Anthropic Member of Technical Staff on Leading Forward-Deployed Engineers | Amandeep Khurana | E310

I don't want to be 70 years old, not very healthy, sitting on $50 million. That trade just didn't make sense to me. >> You recently joined Anthropic and you have a pretty amazing career. I know that you started as a entrepreneur and then you took the blue pill and went to Amazon and then you kind of took the red pill and went back to building. >> I'm Andep Kurana, member of technical staff at Anthropic. >> There were a couple of opportunities that would have paid to 3X. My heart felt pulled in this direction and this time I wanted to do it differently. It's true that now like a lot of these talented professionals that are [music] working in frontier labs are being treated like NBA players. The comp packages that we are seeing are absolutely insane and I just don't know for how long this talent war is going to last. >> To be free of a game, you have to first win the game and only then you realize the futility of the game and then you're free of it. The thing that is missing there is >> Hey, this is Carlos CEO at product school and your host on the product podcast. My guest today is Amandep Kurana who leads a team inside Anthropic's forward deployed engineering function. He's also a friend. So this is a first. We've had a 100 private conversations and zero public ones. His path is unusual. Engineer at AWS, solutions architect at Cloudera, founded a company that exited to data bricks, then 5 and a half years at Amazon where he voluntarily gave up his management role in 2023 to go back to being an IC. The things we'll cover, what a forward deployed engineer actually is versus renamed professional services, the three filters they use to decide which customers to take, turning down offers worth two to three times more, and why on winning the game before you can quit it, and where that advice breaks. Everyone at Anthropic has the same title, including Carpathy. Let's get into it. Welcome to the product podcast, Amandep. >> Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited to be here and uh excited to spend some time with you. >> Uh you know what? This is a special and a weird one for me because you're my friend >> and we've had a ton of conversations about life AI and everything in between, but we've never had a public conversation, right? So, just want to acknowledge that. >> Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity. You're right. It's going to be an [clears throat] interesting one. It'll be fun and it is a it is a different conversation for sure. So I wanted to I mean we've been you've been a collaborator behind the scenes uh and I appreciate that but I just wanted to bring you on the stage especially because you recently joined Anthropic and you have a pretty amazing career. I know that you started as a entrepreneur and then you you took the blue pill and went to Amazon and then you kind of took the red pill and went back to building but now with with anthropic so I want to understand a little bit more about that part of your journey. >> Yeah for sure. you know maybe give some uh give some background context. So I trained as an engineer, took up a typical engineering job back in, you know, 2010, 2011 uh time frame, went to actually work for AWS at the at that time. What I found was I while I enjoyed the engineering work, I enjoyed the hands-on engineering, it just wasn't it wasn't enough for me. [snorts] It wasn't really what I truly wanted to do. I got this opportunity to work at a startup to go work with customers and I had no idea what that entails. So I went and did I took it on, moved to the valley, uh company was called Cloud ETA. So I I went became a solution architect did uh all kinds of uh customerf facing and partner facing work there. Uh spent 5 years uh did a bunch of different kinds of projects and worked with a bunch of different kinds of customers and absolutely loved it. Through that experience um I also learned just by osmosis it's like what does company building look like and I had this kind of dream in my uh in the back of my mind that I want to be a business person at some point. Uh and I don't know where it came from. I think it came from uh watching my dad build his business and um so I wanted to do that. I said, you know what, now I'm I'm in the valley. The game to be played here is to go build a business. So what does that look like? So I started kind of thinking about it. And then I found a set of problems that I got excited about and I said I'm going to go do this. And that's how I started my company. And this was uh 2016. Uh did that uh that company eventually exited to data bricks. awesome experience, lots of learnings, lots of ups and downs along the way. So that was that was great. In 2020, I found myself in you know co hit and I wanted to start another company but just kind of didn't happen and I said I need to do something. So a friend of mine was at Amazon at the time. He calls me and says hey you're you're up to no good. Why don't you come here and help me build this line of business that I'm building here? I said fine you know come do it for some time and once this is done you can go do whatever else you want. I said, "Okay, cool." You know, whatever ideas I'm working on are not quite working out. So, maybe I'll I'll just go do this and not burn through my savings. So, I joined Amazon and I ended up spending five and a half years there building different kinds of things from ground up. ended up doing four 0 to1 initiatives, two of them in the AI space and even there the journey is actually kind of interesting