The FDE Bubble: Silicon Valley's Most Expensive Game Of Pretend
Enterprise AI company raises $9M round to hire engineers to manually make products work. Job postings for 'forward deployed engineer' up 800-1000%.
Intelligence analysis by Qwen 2.5 (3B)
Enterprise AI company Airrived raises $9M to hire engineers to manually make products work. Job postings for 'forward deployed engineer' are up 800-1000%.
Imagine you have a robot that's supposed to do your chores, but it needs a human to tell it what to do all the time. Companies are now hiring more and more humans to do this work, and they're raising lots of money to do it. This is silly because the robot should be able to do the work on its own, but companies are pretending it can't.
Analysis
The FDE Bubble: A Closer Look
The FDE (Forward Deployed Engineering) bubble is a phenomenon where companies are raising large rounds of funding to hire more engineers to do manual work. This is in stark contrast to the promise of AI and automation. The article provides data on the rapid increase in job postings for 'forward deployed engineer' roles, which has skyrocketed by 800-1000% year over year. This indicates the desperation and absurdity of the FDE bubble. The article also discusses the business model of companies like Airrived, which is based on hiring more engineers to make AI products work. This is not a sustainable model, as the cost of hiring more engineers will eventually outstrip the revenue generated by the product. The article concludes by noting that this is a bubble that will eventually burst, as investors and customers will eventually demand more from AI products.
Key points
- Job postings for 'forward deployed engineer' are up 800-1000% year over year.
- Companies like Airrived are raising large rounds of funding to hire more engineers to make AI products work.
- This is not a sustainable model, as the cost of hiring more engineers will eventually outstrip the revenue generated by the product.
- The FDE bubble will eventually burst as investors and customers demand more from AI products.
The FDE bubble will eventually burst as investors and customers demand more from AI products.
Companies that rely on the FDE model will struggle to maintain profitability as the cost of hiring more engineers will eventually outstrip the revenue generated by the product.
