure out which bucket it fit into. Is this just for this vertical or could it be generalized? Could you give us an example of what that looked like, in terms of the products and verticals?"

主持人:"所以这里有一种判断的智慧——'该归到这个垂直专属,还是该被通用化?'能不能举个具体例子,产品和垂直层面是怎么分桶的?"

Bob: "Yeah, I mean — probably the most basic example here is the invention of the Palantir Ontology itself."

Bob:"最经典的例子,就是 Palantir Ontology 的诞生。"

"When we first started talking about working with the US government, specifically working in intelligence — should we have a database table for people, and a different database table for money, and a different database table for this?"

"我们刚开始跟美国政府合作、特别是情报项目时——'是不是该一张表存人、一张表存钱、一张表存别的?'"

"And this is super obvious, I think, at this point — if you go down that route and you try to deploy to multiple people, your database doesn't make any sense."

"今天看这答案显而易见——照那个路子走,部署给多家机构,数据库立刻就崩了。"

"And so the change here was to say — well, we need to pull this up to a higher level of generalization. And instead of thinking about specific types of objects, we should allow that to be defined per customer by the forward deployed engineering team."

"我们做的转向是——把抽象层往上拉一级。不再硬编码'人、钱、船'这种具体对象类型,而是让 FDE 在每个客户那里去定义。"

"And so that's the sort of origin story of where Palantir famously got its ontology."

"这就是 Palantir Ontology 那条著名'起源故事'。"

Host: "So how does that work today? Is there like a base database schema that has common reusable objects like people and money that then gets customized per site?"

主持人:"那今天怎么运作?是不是有个基础 schema,里面有'人、钱'这种可复用对象,每个客户现场再定制?"

Bob: "Well, the database schema is extremely general. There's just this notion of objects, properties, media, and links between objects. And — here, I'm talking about Palantir's government product, which was our first product."

Bob:"数据库 schema 极其通用——就是'对象、属性、媒体、对象之间的连接'这几个概念。这里我说的是 Palantir 政府产品,这是我们的第一款。"

"The ontology is what encodes all of the specialized information that's per customer. And, you know, that says, oh well, this is a person, this is a ship, this is a money flow."

"客户特定的信息全部编码在 ontology 里——它告诉系统:这是个'人'、这是个'船'、这是一笔'资金流动'。"

"And again, this is really the very most basic example. But you know, if you build something for just one customer, then you're going to be thinking in the description that applies to that customer."

"再强调,这只是最基础的例子。如果你只给一个客户做东西,你脑子里全是'这个客户的语境'。"

"But instead of saying 'okay well for people we do this' — you want to be able to pull it up a level and say, 'okay, well there's this common operation that we want to apply to things that have this property.'"

"但你不能停在'对人我们这么处理'——你得拉高一层,说'有一个通用操作,要应用到所有具备某个属性的对象上'。"

"Like people have this property, but maybe also ships have this property — but let's be honest, money payments do not have this property. And so you have to think at a higher level of abstraction."

"比如说'人'有这个属性,'船'也有这个属性,但'付款'就没这个属性。所以你必须在更高的抽象层级上思考。"

"We didn't hire product managers for a long time. And when it did come time for me to hire product managers, I would interview people who were amazing product managers at other companies. And I would ask them to to think at this level of abstraction. And they were very — they couldn't really think at this level of abstraction."

"我们很长一段时间不招 PM。后来要招了,我面试那些在别家公司很优秀的 PM,让他们试着在这个抽象层级上思考——他们真的做不到。"

"They would say, 'okay, well this is the flow, this is what it should look like for this customer.' But that was the wrong thing to do here. They needed to pop up a level and think at the level of — how does this work in the context of the ontology? How do we change the ontology so that this specialized thing works across customers?"

"他们会说'这是 flow,这个客户应该长这样'。但在 Palantir,这是错的回答。他们需要往上跳一层,思考'这个东西在 ontology 框架里如何运作?我们怎么改 ontology,让某个客户特定的需求能跨多个客户都生效?'"

"And of course there's many other examples that don't have anything to do with the ontology."

"当然还有很多和 ontology 无关的例子。"

Host: "Does that create any sort of cultural tension at Palantir itself? It sounds like you're describing the FDEs as sort of these heretics. They don't want to generalize. They want to do what's best for the customer and build specialized solutions. But presumably for your own internal product team, you do actually want to hire the people who can think at some level of abstraction and want to build maintainable code that lasts for a while."

主持人:"这会不会在 Palantir 内部产生文化冲突?听你描述,FDE 像'异端'——他们不想搞通用化,只想为客户解决最具体的问题。而内部产品团队你又要那种'能在抽象层思考、写能维护的代码'的人。"

"Surely that must have created tension somewhere where there's an FDE who's like, 'no, I don't want to use the generalizable ontology, I want to kind of like do it this way.'"

"中间一定会有摩擦——肯定有 FDE 跳出来说'我不想用通用 ontology,我就想这么干'。"

Bob: "Well, I mean absolutely there was always a lot of tension. And I would not frame this so much in terms of the skills that different people had — because it was also very, I think, a lot about the environment, what people do in the environment they're placed in."

Bob:"摩擦一直存在。但我不会把它解释成'人技能不同'——更多是'所处环境不同',人在不同环境里会做不同的事。"

"It was also very common for FDEs to work in the field for a long time and then say, 'hey, I can really fix these products,' and then come in and do an amazing job on the product side and think at that level of abstraction."

"FDE 在客户现场干很久之后,说'嘿,这些产品我能修好',回到产品端做得也非常好,能在抽象层思考。"

"But when you're at the customer site, you were faced with one very —"

"但当你身处客户现场,你面对的是一个非常具体的——"

Host: "The incentives are different versus the skills are different."

主持人:"差的是激励,不是技能。"

Bob: "The incentives are different. And so you're solving one very particular problem, and it makes a lot of sense to just take the simplest approach to solve that problem."

Bob:"差的是激励。你在解一个非常具体的问题,采用最简单的解法是再合理不过的。"

"And that is in fact what the FDE should do. That's what the gravel road looks like."

"这就是 FDE 应该做的事——这就是'碎石路'的样子。"

"And then the paved road, you know, has to go by not just this one customer but a bunch of other customers that are further down the road. So the paved road often looks a little bit different."

