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Christina Cacioppo

Things Christina Says on Podcasts

“What FDE often is is professional services. But I think if you call it a professional services role, that's a very different talent profile than FDE in the current discourse. And I think you're not going to get the Harvard CS grad who's high agency and wants to go do things and learn how to build a business to go sign up to be pro-serve person number four…” — Christina Cacioppo, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) “Go talk to the inference providers. They will say, look, the reason to post-train a model is cost. Some businesses have that need, but there is not a quality reason to do it. There's kind of a marketing reason to do it right now in this environment. And I think there's a lot of post-training for marketing reasons, for investors and for customers, mostly for investors, actually.” — Christina Cacioppo, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) “People are real smart. So if you try to charge them based on tokens, they are very quick to say, oh, you've just marked up a Claude token 4x. Are you 4x as good as Claude? I don't know. Let me go try it out. You actually put yourselves in a competitive position against the models that probably no application really wants to be in. … If you're trying to mark up at all, users are very smart and you will lose on that comparison.” — Christina Cacioppo, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Where to Find Them

Christina Cacioppo has been a guest on The Social Radars (2 times) , Newcomer Pod (2 times) , TBPN (2 times) , Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) (2 times) , The Room Podcast , Cheeky Pint , The Information's TITV , Uncapped with Jack Altman , My First Million , In Depth and Masters of Scale .

Recently: “Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]” on Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) (October 2026); “Christina Cacioppo Unfiltered on Fake Compliance, AI Security & Building a $4B Company” on Newcomer Pod (June 2026); “Compliance at scale and why TAM is a distraction with Christina Cacioppo of Vanta” on Cheeky Pint (March 2026); “Christina Cacioppo, Founder & CEO, Vanta” on The Social Radars (January 2026); “Alphabet Breaks $100B Barrier, OpenAI's Rumored $1T IPO | Grant LaFontaine, Chris McGuire, Max Junestrand, Christina Cacioppo, Lin Qiao, Ilan Twig, Taranjeet Singh” on TBPN (October 2025); “Founder Mode: Christina Cacioppo, Founder & CEO, Vanta” on The Social Radars (September 2025).

What They Said

“What FDE often is is professional services. But I think if you call it a professional services role, that's a very different talent profile than FDE in the current discourse. And I think you're not going to get the Harvard CS grad who's high agency and wants to go do things and learn how to build a business to go sign up to be pro-serve person number four…” — Christina Cacioppo, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Asked what in the current tech discourse she thinks is crazy, Cacioppo names the fashion for "forward deployed engineers" (FDEs), engineers embedded with customers. She calls the title a talent arbitrage, much like "chief of staff": a new name for a role that wouldn't attract the same people under its old one.

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 25:27 into the episode
Patrick O'Shaughnessy

anything else like in the popular discourse that you think is crazy? FDEs? I

Speaker 3

kind of think FDEs are crazy. I think it's like great talent arbitrage,

Christina Cacioppo

the same way like chief of staff is. What FDE often is is professional services. But I think if you call it a professional services role, that's a very different talent profile than FDE in the current discourse. And I think you're not going to get the Harvard CS grad who's high agency and wants to go do things and learn how to build a business to go sign up to be like pro-serve person number four or number

Speaker 3

12 at a company. I think there's a real job there.

Christina Cacioppo

But I think this FDE wrapping around it is probably not going to stay. The company that we all think does this well is Penaltier, which I think they probably do. They have eight-figure contracts. There are some companies that have eight-figure contracts. I think we're using FDEs in a place where…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

you're at like a dinner in San Francisco with other founders, what are you talking about? Are you talking about models and which ones to use? What are the actual topics of conversation between founders right now?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“Go talk to the inference providers. They will say, look, the reason to post-train a model is cost. Some businesses have that need, but there is not a quality reason to do it. There's kind of a marketing reason to do it right now in this environment. And I think there's a lot of post-training for marketing reasons, for investors and for customers, mostly for investors, actually.” — Christina Cacioppo, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Patrick O'Shaughnessy asked what she thinks is overhyped, and her answer was software companies custom-training their own AI models. She says the real pitch is "you're a real AI company now", and doubts that customers actually want to be handed a model of their own.

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 22:45 into the episode
Christina Cacioppo

Custom training models for the marketing value.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Be able to say we post-trained a model on our stuff. Explain why.

Christina Cacioppo

Go talk to the inference providers and sometimes give them, depending on the provider, give them true CRM. They will say, like, look, the reason to post-train a model is cost. Some businesses have that need, but there is not a quality reason to do it. There's kind of a marketing reason to do it right now in this environment. And I think there's a lot of post-training for marketing reasons for investors and for customers, mostly for investors, actually.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

If one of those people were pitching the other side of this, the value of post-training, what is the pitch to you? One of these companies comes to you and is like, we'll do XYZ for you. What are they saying and what do they say the benefits are?

Christina Cacioppo

You are putting a stake in the ground of being a real AI company. Customers will notice. I think that's the primary one. I do think there's a secondary one in some use cases of like a form factor thing. And I think especially with large enterprises, you want to deploy this piece of software wall to…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

I was one of these people and I came into Vanta, what does post-training literally mean? What would it mean in your context? What are you doing? What are the steps that you would go through?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“People are real smart. So if you try to charge them based on tokens, they are very quick to say, oh, you've just marked up a Claude token 4x. Are you 4x as good as Claude? I don't know. Let me go try it out. You actually put yourselves in a competitive position against the models that probably no application really wants to be in. … If you're trying to mark up at all, users are very smart and you will lose on that comparison.” — Christina Cacioppo, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Vanta's CEO is explaining why the company absorbs the cost of the AI tokens its agents use, rather than passing them on to customers through usage-based pricing. For now Vanta accepts lower margins in order to get more customers using its agent features.

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 06:17 into the episode
Christina Cacioppo

Someone just left your company and you didn't get them out of all of their accounts. I just wrote a custom agent for you that will go do that. Do you want me to go turn this on? Great. Do you also want me to go remove accounts, access from these three people? Great.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

So it's not just here's a red alert that someone didn't meet to monitoring stuff. It's like too many reds. I would do like me to go do this.

Christina Cacioppo

…them based on tokens, they are very quick to say, oh, you've just marked up a cloud token Forex. Are you Forex as good as Cloud? I don't know. Let me go try it out. You actually put yourselves in a competitive position against the models that probably no application really wants to. Like we're going to talk about what Harmon says. You don't want to get there. What we've seen on token pricing is if you're trying to mark up at all, users are very smart and you will lose on that comparison. You can like not mark up and this gets to the margin question. But anyone who is marking up Cloud token Forex and trying to pass that off to their users, I think we're eating the token cost right now. You're just taking lower margin. We're taking lower margin and really concentrated on usage. That experience that I just talked through where the agent is going off and doing things, we just…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

I'm also so curious that you said marking up a cloud token, but what about marking up like a Kimmy token or like something that's much cheaper? What's it been like deciding what to use, what's good enough versus cost?

Christina Cacioppo

This was something we started concentrating on at the beginning of the year is basically evals, task specific or agent specific evals. From a product perspective, we call it all the Vanta agent and it's one thing. Of course, behind the scene, it's like hundreds of agents that all have specific…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

you talk to other founders, both of your era and of this new era, what are they doing here? Are they also eating the cost and just charging a software fee? What do you think the end state is going to be?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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