Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:46:12 · Alessio Fanelli, Jacob Lauritzen, Shawn Wang
[00:46:12] S2: How do your FTEs work on client projects [00:46:14] S0: if they touch the data still. So they'll just build the system. Okay. But they will also be onboarded like an employee sometimes. So, like, they might get a laptop and everything. [00:46:22] S2: Like, to the law? Yeah. [00:46:24] S0: Yeah. I guess they [00:46:24] S2: need to. Interesting. [00:46:26] S0: That doesn't happen very often because, like, usually they just build an integration and, like, kinda works, but they... Yeah. They can if they need to. [00:46:31] S2: And you only onboard FTEs into a customer, I'm assuming, if they're a certain size? [00:46:35] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And these two make sense. [00:46:38] S1: Because [00:46:38] S0: our FTEs can also work on core product. Right? So it's like, it's a constant prioritization Is [00:46:43] S1: there a rule, like, I guess, does every, like, know, so Palantir famously had like, you know, four days you spend on-site, one day you come back and contribute back to products, anything like that? [00:46:53] S0: No. We don't. Mean, to be fully honest with you guys, it's still it's still, you know, it's still early days in a lot of this. [00:47:00] S2: I mean, where do you see it headed, maybe over the next year?
00:47:00 · Alessio Fanelli, Jacob Lauritzen, Shawn Wang
[00:47:00] S2: I mean, where do you see it headed, maybe over the next year? [00:47:03] S0: I do think that it's gonna be more, maybe not exactly like Palantir, but like, we... I think we will have a larger in constant circulation group of FDs. That way we sit with a client for, like, two months or whatever to build out this one thing, then they go to the next one, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. But I I do imagine us rolling in with legal engineers and forward deployed engineers to, like, work on specific projects. [00:47:24] S1: Yeah. The API business is actually interesting, like you said, because that's another rule that you can have where you are CTO maintainer of the Legora platform. Yep. Right? We will offer everything that we have in the Legora web app as an API, and then you guys can use whatever. Is that a promise they make or? [00:47:43] S0: That's not something we're promising now. Yeah. We do have APIs that you can build against, but not the entire surface of the product. [00:47:49] S1: That's the curious thing, like, is that the strategy or... And obviously, some people will love it because I don't have to learn a new tool, I can just use the existing tool I have. Right? And then I just like install Legora, for example, with the Word document stuff. Other than that, you know, I I do think like then you have
00:47:49 · Shawn Wang, Jacob Lauritzen
[00:47:49] S1: That's the curious thing, like, is that the strategy or... And obviously, some people will love it because I don't have to learn a new tool, I can just use the existing tool I have. Right? And then I just like install Legora, for example, with the Word document stuff. Other than that, you know, I I do think like then you have [00:48:06] S0: to maintain it. Exactly. That's that's... So that's been my thing. That's why we've tried not to do it. We haven't we haven't had APIs. I mean, we started our APIs like six months ago or something. We fought it for a very long time, mostly because, yeah, I just don't wanna we we move so quickly in in the product that I don't wanna be, like, slowed down by having to maintain old API versions for, like, a data model that we've changed. I mean, now we're bigger and things are different, so now it's it's a cost that we can take on, but, like, when we're 20 engineers, it's just like, we move so quickly that we can't do this. [00:48:35] S1: I have toyed with this. It's just generally good for all companies to have a platform team and a product team, because the product team, you have one, but then you can easily spin up a second one as long as the platform is not super tied to product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, a very simple one is web app mobile app. Right? Or, like, web app mobile app RTP and and then, like, you know, whatever, like, other other integrations. Then your FTEs just are one more client to the overall platform anyway.
00:48:35 · Shawn Wang, Jacob Lauritzen
[00:48:35] S1: I have toyed with this. It's just generally good for all companies to have a platform team and a product team, because the product team, you have one, but then you can easily spin up a second one as long as the platform is not super tied to product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, a very simple one is web app mobile app. Right? Or, like, web app mobile app RTP and and then, like, you know, whatever, like, other other integrations. Then your FTEs just are one more client to the overall platform anyway. [00:49:01] S0: Yes. Yeah. And I think even the agent, you can think about it this way. There's like a harness team or that runs the agent, and then that you can even build a product around it with skills and automations and whatever else. [00:49:11] S1: Yeah. This is very famously the Amazon web services mandate, like Bezos was like, no more backdoor access. You only offer other teams your APIs, the same APIs you offer customers. If you don't have it, you build it. Yep. And then the customers also get it.
00:49:11 · Shawn Wang, Jacob Lauritzen
[00:49:11] S1: Yeah. This is very famously the Amazon web services mandate, like Bezos was like, no more backdoor access. You only offer other teams your APIs, the same APIs you offer customers. If you don't have it, you build it. Yep. And then the customers also get it. [00:49:26] S0: Yeah. I think that's also changing a little bit. A lot of APIs now, like, one thing that we're toying with is, can the agent be the API? I know it sounds weird, but, like, for some of this stuff, what they actually want to do is they want to trigger certain things to happen. For some part of this, you could just be, I'm not saying that we're doing this, but it's like a thing that I'm toying with in my head is, could that just be like, okay, you trigger the agent and ask it to do this thing. Like, obviously it's way less efficient than if you just had like an API that you always hit and it's like, you know, but it's something that I'm toying with is like how much of our product can just be the agent versus all the other stuff? [00:49:58] S1: Well, you know, unbounded execution and costs and latency, [00:50:01] S0: that's the... That's... [00:50:02] S1: Is that the only whole batch? Yeah. [00:50:05] S0: And then I think deterministic, maybe in, you know, a 100 out of... Or in two out of a 100 times, it's gonna do something whack that we didn't want it [00:50:12] S1: to do. We're gonna go into, like, harness and and model fine tuning in a bit. But I think there's a there's a product question about restraint about what you don't do [00:50:20] S0: Yep.
00:50:20 · Jacob Lauritzen, Shawn Wang
[00:50:20] S0: Yep. [00:50:20] S1: Because you could do all that. And obviously, there's a prioritization issue. Like, you at more at a point of let's say no to most things and then only do a short number of stuff? Or, no, actually, we wanna do more things and we just need to hire like 100 people? [00:50:35] S0: I was very strongly the first thing for a very long time, let's just say no to everything, like, keep the AI team. I I think I've said this before, but, like, one of our presentations today, like, after I've been at Legora for half a year, I I pulled up this slide of, you know, the 300 Spartans and and and Yeah. For the movie, and I was like, we're just gonna be 20 engineers for the rest of the company's history, and, like, we're gonna beat everyone who's much bigger, and we're a 100 engineers now, and it feels like we're way too small. I wanted to do that, but I think in the real world, we're in, like, fierce competition, people want so much stuff. It's like, I could be a puritan and just be like, no, we have to stay 20 people, and we can only build, you know, whatever, but then we just lose, and, like, people would go elsewhere. So, we have to build more, and so I think my job is to figure out how do I build a system where we can build a lot, but actually only... Like, where we can... The customer feels like we've built so much stuff, but we've actually only built a few things. That's that's how I think about my job right now. [00:51:27] S1: Yeah. I mean, primitives is right, you know? Yeah. Exactly.