"而'柏油路'要服务的不仅是这一个客户,还有未来更多客户——所以柏油路的形态往往会和碎石路有些不同。"

"But the flip side of this though is — imagine you said, 'well, clearly this FDE approach is just wrong. The FDE is building the wrong thing. What if the product team just thinks really hard about what to build and then they go build that?' They're absolutely going to build the wrong thing."

"反过来想——假设有人说'FDE 的方法明显错了,产品团队认真想清楚要造什么再去造'——他们一定会造错东西。"

"In fact, the way that we would often build features early on is — first the FDE team would build something, they'd see something at one customer, we'd bring it back to the product team in Palo Alto. And we would say, 'okay, what's the right generalized version?' And those FDEs would participate in those discussions."

"实际上我们早期做功能的常见路径是:FDE 团队先在客户现场做出某个东西、捕捉到一个现象,带回 Palo Alto 的产品团队;我们一起讨论'这件事正确的通用化版本是什么',那些 FDE 也会参与这场讨论。"

"That was incredibly important."

"这一点极其关键。"

"And then we'd identify several other customers — well, if it worked for this customer, we think it could work for this other customer. So let's bring the FDEs from those customers in as well and help them design — they can help us design this feature so that when we build something, we know it'll work for the customer it was initially prototyped at, and we know it will work for these others."

"接着我们识别其他几个客户——'既然在 A 客户能跑,B 客户大概率也能跑'。把 B 客户的 FDE 也拉进来一起设计——这样我们做出的功能既能在最初原型的客户上 work,也能在另外几家上 work。"

"And then of course, once you've built that context where everybody can say 'here are three different workflows that are subtly different,' then suddenly you're not having this argument about, well, we think it should be general and we think it should be specific. But everybody is solving the same problem. And then I think that really melds the incentives."

"等你建立起'三个客户的工作流虽然只差一点点,但确实有差'这个共同认知,'通用 vs 专用'的争吵就消失了——大家都在解同一个问题。激励就被对齐了。"

Host: "Do you feel like it requires a lot of organizational discipline to keep this model from devolving into pure consulting where the FDE teams are just off building like whatever product the customer needs?"

主持人:"要让这套模式不滑回'纯 consulting'——FDE 各自跑去客户那为客户造任意产品——是不是需要极强的组织纪律?"

Bob: "Yes. You absolutely have to focus on this. And I think one of the other failures, by the way, is even prior to that — and more the easier failure to become a consulting firm — it's where you build the product in the field that the customers are asking for, rather than the one that's actually valuable to them."

Bob:"是的,这必须是首要动作。还有一个更早期、更容易让你滑成 consulting 的失败模式是——你做出来的产品是'客户开口要的',而不是'对客户真正有价值的'。"

"Because it's often the case that the customer — right, you don't actually — the customer is like a whole organization. You don't talk to the customer. You talk to maybe the CIO, right, or you talk to one sponsor, usually a couple levels down from the CEO, who you only get to see every once in a while."

"因为客户其实是一整个组织,你接触不到'客户公司'。你接触到的可能是 CIO,或者是 CEO 下面两层的某个 sponsor,而且只有偶尔才能见到他。"

"And it's often the case that they would rather just have you solve some problem that's easy for them to have you solve, rather than one that's really impactful and improves the business."

"他们往往更愿意让你解决一个'对他们来说好处理'的问题,而不是真正能改变业务的问题。"

Host: "Going back to the opening from Jared — what's going on with all these AI companies really now ramping up and hiring tons of FDEs?"

主持人:"接回 Jared 开场提到的——为什么这些 AI 公司都在疯狂招 FDE?"

"What had caused them to really adopt this model, which was not the case for the previous generation of companies with SaaS? What happened?"

"是什么让他们大规模采用这种模式?为什么上一代 SaaS 公司不这样?中间发生了什么?"

"Especially because I feel like even as Palantir became successful and the FDE model became more known, it was still seen as — well, that's a one-off thing because Palantir is a unique company and selling to the government. Like, a really weird thing."

"特别是——即便后来 Palantir 做出名了、FDE 模式更被外界听说,大家也只把它当成'孤例'——'Palantir 太特殊了,卖给政府,是种很怪的玩法'。"

Host (cont'd): "But you wouldn't — 'don't try this at home' mindset, right? Like, now everyone's sort of — it's become, like Diana said, very commonplace. Has that surprised you? And then two, why do you think that's happened?"

主持人:"是那种'别在家里乱试'的态度。但现在已经像 Diana 说的——非常普遍了。你意外吗?你觉得为什么会这样?"

Bob: "This was absolutely a surprise to me. My first, second, and third pieces of advice to people who are thinking about trying an FD strategy is — like, don't do this at home. If you can avoid it, it's probably bad for you. Probably you're going to end up doing services."

Bob:"完全出乎我的意料。我给那些想尝试 FDE 战略的人的第一、第二、第三条建议永远都是——'别在家里乱试'。能避就避,大概率对你不好。你最后多半会变成一家 services 公司。"

"And then only if you really try hard not to do it and fail — then, well, then maybe actually it's a moat for you, if it's the only thing that can possibly work in your market."

"只有当你竭力想绕开 FDE、却始终绕不开,那它才可能成为你的护城河——因为你的市场里只有这条路跑得通。"

"So what's special about this market, right? Why does the AI agents market work this way?"

"那这个市场到底特殊在哪?为什么 AI agent 市场会走这条路?"

"Maybe the starting place is — why did Palantir have to adopt this?"

"也许该从'Palantir 为什么不得不用 FDE'说起。"

"The Palantir market is not one coherent market, right? So we were working with national intelligence agencies, with national law enforcement, with the military."

"Palantir 的市场不是一个统一市场。我们对接国家情报机构、执法机关、军队。"

"All of these organizations had some similar projects, right? But even, you know, the difference between a counter-proliferation workflow and a counter-terrorism workflow — one you're trying to figure out who's building bombs, the other one well, who's building nuclear bombs and who's building IEDs. And those are actually quite different in terms of how they work."

"虽然他们之间有相似的项目,但'反扩散工作流'和'反恐工作流'其实差很多——一个是'谁在造核弹',另一个是'谁在造 IED',两套工作流形式截然不同。"

"And so there's this incredible heterogeneity, and the market — you should really think of the market as different segments inside each segment."

