Insights
Long-form essays, market analyses, case studies, and hiring playbooks. Slower cadence than the newsletter, deeper cut. Most pieces start from data we pulled out of the directory or the jobs ingest.
The Forward Deployed Decade
Why the role Palantir invented in 2003 is the highest-leverage seat of the next ten years — and the labor-market repricing that's already underway.
“Anthropic alone is a $1B+ FDE shop. The market has only just noticed.”
Voice agents quietly took over enterprise intake
Three under-the-radar deployments in healthcare, plus the four tools every implementer now needs to know.
FDE vs. McKinsey · the economics of the 2026 implementer market
Two FDEs at $267K each beat a $1.5M McKinsey engagement — and they ship the code. Here's the math operators are running.
The implementer stack, May 2026
Claude leads at 64% mention. Cursor is up. n8n is the dark horse. What the postings actually demand.
What makes a great Forward Deployed Engineer
Ten years of Palantir alumni patterns + 100 implementer-screened candidates says: it's not what the JD asks for.
Five archetypes of the AI buyer
Founder-bottleneck. Compliance shadow. Hidden committee. Whale signal. Tire-kicker. How to spot each in the first 30 seconds.
Claude prompt caching for implementers · a 2026 field guide
How to cut a $40K/mo Sonnet bill to $7K with three lines of config. The pattern every FDE should know.
How we built the Founding 100
A pre-launch cold-start playbook for marketplace founders: 100 seed profiles, one weekend, and a permanent leaderboard.
Case study · Regional Health voice-triage deployment
From 31% voicemail rate to 6% in 4 weeks. Vapi + Claude on top of Epic. What worked, what almost killed it.
What the Anthropic-Blackstone JV actually means
$1.5B is a number. The structure of the deal is the story.
What implementers are actually paid · Q2 2026
$267K median TC for FDEs. The bands, by vertical, region, and stage. Plus the 14-state pay-transparency map.
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