Forward Deployed

The hardest part of shipping an AI agent isn't the agent. It's getting it access to data buried across a dozen internal systems, and capturing the tribal knowledge that runs a company but was never written down. I sat down with Leo Mehr, Director of Engineering at Ramp (a $44B-valued company), who runs the forward deployed engineering team that walks into large companies and replaces real, painful...

"Software has been solved." Most of the best engineers I know have landed on this exact conclusion. Last week I sat down with Siddharth Nanda, who went from writing every line of code by hand at Microsoft and Atlassian to shipping 30,000 lines a week with 0% of it written by him. He's now at Finch, a startup that's raised $20M+ to automate admin work at personal injury law firms, where 100% of the...

Voice agents are one of the hottest use cases in enterprise right now, but also one of the hardest to actually take live. Getting latency low enough to feel human without dumbing down the responses, making reliable tool calls to a CRM without dropping the customer mid-call, building fallback models for when Anthropic or OpenAI are running hot. None of it is as simple as the demos make it look. Las...

(We know the audio quality isn't great on this one :( But the conversation is still well worth it!) Last week I hosted a fireside chat on what it actually takes to build AI agents in the enterprise with Natalie Meurer (Head of Agent Eng, Sierra), Harsh Trivedi (founding engineer, Mercor), Juhi Parekh (GM, Turing), and Kevin Lynch (Senior FDE, Fin). We get into why new models aren't always better (...

Today's episode is with Vince Signori, Sales Director at LangChain and one of the first sales hires at HashiCorp, where he watched the company grow from a small startup all the way to an IPO and get acquired by IBM. He sees the exact same shift happening now with AI agents that happened with cloud back then, except 50x faster. And he's got the numbers to back it up — LangChain is downloaded more t...

Today's episode is with Shrivu Shankar, VP of AI Strategy at Abnormal AI - a $5B cybersecurity company. What makes this one unique is that Shrivu joined as an intern in 2021 and got promoted every single year until he reached VP, so he's basically watched AI go from a niche engineering tool to something that's reshaping entire companies from the inside. We get into how AI is catching cyberattacks...

Today's episode is with Supriya Gupta, ex-VP of Product at Intuit Credit Karma and former Product Lead on the Ads team at Meta when that business was scaling like crazy. She brings a really unique perspective on everything happening with GenAI right now because she's seen it from the inside at two of the biggest companies in tech. We get into how ads are slowly going to be generated on the spot, p...

AI agents are everywhere right now. But are they actually working inside real engineering teams? At AngelList’s Founders Cafe, I sat down with founders of Cognition ( $898M raised), Semgrep ( $204M raised), Factory ( $70M raised), and Composio ( $29M raised) to talk about what agentic engineering looks like in practice. There’s a lot of hype around AI coding tools, but the reality is more nuanced....

Summary: In this conversation, I talked to Ashish Shubham (VP of Engineering), who's been at ThoughtSpot for 10 years, about AI agents in enterprise analytics. ThoughtSpot started as a search-based analytics company trying to make data accessible to regular business users. In 2019, they tried building natural language interfaces using BERT, but only hit about 50% accuracy. For a product where ente...

In this conversation, Tatu discusses the transformative impact of AI on game development, drawing from his extensive experience in the gaming industry. He highlights the shift from traditional game development processes to a more agile, AI-driven approach that allows for rapid prototyping and iteration. Tatu emphasizes the importance of organizational change and the need for leaders to embrace AI...