"这种异质性极强,你必须把这个市场想成'大段里嵌套小段'的结构。"

"Inside each segment you can build something, and the Crossing the Chasm story a little bit applies. So you're starting off, nothing seems to work, suddenly you find product-market fit in the segment — you can deploy the people that are doing this kind of workflow. And then at the next customer you find the same people doing a similar workflow, and you can deploy with very little customization."

"在每个 segment 里你可以做出一个东西,《Crossing the Chasm》那套逻辑在每个 segment 内部部分适用——一开始什么都不行,突然在这个 segment 内部找到 PMF,把人手部署给同一类工作流的客户;到下一个客户那里,同样的工作流、人也类似,你做很少的定制就能部署。"

"But then there's a natural limit to that. And so now you want to go tackle a different market segment, and you have to develop a new piece of technology. And then that can be referenced in other market segments."

"但这会撞到自然的天花板。然后你想去攻打一个新的 market segment,就必须再开发一块新技术——而这块新技术又能在其他 segment 里被借鉴。"

"And like I'm sort of saying here, a segment is not the same as a customer necessarily. Especially in an enterprise or a very large enterprise like the government, where a customer is tens of thousands of users potentially. In that case, that's where the FD strategy matters — because you're doing things that don't scale, but you're doing it scalably over and over again for every market segment that you enter."

"这里说的 segment 和 customer 不完全是一回事。尤其在大企业或者政府这种客户里——一个客户可能就是几万名用户。这种场景下 FDE 战略才真正起作用——因为你在做'不可规模化的事',但你在每一个进入的 segment 里都把这件事可规模化地重复做下去。"

"Why do we see this with AI agents?"

"那为什么 AI agent 也是这套?"

"I think the other thing that's unique about Palantir is that we were building a completely new type of product."

"我觉得 Palantir 另一个独特之处是——我们做的是一类全新的产品。"

"The product that the users saw — well, they were used to basically tracking, doing their analysis, and tracking people in a tool that looked like PowerPoint. And they would collaborate by sending these files back and forth with each other."

"在 Palantir 之前,用户的工作流是——用类似 PowerPoint 的工具去追踪、分析、画人物关系图,然后通过互相发文件协作。"

"But the product we built basically said — hey, when you're drawing out that link diagram, you're not just editing a file. You're actually changing a database, and everybody has the same database."

"我们的产品本质上是说——'你画的这张关系图,不只是在改一个文件,你是在改一个共享数据库——所有人共享同一份。'"

"And so while to the user it looked like a small change on top of the work they were doing, to the enterprise, to the organization we were selling to, it was a completely different market category."

"用户看着只是'手上工作的一个小改动',但对企业、对买单的那个组织来说,这是全新的产品品类。"

"And that I think is what's happening with AI agents — where this is a completely new market category."

"我觉得 AI agent 也是这样——这是一个全新的产品品类。"

"If you are implementing a standard SaaS product and you're replacing one way of paying bills with a different way of paying bills, everybody understands what that market is. The segment — there's not all this little segmentation. There's not the same kind of product discovery."

"如果你做的是标准 SaaS——把'付账单方式 A'换成'付账单方式 B',大家都理解这个市场。segment 之间没那么多细分,也没那么多产品发现要做。"

"You can make a product that's better than the incumbent product, and scale by replacing that product."

"你可以做一个比现有产品更好的版本,通过替代它来 scale。"

"With AI agents, there is no incumbent product. And so — also I would say what it is to build AI agents is actually probably a lot of different things, and we don't know what those are yet. We've got to figure them out."

"AI agent 没有'被替代的现有产品'。另外——'造 AI agent'到底是什么,可能本质上是一堆完全不同的事,我们现在还没搞清楚。得一点点摸出来。"

"Probably in five years we'll look back, we'll be like — well, AI agents, it wasn't even a thing at all. We were actually doing all these different things."

"五年后回头看,我们大概会说——'AI agent'这个概念根本不存在,我们其实在做一堆完全不同的事情。"

"And so that, I think, is why you're seeing the FDE model taking off — because there's so much product discovery to do, and you can only do it from inside the enterprise."

"所以我觉得这就是 FDE 模式爆发的根源——有海量的产品发现工作要做,而且只能从企业内部做。"

Host: "Okay. How does this relate to some of the classic YC advice, which is 'do things that don't scale'?"

主持人:"OK,这跟 YC 的经典建议'do things that don't scale'怎么对应?"

Bob: "Well, that's the advice that you give to an early-stage founder. And the FD model effectively is doing things that don't scale — at scale."

Bob:"那是给早期创业者的建议。FDE 模式本质上就是——把'不可规模化的事',规模化地做下去。"

Host: "Since you see a lot of people trying to apply the FDE model now to their new startups — including a lot of people who didn't work at Palantir and are sort of doing it second or third hand — what are ways you see people getting it wrong, or misconceptions that you'd like to dispel?"

主持人:"很多人现在在自己的 startup 里套用 FDE 模式——很多人甚至没在 Palantir 干过,是二手三手学来的。你看到哪些常见的误用?有没有你想澄清的误解?"

Bob: "Maybe I will start by saying — as I've advised a few different startups who are doing this — I think the startups, the most successful startups doing the FD model, have people from Palantir running the FD model."

Bob:"我先说一点——我顾问过几家在做 FDE 的 startup——最成功的那批 startup,FDE 业务都是由 Palantir 出身的人在带。"

"The startups that I've talked to who are switching to the FD model gained a lot of benefit by bringing on someone from Palantir in one of the core roles."

"那些转型 FDE 模式的 startup,只要在核心岗位上招进一位 Palantir 出身的人,收益就非常显著。"

"As I said, the engineering team is often fairly similar, you know, but maybe continues to be fun for a long time. But the actual mechanics of how the FDEs work, how you build these accounts, how you find the outcomes — those are actually quite different from a standard software firm."

"我前面提过,工程团队的形态通常差不多,而且能在 FDE 里干很久还觉得有意思。但 FDE 实际怎么运转、怎么把一个客户做大、怎么找到交付的 outcome——这些动作和标准软件公司完全不同。"

"And so one of the key differences — and something that I think is actually quite difficult for people to understand — is how you choose a problem, and then how you price that problem."

"其中一个核心差异——很多人理解起来都很费力——是'你怎么选问题',以及'选完之后怎么给它定价'。"

"And fundamentally what you're selling with the FD model is — you're not selling the installation of software. You're selling an outcome. As Shyam would say, you're selling that you have solved a problem."