because went from being an IC to in a management role owning both product and engineering for to then giving up on all the management responsibilities and becoming an IC product manager back in 2023 because I just wanted I want to stop you there because that is uh pretty unique right like a lot of times people want to grow up in their career and assume that that means managing more people and kind of did that as a general manager at Amazon >> and then [clears throat] it seems like you chose to >> go back quote unquote to be an IC and now it's cool again right but I think it wasn't that obvious or cool in 2023 and I want to understand more about that rational >> you know it wasn't you're right it wasn't cool it wasn't something that um a lot of uh people were doing I found myself in a place that um there was this opportunity in front of me which was an IC opportunity and it was in a domain that I wanted to learn and I did not know anything about if there was a management opportunity there I might have picked that over the IC opportunity. So it was so there was that and I said look I want to learn this thing. I want to get involved and let me just jump in and just see what happens and let me learn at least cuz I'm not going to learn a ton if I'm going to continue spending a large chunk of my time in the org building or management work. I want to be hands-on and so that was one. Second is I spoke with a few folks at AWS at the time who had done similar transitions who had gone from a VP role to an IC role and then eventually back into a leadership role and I asked them about how they thought about this and so they advised me with some perspectives and so I took that on and I said I'll give it a shot. I have nothing to lose here. you know, worst case scenario, I'm going to learn about this new domain or best case scenario is I'm going to learn about this new domain and as this team grows, there might be management opportunities that I can then take on. So that's how I thought about it like AI wasn't where it is today. And u for me it was I want to learn that thing. I want to be hands-on and we'll see what happens. So, so you you tried I think you liked it because when you left Amazon, you wanted to kind of either build your own business, build a new business again or continue working as an IC, but then you didn't choose any of those two. >> That's true. That's true. So, okay. So, the story there. So, I do this thing at Amazon and five and a half years in I said, "Okay, I'm ready for something new." Uh, and I'm going to go build a company, right? So, I made up my mind. I'm going to go build a company. And so, I I resigned from Amazon. And then you know about a couple weeks into it I get an offer from Entropic to come in and uh be a part of the forward deployed engineering team. And so when that when that conversation was happening I did say hey I want to can you just make me an IC forward deployed engineer because you know this is just so much fun. I want to I want to do this and uh the the uh hiring manager for that particular role he refused and he said no I I want you to come in and lead the team. So or be a leader on the team. So okay fine you know whatever whatever the company needs we'll make it happen. So tell me more about your current team. What do you really do at Anthropic? >> Yeah, so uh Antropic uh recently started a forward deployed engineering function. Now we had FTEEs. We had people working with customers on implementations. So it's not that concept is not new at anthropic uh but we formalized it as a function relatively recently. I am a part of that function and I uh manage a pod in that function. So I've got a bunch of forward deployed engineers that are working with a number of external and internal initiatives just working with customers working with uh internal projects and uh really bringing AI into the world um in a safe manner right so kind of aligned with the the charter and the mission of the company and these can be projects of all kinds internal projects could be oh there's a new product we're building let's go try it out to uh there's a new initiative that actually impacts the uh kind of entropic um operations. So let's go bring AI into that initiative to working with customers on identifying uh use cases that can transform the way they do certain workflows, certain processes and then going and building those out. So kind of the applied side of AI. Uh some of the folks also get involved in a little bit of the research on the model side of things but not in the training. It's still once the model is at different stages of its training. Uh that's when the people get involved. the term forward deployed engineer now it's super hot and a lot of the companies that are doing some sort of enterprise motion they claim to have FDE that go and help the client adopt whatever SAS tool they are selling >> but you guys are like the pioneers of this concept right so I really want to understand what it really means to do forward deployed engineering right as opposed to just renaming the traditional professional services [laughter] >> you know I wouldn't not call us pioneers of this. The concept of forward deployed engineering has existed for a very very long time you know like Microsoft is the OG of this right and they used to do it several decades ago u and then the current incarnation of the term uh was popularized by Palanteer back in 2006 78 time frame right so of 2008 onwards so we're not the pioneers at all in fact we are learning from them and seeing how do we take all of that and adapt it to the business that we are building uh the way I think about