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CC Christina Cacioppo On Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

“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…”

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · Money & Markets · October 2026

“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 Listen to the episode → More from Christina Cacioppo → More Money & Markets quotes →

Transcript

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

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