"本质上,FDE 模式卖的不是'软件安装',卖的是'outcome'。用 Shyam 的话讲,你卖的是'你已经把这个问题解决掉了'。"

"The next question then is — if you've now solved a problem that is delivering some value to the users, how do you price that?"

"接下来的问题是——既然你解决了一个对用户有价值的问题,怎么给它定价?"

"That's a very common question we get from all these AI startups, because —"

"这是所有 AI startup 问我们最多的问题之一,因为——"

Host: "In the age of SaaS you would do it based on usage, or subscription, or seats. And this is completely different — it's outcomes. How do you even price it? How should all these AI founders price their solution?"

主持人:"SaaS 时代你按 usage、按订阅、按 seats 定价。但 outcome 完全是另一回事——你到底怎么定?这些 AI 创业者应该怎么给自己的方案定价?"

Bob: "Yeah. And I think one of the really important things that is differentiated between the FD model and your sort of standard SaaS model is that — with the SaaS model and product-market fit, you're going toward very simple, repeatable contracts, very simple repeatable pricing that makes sense across all of your customers."

Bob:"SaaS 模式和 FDE 模式有一个非常关键的区别。SaaS 在找到 PMF 后,会奔向'简单、可重复'的合同和定价,在所有客户身上都成立。"

"And often you're going to be quite comfortable with small contracts, because the cost — the marginal cost to deploy is very low."

"而且你通常对小合同也很满意——因为部署的边际成本极低。"

"With the FD model, you're going to get pushed toward larger and larger contracts."

"FDE 模式则相反,你会被推向越来越大的合同。"

"Like we talked about, you're going to be growing contracts per customer over time. The contracts, because they're complex, are going to be more flexible."

"如前面所说,你会让每个客户的合同随时间越做越大。合同因为复杂,所以也更灵活。"

Diana: "I think this is what the AI startups that we work with discover on their own. I have this company called Castle that does AI voice agent for mortgage servicing. So they work with very large banks. And the way they actually have been able to go live with large banks is exactly that model of ramping up — it's the number of successful calls that were handling all these mortgage requests."

Diana:"这件事我们合作的 AI startup 自己也都摸索出来了。比如我有家叫 Castle 的公司,做房贷服务的 AI 语音 agent,客户是非常大的银行。他们上线的方式就是这种阶梯式 ramp-up——先按'成功处理了多少通房贷电话'计费。"

"Then they had stipulations — when it goes to scale, it would be this much. And they kind of figured out on their own. And other startups as well — like Happy Robot is another YC company doing AI voice agents for logistics. They're working with large companies like DHL, similar thing."

"再约定'放量到一定规模后是这个价'。他们自己摸出来的。还有像 Happy Robot——也是 YC 公司,做物流场景的 AI 语音 agent,客户是 DHL 这种大公司,模式类似。"

Bob: "There's an asymmetry here between you the startup and the business that you're selling to."

Bob:"你这家 startup 和你卖给的那家企业之间,有一种结构性不对称。"

"Which is — typically when you're selling to a large enterprise, they don't believe they can actually accomplish anything. And that's because oftentimes they've had many large projects that have failed."

"大企业本身不相信'任何项目能成'——因为他们见过太多大项目失败。"

"They also don't believe you can accomplish anything, right? Because they think that you, the startup, are just like them."

"他们也不相信你能成——因为他们觉得'你这家 startup 跟我们差不多'。"

"You, on the other hand, know that you can actually execute. And if you can't, well, you should go into a different line of business anyway, right?"

"但你自己知道你能执行下去。如果你做不到,那也不该干这一行——你应该换条路走。"

"And so early on it makes sense for the startup to just take on all the risk and say, 'we're going to just believe in our own execution, and we're going to take on the risk, and you pay us if it works, or you pay us when we're actually able to expand.'"

"所以早期最合理的做法是:startup 把所有风险都吃下来——'我相信我们能交付,这风险我担——成了你再付钱,或者放量后你再付钱'。"

"The one place this can go wrong is that, particularly if you're doing something that needs to be deployed into the enterprise on-premise — or any piece of it needs to be on-premise rather than in the cloud — you do have to fight the IT team."

"有一个地方会出问题——如果你的方案需要在客户那 on-premise 部署(或者任何一部分要 on-premise 而非云端),你就得跟客户的 IT 部门正面对线。"

Diana: "Yeah, actually seeing that too."

Diana:"对,我们也看到这一点。"

Bob: "Yeah, with some of these companies."

Bob:"对,在好几家这种公司身上都看到了。"

"And more generally — who needs to say yes inside the organization you're deploying into in order for you to succeed? Because those people do not think like startups. They are not aligned with the end user."

"再宽一点说——你部署进的那家组织里,到底有哪些人必须点头你才能成?这些人不会用 startup 的思维方式想问题,也并不天然站在终端用户那一边。"

"And so you're going to have to figure out a way past them. And this is part of why it matters that you're working on one of the CEO's top five problems — because you need to be able to bring in someone from the top to say, 'yes, give them authority to operate. Give them the ability to use — yes, you use this particular type of database. They need to use a different type of database.'"

"你必须想办法绕过他们。这也是为什么'必须解决 CEO 关心的前五个问题'如此重要——你需要顶层有人喊一句'OK,给他们 authority to operate;让他们用别的数据库;'。"

"You have all these specific organizational things that are meant to apply to your IT staff who are building things in-house, but they don't apply to the startup. Let them do what they need to do."

"客户公司内部有一堆专门为'内部 IT 团队'设的规矩——对内有效,但不该套到 startup 头上。要让 startup 按自己的方式做事。"

Host: "How did Palantir get that executive buy-in? I think this is sort of what's happening with all these AI startups that are taking off and going from zero to seven, eight figures in revenue within a year — they figure out the executive buy-in, but it's all very haphazard, I would say, from all the stories I know of."

主持人:"Palantir 当年怎么搞定客户的高层?现在这些一年从 0 做到七八位数收入的 AI startup,基本都靠搞定高层——但从我了解到的案例看,大家都挺'摸黑式'的。"

Bob: "That's how it felt early on too."

Bob:"我们早期也是这种感觉。"

Host: "Okay."

主持人:"OK。"

Bob: "Right. It's a discipline. It's a skill. You need really amazing leadership on the FD team to be able to have that kind of discipline, and to share what works, and just get the practice of doing it at one customer."