it is there is you know in any company there is building a product and selling a product two things that's it right everything else is just a supporting function for these things what does the selling of a product entail there is the technical selling of it right so this is your typical solution architect systems engineer persona that will come in and you know they'll do the demos and they'll show you what the use cases look like and they'll walk you through the architectures and so on and so forth depending on the product you're selling so it's technical pre-sales they're tied to certain accounts or certain verticals and they're incentivized to essentially close the deal [snorts] then there's the post sales and post sales could be one of two ways right? It is I'm going to help you implement the thing that you bought or it will be now it is implemented uh and I'm going to be the uh service or customer support team. So something goes wrong you call us and we'll we'll help you fix it. Uh so note that both these things are the product team builds something technical go to market both pre and post sales teams go and make the customer successful with the thing that the product team built. FTE is forward deployed engineering. It is actually so there's a couple of different things about FD that are different from your traditional professional services which is the postal implementation. Couple of different things. One typical professional services is I'm going [clears throat] to I'm going to give you my time and you're going to give me my money. Right? So the exchange is time and money and you tell me what you want me to do and I will do it for you. I'm simplifying it but generally speaking that's the way it works. Uh one of the core parts of FTE is it's not that I'm going to just give you my time and you're going to give me money and I'll do whatever you want. uh it is that we are going to align on an outcome. We're going to actually we might even spend time together to identify the right outcome for the business based on the overall goals and we're going to align on that and then I'm in it with you. We're going to make it happen. Right? So, so there's that. So there's a lot more ownership in that relationship as opposed to you know you just tell me what you want me to do and I'll I'm going to be the your implementation person for that. So that's one component. The second is whatever work we do will feed back into the product. In Anthropic's case, part of it is in the research as well. Um because that's how you build the flywheel, right? So FTE as a function is very closely tied to the product and engineering function and that's where the value gets created, right? So every engagement should produce a couple of things for us. One, feedback into product. two uh it needs to create some sort of a blueprint or a playbook such that that type of an engagement we don't have to do it again. Right? It's a first of a kind tip of the spear uh problem that has not been solved before. We will come in and help solve that and then after that um that becomes a template that either again gets productized or we give it to the customers to build themselves if that's appropriate or we may uh give it to partners to then go scale it up as appropriate. Right? So there's a bunch of system integrated partners that will take those templates and then go say this is how you do this in a bank. Right? So that's how we think about it. It is not we're not trying to build a professional services arm um we're not trying to scale a professional services arm. This is to essentially figure out how to bring this technology into the real world uh in the best possible way and then take all those learnings and templatize them and and and kind of give it away either in the form of product or in terms of blueprints. At the same time, I imagine that this um service is reserved for a certain level of client, right? Because it's harder to scale such an elite team to be able to go into clients and and deploy these type of solutions or like what what makes the cut? >> That's a uh that's a that's a great question. So if we look at the definition, right? So one is the work aligned with our mission as a company, right? So our mission of bringing AI safely to the world but not just bringing AI to the world uh also for the uh benefit of humanity generally. So that's one. Second is is it a first of a kind uh and it will it open up a set of use cases or a vertical for us that currently is not available and is there some signal that we think we will get for the product out of this engagement. So we look at those three things and then decide should we lean in here or not. We actually don't look at uh the FD team does not look at uh commercials as the only lens. In fact, that is these three things are much more important than the commercials. >> Where do these FDES come from? Right? Because if you go to LinkedIn, everybody calls themselves either AIPM or forward deployed engineer or however they want to call themselves, right? But realistically like what does it take to become FDE at anthropic? You know, I don't I don't think I can say that there is one one kind of persona that makes for a good FTE. We've got FTEEs that were uh engineers. We have FTEEs that were um kind of researchers and they have their PhDs. Um we have um FTEEs that come from non-engineering backgrounds as well. So, it it's the the background while important is not the only thing that that matters. What really matters is mission alignment. Are you hands-on and building things? Uh can you be in front of customers in complex environments and actually guide them