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Vinoo Ganesh on Latent Space: forward deployed engineers must report to product, not sales, or the function becomes consulting
The 2026-09-12 episode has Kepler CEO Vinoo Ganesh, who ran Spark at Palantir and built Project Frontline, a rotation 250 engineers went through. His operating rule is that FDEs 'collect nouns and verbs' — learn how a customer defines its concepts and runs its processes — and that the last-mile problem solved at one customer is the signal for which piece of the platform should become generalizable. The structural claim is the useful one: when FDEs report to product rather than sales, deployments produce reusable platform work; his Palantir Phoenix example failed first because design came from secondhand user research and only worked after field deployment exposed holes in real financial data.
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