Bob:"对。它是一门'纪律',也是一种技能。FDE 团队需要非常出色的 leadership——既有纪律性,又能把'什么有效'沉淀分享给团队,然后在一个客户身上把这套实践跑出来。"

"I mean, I think it's not surprising — that's why the companies I've seen that have done this the best have sort of pulled that from people who've done it before. But it can be learned. We learned it."

"也不奇怪——我看到的把 FDE 跑得最好的公司,都是从'之前干过这件事的人'那里把它学来的。但这件事本身是可以学的——我们当年就是这么学会的。"

Host: "Jared pointed out earlier that — I think the Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer model is not that different to sort of classic YC advice around doing things that don't scale."

主持人:"Jared 前面提到——Palantir 的 FDE 模式和 YC 经典建议'do things that don't scale'其实没差多远。"

"We have this concept of like the Collison install — which essentially boils down to, don't wait for people to turn up to your website, like go to them and get them to install the software. Like physically go to them, like go to their office and sit next to them."

"我们有个概念叫'Collison install'——本质就是'别等用户跑到你网站上,主动到他们那儿去,给他们装上软件;甚至物理上跑到他们办公室、坐在他们旁边'。"

"I feel like it's always been a great starting strategy. But most startups aren't getting big contracts off the bat. So actually the reason they have to stop doing sort of like this manual, high-touch process is — you just can't get the growth rates to sustain without at some point having a product that scales."

"作为起手策略一直很好用。但多数 startup 早期拿不到大合同——所以他们之所以必须停止这种人工高接触的模式,是因为'你没法靠这种方式维持增长率,迟早得有一款能 scale 的产品'。"

"It's kind of like what we were talking about earlier — at some point, hopefully, you build a product that's so good that people can figure it out themselves, and then all of your problems are just scaling it."

"就像我们前面说的——理想状态是某一刻你做出一个产品好到用户自己就能用起来,然后你的问题就只剩 scaling。"

"With AI, what's different is — because these contracts are so big now, you can actually go quite far by doing the high-touch thing."

"AI 时代不同的地方是——因为合同体量本身就大,你靠 high-touch 也能跑出很远。"

"And maybe something you could help us out with actually — a common office hour question I get is, 'how far can I keep pushing this?'"

"也许你能帮我们解答一下——我在 office hour 上最常被问的问题之一是:'我能把这种 high-touch 模式推到多远?'"

"My advice is largely like — it's okay to be doing custom work per customer. You just want to get less custom for every customer. Maybe you could give more specific, higher-resolution advice — like, how do you know if it's okay to keep adding new customers in this high-touch 'I'm doing lots of custom work' way, versus 'oh no, actually I need to be abstracting out and building an actual product here'?"

"我通常的建议是——'每个客户做定制是 OK 的,但要让定制工作量逐客户递减'。能不能给一个更精细的建议——怎么判断'继续 high-touch 加新客户是 OK 的',还是'我必须停下来抽象成真正的产品'?"

Bob: "Yeah. And I think this really encapsulates the key difference between the product-market fit strategy and the FD strategy."

Bob:"这正好抓住了 PMF 战略和 FDE 战略的核心区别。"

"In the product-market fit strategy, you want to be doing less work for every customer. You want to be driving down costs. You want to keep the contract size the same. Yep."

"在 PMF 战略里,你想让每个客户的工作量更少、成本更低,合同规模保持不变。对。"

"In the FDE strategy, 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. And because you're doing more valuable work, it's okay — you can leave the amount of customization you do per customer the same."

"在 FDE 战略里,你的目标是把合同规模做大。你给当前客户、未来客户做的工作都越来越值钱。因为活儿更值钱,所以每客户的定制工作量保持不变也没问题。"

Host: "So the KPI or the internal metric is like contract size, not necessarily how much custom work they're doing per —"

主持人:"所以 KPI / 内部指标是合同规模,不一定是'每客户做了多少定制工作'?"

Bob: "There's two useful things here. So one — the thing you can measure, yes, contract size."

Bob:"这里有两个有用的视角。一是你能测量的:合同规模。"

"I would even be a little bit more general than that and say — the value of the outcome you're delivering — because that's actually the true thing. And do you yet have the muscle in order to be able to monetize that and price that and capture that? Maybe not."

"我会再泛化一点——更本质的是'你交付的 outcome 的真实价值'。当然你是否已经具备把它变现、定价、捕获的能力——也许还没有。"

"But if you're able to deliver more and more valuable outcomes to the customer, then you know you're doing something right."

"但只要你给客户交付的 outcome 价值在持续上升,你就知道方向是对的。"

"The second piece that we haven't talked about yet is the value of the product. And so the other thing you want to measure is — are you getting more and more product leverage against that outcome?"

"还有一个我们还没聊的维度——产品本身的价值。所以另一个该测的指标是:你对这个 outcome 的产品杠杆是不是在持续上升?"

"This is all extremely counterintuitive when you're in it. It's very hard if you're an FDE or if you're leading an FDE team. There's a lot of things you have to do that seem very counterintuitive."

"你身在其中的时候,这一切非常反直觉。无论你是 FDE 还是 FDE team 的 lead,你都得做一堆看起来'反直觉'的动作。"

"You have to build for the customer things they're not asking for but that they actually want."

"你得给客户做他们没开口要、但其实他们想要的东西。"

"On the product side, you often think to yourself — how do I make a product that's just really easy for every customer to use? It's very easy. And I struggled with this myself quite a bit leading product early on — you want to focus on the user experience, and you have to do that. But you also have to remember your other key customer is the FDE."

"在产品侧,你会不自觉地想——'怎么让每个客户都觉得这个产品超好用?'我自己早期在 Palantir 带产品时也很挣扎——你想专注用户体验,这没错;但你也得记住——你还有另一个核心客户,就是 FDE。"

"Your product should be ultimately delivering a good thing to the user after FDE customization. But it should be delivering leverage to the FDE who's delivering that outcome at the customer site."

"产品最终通过 FDE 的定制交付到用户手里——但产品本身的设计目标,是给现场交付 outcome 的 FDE 提供杠杆。"

"And that amount of product leverage should be going up over time. Like — they should be able to use your product to deliver more value to the customer without them having to go and pull in three more engineers in order to do it."