through the journey? Because you know we we have to help them. We have to uh and often times even we don't know the answers. So we have to go figure it out because again first of a kind never done before. So we're going to run into problems that we never anticipated. So do you have high agency? Are you going to go figure things out? um and right and really try to disambiguate while maintaining the customer relationship while maintaining the trust of the customer and having their back and doing it in a in a manner that is aligned with our culture and our mission right so that's really what we look for >> I want to talk about comp packages too is I think it's a big elephant in the room right we're hearing how these frontier labs are throwing money at incredible talent but at the same time this talent is being poached from one lab to the other right as as I hear you talk about mission alignment and like kind of thinking beyond just pure comp like how do you think about retaining this this type of talent? >> You know we have not as far as I know uh we have not really had a problem from a retention perspective uh so far anthropic has been growing very very fast and uh the stocks are worth more than you know what you got definitely more more than what you got 3 6 months ago. compensation has not been a reason why we have seen any attrition and Anthropic generally has not seen attrition from what I understand now again it's a very young company right so uh we still have to keep doing what we're doing u and keep doing keep raising the bar for ourselves in the long term this has yet to play out uh but we are a very very principled company and so people when they when they join Enthropic uh they're generally very very aligned with those set of principles And that is one of the primary drivers uh when people join us and we also screen for that in the interview. Having said that, you're right that the uh the comp packages are very generous with in the labs and much more so than the the fang companies if you will, which which was not true five six years ago, right? The fang companies were the biggest pay masters or the healthiest pay masters. Um that definitely has changed now. >> Totally. I mean, and I want to uh share a quick anecdote um that that you and I talked about and you gave me permission to to at least put it here, which is uh in your case, the other companies uh tried to hire you and for even more money than what Anthropic offered you and you're really one of a kind that chose mission over comps assuming there's a certain level of comp that makes you be comfortable enough, right? So it's true that now like a lot of these uh talented professionals that are working frontier labs are being treated like NBA players and the co packages that we are seeing are absolutely insane and I just don't know for how long this talent war is going to last. >> Yes. So in my in my case there were a couple of opportunities that would have paid more u even two to 3x. My decision criteria was actually very simple. My heart felt pulled in this direction and historically I have not operated from my heart. I've operated from my mind [snorts] and this time I wanted to do it differently and so my heart pulled in this direction and I and I followed it. Uh that was kind of that was the line of thinking. Now why did the heart ppull in this direction was really because I felt connected to and the mission resonated and everybody that I met and how they talked about how the mission and how the principles uh actually play out in practice on a day-to-day basis that resonated for me and and so that's why I chose this direction in in terms of talent wars right so my line of thinking is if AI is to play out all the benefits of AI that we talk about ranging from medicine to bio research to chemicals to everything, right? If AI is to play out, the talent the the understanding of AI, especially on the applied side, has to be uh taken to the market and there needs to be diffusion of it. Otherwise, if it's only going to remain with a small set of people, AI will not play out at the scale of humanity. It will remain concentrated to a very small group of people or the impact that the small group of people can have. So I believe that it is our job and our responsibility to diffuse this information to train people to teach to make it easier to deploy to make it easier to build and so on and so forth. Uh and that's very much a part of at least anthropics uh line of thinking. If you start to think about openw weight models [snorts] that's another form of diffusion that's happening. These capabilities are not now some of them are not just behind pay walls. you can you have to pay for infrastructure but you have these open models and you have choice available to you. So that's another form of diffusion that's happening. [snorts] Same thing has to happen with talent. Now if you look at historically late '90s website developers were uh you know were you didn't have many of them and they used to charge a bomb. Well today you just go to any of these you know go to lovable and one single thing and it's going to give you a full app right. So the diffusion happens in every industry over time and it's going to happen here as well. I think I want to acknowledge as I hear you talk about what the decisions that you you've been able to make is that you earned the right and the privilege to make them right to not take an offer that is 2x what you are making or to decide to be an IC or then a manager and then an IC like a lot of people who are kind of fighting on their way up and they are the people let's call it director level