The FDE Motion That Took HappyRobot to $1.2B | Pablo Palafox, HappyRobot CEO

📌 Pablo Palafox was doing forward deployed engineering before he knew it had a name. He scaled HappyRobot past a billion-dollar valuation and from 25 to 60 FDEs in under two years, then killed the pods, the titles, and most of the org chart. Pablo is co-founder and CEO of HappyRobot, the AI OS for supply chain and logistics. ---------------------------------------- 🎙️ Pablo Palafox LinkedIn:   / pablorpalafox   X: https://x.com/pablorpalafox?lang=en Visit HappyRobot: https://www.happyrobot.ai/ ---------------------------------------- Chapters: 00:00 Intro 02:28 "We Didn't Know We Were Doing FDE" 05:00 No Solutions Engineers, No Pre-Sales, No Post-Sales 09:34 The Million-Dollar Rule of Thumb 10:21 Why They Killed the Pods 12:35 Astronauts and Commanders 17:03 "Let Them Be Unicorns" 18:51 Playbooks Are Poison 24:51 Why Deployments Reports to the CTO 27:34 Fake the Data, Customize Every Demo 34:25 What Broke Between 25 and 60 FDEs 41:47 Why FDEs Don't Get Commission 46:46 R&D and Cost of Acquisition, Not COGS 48:09 Why the Labs Spun Out Their Deployment Arms 49:43 Computer Vision, Munich, and the Name 55:29 Quickfire: When an FDE Motion Is Worth It ---------------------------------------- 🔗 Ivory Tang LinkedIn:   / ivorytang   X: https://x.com/ivory_tang 🌐 Visit Contour: https://usecontour.ai/ #FDE #ForwardDeployedEngineer #EnterpriseAI #AIdeployment #B2BSaaS #SolutionsEngineering #Logistics #SupplyChain #HappyRobot