"这个产品杠杆量应该随时间上升——FDE 用你的产品就能给客户交付更多价值,而不必再拉三个工程师才能做成。"

"That's right. The first customer you deploy at takes a lot of work. If you want to then go sell that same outcome to a different customer, then that should be a lot easier at the second customer, and it should get easier still as you go customer by customer."

"没错。第一个客户上你做得很费劲。如果你想把同样的 outcome 卖给下一个客户,第二个客户那儿就该轻松很多——而且会越往后越轻松。"

"But then if you really get it to work — remember that you're building a platform. So you're doing more than just a stack of vertical use cases on top of each other. If you've correctly abstracted away what the core concept is that you're really building, then you should also have an easier time — you should have more product leverage even when you're not doing that use case, when you're doing something that's sort of similar."

"但要记住——你做的是平台,不只是一摞垂直 use case 的堆叠。如果你把你真正在造的核心概念抽象对了,那么哪怕你接下来做的不是同一个 use case 而是一个'类似'的 use case,你也会更轻松、产品杠杆也更高。"

"Or you will find that your FDEs — if it's really good — you'll find your FDEs can figure out some new way to use that technique you built to solve something completely different."

"或者更进一步——做得真好的时候,你会发现 FDE 能想出新办法,把你做的那套技术用到一个完全不同的问题上。"

Host: "There's almost like an internal market dynamic going on. If you've built it really well, then the FDEs should choose to use it, and you should see demand from the FDE to use your sort of abstracted product versus just hacking a one-off solution themselves."

主持人:"听起来像是内部市场动力机制——产品做得真好,FDE 就会主动选择用它;你能从 FDE 那里看到对这种'被抽象出来的产品'的需求,而不是他们各自 hack 一次性方案。"

Bob: "Yes. Although I will just note this is a very painful process for everyone involved."

Bob:"对。但我要提醒一下——这个过程对所有相关人来说都非常痛苦。"

"I probably can't use the word 'pain' often enough in the FDE. There are many times where I built something — I thought it was amazing, I thought it was beautiful. Not there yet, right? But it really would help the FDEs as soon as they just had the ability to see it. And I'd be like, 'please use my product.' They'd be like, 'no, it's just — this is way more work. It's not helpful.'"

"在 FDE 体系里'pain'这个词怎么用都不嫌多。我无数次造出一个东西——自我感觉很棒、很漂亮、'你看了就会用'——但 FDE 那边的反应是:'不,这反而让我多做更多事,根本帮不上忙。'"

"And I will say — let's be honest, most of the time I was probably wrong, and I was building the wrong product for them. And I should see that. But sometimes also I was on the right track, but I hadn't done enough to make it easy for the FDEs to use."

"老实讲,大多数时候是我错了,我做的产品对他们就是不对——这我得承认。但有时候我方向是对的,只是没把它做到'FDE 愿意上手'的程度。"

"And so I would send the developers out into the field to deploy those early solutions and get them over the line, even to the point where the FDEs could use them profitably."

"那种时候我会把开发工程师派到客户现场,亲自把这些早期方案推过临界线,直到 FDE 能用它真正产生收益为止。"

Host: "Are the FDEs always right in that case? Or should the founders sometimes be just top-down and say, 'actually I just want you to do that, do it this way'?"

主持人:"那 FDE 是不是永远对的?还是说有时候创始人就该 top-down 拍板'你给我用这个方法做'?"

Bob: "I mean, the answer is like yes to all of these things."

Bob:"这些情况其实都存在。"

"The other thing that comes up over and over again is just how much the right answer here is a matter of judgment."

"反复出现的一个主题是——这里'对的答案'是高度依赖判断的。"

"And I think going back to this question about product vision — what is the right product that generalizes from this customer to the next 3 to the next 10? You very literally do not have the information needed to answer that when you see that first customer. And so it becomes a judgment call."

"回到'产品愿景'这个问题上——'从一个客户能泛化到下 3 个、下 10 个'的那个'正确产品'到底长什么样?在第一个客户身上你根本没有足够的信息去回答这个问题。所以这件事就变成了一个 judgment call。"

Diana: "So in the context of how all these FDE companies price very differently based on outcome — how does that fit in with the culture of doing demos?"

Diana:"既然 FDE 公司是基于 outcome 定价的——这跟'做 demo'的文化怎么结合?"

"Because there's this thing — at least in SaaS, or I used to get this pushback from my engineers — demo-driven product development would be sort of looked down upon. But in this case it's different for FDEs, right?"

"至少在 SaaS 里——以前我手下的工程师就会反对——'demo 驱动的产品开发'被瞧不上。但 FDE 体系下不一样吧?"

Bob: "One of the interesting things that happens there is — because you have to go repeatably show this to new customers, you're forced to give these new demos. But actually, I think demo-driven development works really well if you have the right kind of product."

Bob:"有意思的一点是——因为你要反复给新客户展示,你被迫不断写新 demo。但其实只要产品形态对,demo 驱动的开发是非常有效的。"

"In the early days of Palantir, we actually had one demo. It was a flow where you're stopping a terrorist plot. And we started this with just one of our features. And every time we integrated a new feature, we had to think to ourselves — how do I show that this new feature is actually helpful for the analyst who's going through this demo, who's stopping this plot?"

"Palantir 早期我们只有一个 demo,场景是'阻止一场恐怖袭击'。一开始用一个功能跑通。每加一个新功能,我们都要自问——'怎么在这个 demo 里展示出新功能确实对那位走 demo 的分析师有用?'"

"You know, when we integrated a histogram, we had to say — well, how do we actually use this? How does that work with the existing features that we already had? And we went — when we integrated a map, we had the same question."

"加直方图的时候我们就问:'怎么用?和已有功能怎么搭?'加地图功能也是同样的追问。"

"And if you think about the world from 'what am I building?' — you're thinking about your capabilities. You might think of each of these features individually and how to build the best version of these features."

"如果你从'我要造什么'的角度想——你想的就是'能力'。你会把每个功能孤立地看待,'怎么把这个功能做到最好'。"

"But when you're building a demo, you're thinking about it from the customer's perspective. And a really good demo is something where you show it to the customer, and you are creating desire in that customer for what you're doing. They have to see what you're doing and just want to reach out and grab it and bring it into their life."

"但你做 demo 时,你是站在客户视角想问题。真正好的 demo 是这样一种东西——当你给客户看时,你在他心里激发出渴望——他必须看到你做的事情,然后冲过去想'抓在手里、塞进自己生活'。"

"And if you see that, then you know that you've identified a real pain for the customer."