they're like yeah right but in reality I really want that 2x package and I really want to be a CPO and and whatn not, right? So, I I'm I'm curious to know how you how you think about it from the perspective of someone who >> achieve certain things in life and is now in a position to be more free to choose what's your next move. >> I've heard this uh Naval Raviant says this right that to be free of a game you have to first win the game and only then you realize the futility of the game and then you're free of it. I think he's right but only partly right. I think um well he's 90% right. The thing that is missing there is to realize the futility of the game. There are a number of other ways you can get there. Right? It's not just winning the game. You can realize the futility of the game in other ways. How I realized the futility of the game was as I reflected on my journey. So I wasn't a director at Amazon. I wasn't a VP at Amazon for instance. Right? So it's not that I had got to a VPN and then said, "Eh, what's the big deal? I can just give this up." I was very much on that ladder of growth. Right? So for that definition of growth, but I I also found myself in in this place that I was just not any happier as I grew, right? And it just kind of wasn't cutting it. And then I had a few experiences which then made me kind of go through this thinking of, okay, I went from point A to point B, I didn't feel any different. I went from point B to point C, I didn't feel any different. What were the things that were missing for me at each of these points? And I started to see a consistency there for myself. It was that there was just not enough heart involved in each of those steps for me. And so that realization over several years, it's not an overnight thing. Over several years, that realization then led me to this place of I got to at least give it a shot and see what happens. I I owe it to myself to let my heart be the leader here and then see what happens. Now, it doesn't hurt that the company's anthropic. It doesn't hurt that they pay well, right? So, I'm not compromising on anything from a quality of life perspective. If anything, um it's an awesome brand and and a fantastic group of people. So, I won't say that I'm free of the game. I I think that may that is not the right uh characterization. I can see the futility of it, but I haven't freed up freed myself up of it. >> Yeah. And the way I I think about it is ultimately you have the freedom to create your own game. Yeah, sure there are certain parameters in life that are predefined and you know if you want to live in certain parts of the world you need to make certain amount of money but at the same time like someone defined what is a level two three four five at a company and maybe at some point you're like what if I define levels those levels for my own company or for my own life. >> Totally. Absolutely. I think what you're pointing to is is incredibly important. We get I mean I certainly did. I I got wrapped up in the game that was defined by somebody else. the rules were defined by somebody else. What good looks like is defined by somebody else and so on and so forth. And some of those things just did not align with how I saw the world and the life that I wanted to live. Right? So for instance, I value health and community. If I need to be a VP at any company and I need to work 60 hours a week, I won't be able to pay attention to my community, my family, and my health. That's just how it is. And you see this, right? I don't want to be 70 years old, sick, not very healthy, sitting on $50 million. That trade just didn't make sense to me. So like that's an example of me kind of observing the game, evaluating it for myself and seeing does this fit me and it just didn't fit me. >> One of the mechanisms that I think anthropic is using which is very smart is everybody's a member of technical stuff, right? like so tell tell me more about it and how are people okay with just using the the same term regardless of level >> I think it is um this is a culture thing um and people self- select into it right so if I'm in a meeting with somebody who would have been a VP let's let's say I'm at Amazon I'm in a meeting with a VP I am in a meeting with a VP right so their word carries more weight than my word there is this um implicit authority relationship there right at entropic Like I'm in a meeting with take Andre Karpati absolute celebrity you know so deep in the space and somebody so many people look up to including me when he introduces himself short I know who Andre is but he's an MTS and I'm an MTS right so the titles almost don't matter now let's assume that I did not know who Andre is right I was living under a rock and I never heard his name um I'm I'm in a meeting with him and I'm having a discussion with him title says MTS mine says MTS I look up in the company directory MTS SMTS, you know, we're we're on equal footing in that conversation, right? So, it's all about that conversation and what you're bringing to the conversation and adding value to the conversation and and having a respect for the other individual. Uh not because of their title, but because of their ideas, right? So, >> and so people just bring people self- select into it. That's how it I don't have a problem with the title. I'm an MTS. My people who report to me are MTSs. I report to an MTS. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. >> And this is a great way to grab this up. Amandiv, thank you so much for your time and giving us an insider view into how Anthropic is is growing. >> Thank you. This is a blast and thank you for the opportunity.