"如果你看到这反应,就说明你抓到了客户真正的痛点。"

"And by doing that, that also forces you to develop a better product. Because not only are you thinking 'do each of these features make sense in isolation' — but 'how do they work together'?"

"这件事还会反过来逼你做出更好的产品——你不只是单独看每个功能合不合理,还要思考'它们组合起来怎么用'。"

"If I'm going to be showing this demo over and over again, even just simple things like moving from one feature to another — that part of the path has to be very straightforward."

"既然这个 demo 要不断反复展示,哪怕'从一个功能切到另一个功能'这种最基础的转场,也必须做得非常顺。"

"And those are all the kinds of product pain points that you would often see — but only later, after you've actually deployed to the customer."

"这些都是那种'产品级的痛点'——通常你只有在真正部署给客户之后才能看到。"

"So what the demo does is — it changes the locus of what you're thinking about, from thinking about 'what can I build?' to 'what is it that the customer wants, and am I solving that pain point for the customer?'"

"demo 这件事的作用是——把你的思考焦点,从'我能造什么',转向'客户要什么、我有没有真的解掉他这个痛点'。"

Host: "So it sounds like — you have to keep doing the gradient ascent in this very, very highly dimensional, multi-dimensional space, and you keep changing the variables."

主持人:"听起来这像是——你必须在一个超高维空间里持续做 gradient ascent,不断改变变量。"

Bob: "Yeah. Yeah. I think — maybe that's a really key point here — that the kind of company you have to build is a learning company."

Bob:"对。我觉得这可能是一个非常关键的总结——你要建立的,是一家'持续学习的公司'。"

Bob: "And I think everybody wants to build a learning company. But if you're a company like Google or Meta, it's very easy not to learn — because what you're doing right now was working, and if you just keep doing it, the market is growing. Everybody wants to do what you're doing. You can just sort of keep coasting on the same strategy and it's paying off for you."

Bob:"每个人都想说自己是 learning company。但如果你是 Google 或 Meta 这种,'不学习'反而很容易——因为你现在的做法本身在赚钱,市场又在涨,所有人都想做你做的事。你完全可以靠同一套战略一直 coast,而且会一直赚。"

"My advice to people if they're thinking about where to join a company is — I tell them to join a young company. Not necessarily a small company, right? But a young company — because a young company is still figuring things out. It's still learning. It hasn't succeeded yet."

"我给求职者的建议是:加入一家 young company,不是 small company。Young 意味着这家公司还在摸索、还在学习、还没真正成功过。"

"You know, if you're just out of college, you want a young company that is growing really fast. And then you'll see what success looks like, that positions you exactly to be a founder of your own company later."

"如果你刚毕业,就该去一家正在飞速增长的 young company。在那种公司里你能亲眼看到'成功是什么样子',这恰好是你将来自己创业最关键的准备。"

"This is why Palantir has birthed so many other startups — because even as a very large company, it is still a company where everybody all the time is learning, focused on learning, and always doing that same grinding motion that it is to be a new startup."

"这就是为什么 Palantir 出了那么多创业者——它即便已经是非常大的公司,内部依然时时刻刻都在学习、聚焦学习,大家用着早期 startup 那种粗砺的状态在干。"

"Because, you know, yes — new startups, a lot of pain there too, right? That is, like, probably the canonical part of the YC experience — it's not coasting, it's working really really hard on something that you're not quite sure if it's going to succeed."

"当然新 startup 里也有很多痛苦——这几乎是 YC 经验最典型的部分:不是在 coast,而是为了一件你不确定能不能成的事拼命下苦工。"

Host: "Obviously, I mean, monster successful Palantir. They're now a super big company, huge organization. We heard that you're joining another large organization, the US Army Reserve. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that, and are there any lessons from the Palantir experience you're planning to apply there?"

主持人:"Palantir 现在已经是巨大的成功公司、庞大的组织。我们听说你最近加入了另一个大组织——美国陆军预备役。能讲一下吗?你打算把 Palantir 的哪些经验带进去?"

Bob: "Yeah, absolutely. I've recently joined the US Army Reserve as part of Detachment 201."

Bob:"好。我最近以 Detachment 201 成员的身份加入了美国陆军预备役。"

"So one thing just to get out of the way — to say that what — everything I'm talking about here, these are my opinions. These are not the opinions of the US Army, the Defense Department, the US government."

"先把一件事说在前面——我接下来讲的全都是我个人意见,不代表美军、国防部或美国政府的立场。"

"But I think it's — it's been this absolutely intense experience, and it's a really interesting story. So we are part of a unit that's advising the Army on technology. And we are not just civilian advisers — we are actual officers."

"这是一段极强烈的经历,也是一个很有意思的故事。我们是给陆军做技术咨询的一支单位——但我们不是文职顾问,而是真正的军官。"

"So we took the oath. I'm a lieutenant colonel in the US Army."

"我们都正式宣过誓——我现在是美国陆军中校。"

Host: "I heard you went through basic training too."

主持人:"我听说你还完成了基础训练。"

Bob: "Yeah, we went through the direct commissioning course. We've been trained by military academics — often at 5 in the morning, because that's the time that works for people on the East Coast and doesn't conflict with our day jobs."

Bob:"对,我们走的是直接任命课程(direct commissioning course)。授课的是军方学者——经常早上 5 点开课,因为这时间方便东海岸的人,也不冲突我们的本职工作。"

"We learn from officers. I had to take the Army fitness test — which, since I am not very fit, was something that I had to train for for 9 months."

"我们从现役军官那儿学习。我还得过陆军体能测试——我本来体能不太行,练了 9 个月才达标。"

"But it really matters because we're not just giving advice on the side. We have skin in the game. We are actually part of the organization that we're advising."

"这件事很要紧——我们不是站在旁边给建议。我们 skin in the game,是被我们咨询的那个组织真正的一员。"

"And the Army itself — the leadership is very different from what it felt like in the early days of Palantir when we worked with them back in 2005 or 2010."

"陆军本身——它的领导层和我 2005、2010 年在 Palantir 早期对接的那时候已经截然不同。"

"General Randy George, the Chief of Staff of the Army, Secretary of the Army Driscoll — they have articulated a plan for the transformation of the Army."

"陆军参谋长 Randy George 上将、陆军部长 Driscoll——他们清晰描述了陆军转型的计划。"

"They know that the Army needs to change from fighting the kinds of wars we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, to fighting the kind of wars that are being fought today in Ukraine, or what it would look like if we face large-scale combat operations in the Pacific."

"他们清楚陆军必须从'伊拉克/阿富汗式的战争'转向'今天乌克兰式的战争'——或者太平洋大规模冲突场景下应该是什么样。"

"They know the Army needs to move faster. They know the Army needs to change. And we're a part of that strategy that they're executing."

"他们清楚陆军必须加快节奏、必须变。而我们是他们这个战略的一部分。"

"As they've brought us in, they have given us — they've outlined the priorities for the Army. They've given us each an area in which we're supposed to operate. But they've also given us the freedom to go around, look for problems, work directly with the officers on the ground to solve those problems — or if need be to escalate that to leadership and get that fixed."

"他们让我们入伍后,把陆军的优先级清晰地告诉了我们,也分给每个人一个负责的领域。但他们同时给了我们自由——可以到处走、找问题、直接和一线军官合作解决,有需要就升级到领导层把问题修掉。"

"And so I think one of the things that's really interesting about it is — you know, in many ways it does feel a lot like running the FDE strategy on the Army."

"我觉得有意思的一点是——在很多方面,这件事跑起来很像在陆军身上跑 FDE 战略。"

"We get to see what are the CEO's, what are the leadership's top five priorities. Can we make progress against those?"

"我们能直接看见'CEO/领导层关心的前 5 个问题',去推动这些方向。"

"But also in a world where you see that there's a disconnect between what the leadership wants, and 20 years of how things have been implemented, and it takes a long time to change that. And so we're helping them make that change."

"同时你也看到——领导层想要的方向,和过去 20 年实际执行的方式之间是有断层的,这种断层要改并不容易。我们就在帮他们完成这次改变。"

"I'm really eager to have the opportunity to make a difference."

"我特别珍惜这个能真正带来改变的机会。"

Host: "There's a question that we love to ask people on this podcast — which is, what do you think are the best opportunities for startup founders to work on right now?"

主持人:"我们这个节目最喜欢问的问题是——你觉得现在 startup 创始人最值得做的方向是什么?"

Bob: "Well, you know, I think this really goes back to exactly this question of — why is it that AI agents are pursuing the FD strategy?"

Bob:"我觉得这正好回到一个问题——为什么 AI agent 都在走 FDE 这条路?"

"And, you know, if you zoom out and I put on my AI research hat for once in this podcast, I think what we've seen is that capability improvements are actually extremely fast."

"如果你拉远视角,让我在这一集里破例戴一次'AI 研究员的帽子'——我们看到的是:AI 能力提升的速度极快。"

"Yes, I heard people, you know, after GPT-5 people feel like things are plateauing. But actually if you look at this time period between April 2024 — when the best model, you know, the release of GPT-4o — and April 2025 and the release of o3 — that's an extremely fast rate of progress. And I think that's just going to continue."

"GPT-5 之后有人说'好像 plateau 了'。但你看 2024 年 4 月——GPT-4o 发布——到 2025 年 4 月 o3 发布,这一年的速度极快。我认为这种速度会继续。"

"I think we're going to see capabilities continue to move quickly. But what's really shocking, actually, is that the adoption is not anywhere near what you would expect from the speed of these capabilities."

"能力还会继续快速演进。但真正让人震惊的是——'真实采用'的速度,远远配不上能力提升的速度。"

"What the world is going to look like over the next 5 years is that the capabilities just race ahead, and race ahead, and race ahead — and somehow the world feels increasingly banal."

"未来 5 年的样子大概是——能力一路飙、一路飙、一路飙,而世界却看上去越来越'平常'。"

"You're in your Waymo and you aren't thinking, 'oh my god, it's not — no one's driving this.' You're like, 'huh, traffic. It's really slow.'"

"你坐在 Waymo 里不会想'天哪没人开车',你想的是'唉,堵车,真慢'。"

"And so, just like with the world of the FDEs where you have, you know, the FDE filling the gap between this product and what the customers need — I think this is a time where there's so much availability to fill the gap between what the capabilities can actually do and what the customers are able to adopt."

"就像 FDE 填的是'产品'和'客户需要'之间的鸿沟——今天这个时代,真正巨大的机会,在于填'AI 能力实际能做什么'和'客户实际能采用什么'之间的鸿沟。"

"And in the early days of AI, if we sat around a table in 2018 and talked about what it looked like when AGI was built — people thought, 'oh, well, you know, it's going to maybe, maybe over the weekend it's going to come alive and it's going to take over the world.'"

"AI 早期,如果你 2018 年和我们围坐讨论'AGI 造出来是什么样',大家会想:'也许它会在某个周末突然苏醒,然后接管世界'。"

"And, you know, one of the things that I think people missed in that was — AI needs to be adopted. It's something that doesn't just happen by itself. You need human ingenuity and exploration, and well, dealing with a lot of pain, in order to make that happen."

"大家漏掉的一件事是——AI 必须被'采用',它不会自动发生。你需要人类的创造力、探索,还要愿意吃下大量的痛苦,这件事才会真正发生。"

"And so I think there's just a huge amount of opportunity out there — looking at what are the capabilities that are there, but what does it take to make them really genuinely useful to people?"

"所以我觉得机会非常多——看清现在已有的能力,然后想清楚'要让这些能力对人真正有用,缺什么?'"

Host: "There's an analogy that occurs to me — this might be a little bit forced, but it's almost like OpenAI is the home product team, and the startups are the FDEs out figuring out how to get adoption of the research that OpenAI is cooking up back at the home office."

主持人:"我想到一个比喻——可能有点牵强——OpenAI 像'总部产品团队',startup 像'外派的 FDE',负责把总部研究出来的东西推到一线、推到真实采用里。"

Bob: "I think that's not a bad analogy at all. I think that is maybe the underlying truth of what's making this whole FDE strategy exciting again."

Bob:"这个比喻一点都不勉强。我觉得它可能就是这套 FDE 战略再次让人兴奋的底层原因。"

Host: "Okay, that's all we have time for here today. Bob, thanks so much for joining us. That was really really interesting, and we all learned a lot. And we'll see you all here next time."

主持人:"OK,今天就到这里。Bob,非常感谢你来,这次聊得真的很精彩,我们都学到了很多。下期再见。"