Forward-deployment is having a moment. It seems like every organization is trying to build their own forward-deployed function, and the term gets used loosely. 

When I was on the forward-deployed team at Palantir in 2012, FDEs would travel to our customers’ sites, embed at their desks sitting side by side, and deeply understand their workflow needs, often by conducting analyses ourselves. We would say that our Palantir software was 80% of the way there, and our FDEs would bridge the last 20% gap through customization, whether that was for an intelligence agent, a banker, or a pharmaceutical researcher.

What actually matters most in forward-deployment is (1) creating real, immediate value, and (2) the ergonomics of the product for customization. Palantir’s overlooked edge was creating a product that easily afforded adaptation to the user workflow at the frontlines.  

At Theory, we apply the same principle to our customers: our portfolio companies. Capital and advice get a company most of the way there. The last 20% is where things get hard: the first sales hires, the first executive search, the board-meeting debate about why pipeline slipped. Most of that work happens inside the company, not on a chat with an investor.

So we go there. Our forward-deployed team offers to sit with teams and understand their gaps, their pain points, their needs. They don’t show up as observers or advisors, they come as an extra pair of hands to get the job done. Like Palantir, we build our internal tools for ergonomics, so our forward-deployed intelligence leads can leverage them for each company’s workflow in the room, whether probing our network or gathering evidence across our internal “brain.”

To date, we’ve forward-deployed our GTMINT (Go-to-market Intelligence) and TALINT (Talent Intelligence) practices. 

CASE STUDY

Ollama is one of Theory's AI-native portfolio companies, and it drives more open-weight model tokens across North America & Europe than any other platform in the world. When Beth Scheer & Rafa Jara-Simkin started by spending one day a week with the team this summer, the company’s main focus had been its product-led motion.

A few months later, Ollama has:

• A working, scalable GTM tech stack
• A strong pipeline of customers for its new Ollama Enterprise product line
• A founding sales team ready to start, hired with support of Rafa who joined dozens of interviews

“Beth and Rafa jumped in right away. In under 90 days, we had our hiring and go-to-market plan in place to meet growing enterprise demand for Ollama.

Beth helped us sharpen the candidate profile and pick the right search partners. Because of her, we skipped months of searching and started serving new customers sooner.

Rafa built a GTM stack that serves millions of Ollama developers, co-designed our PoC process, and worked alongside us to stand up our sales team and onboard initial enterprise customers.”

 — Jeffrey Morgan, CEO and Co-Founder of Ollama

This is how the two practices fit together. Rafa builds the sales motion and knows what great looks like in the seat. Beth makes sure the search is scoped right before it starts. Together, they partner on every founding AE and every Head-of-and-above hire in sales or customer success.

GTMINT

How does a founder transition from founder-led to a sales team that can sprint to capture the opportunity in front of them? What does it mean to hold that team accountable and run an excellent SBR? Which AEs should you hire, and in what order? 

That’s where Rafa comes in. Rafa was one of the early sales leaders at Looker, a business intelligence company which Google acquired for $2.6 billion. Over 8 years, he led Looker’s Mid Market and SMB sales teams, built its international teams, and closed the first 8 figure deal with a Fortune 50 customer as a strategic account director. He then led an Enterprise sales team at Monte Carlo before joining Theory. 

Today, Rafa is the first call when a portfolio founder has a sales problem: which accounts to focus on, how to run discovery and qualify deals, how to close, who to hire, how to structure the team, and how to manage it all. 

TALINT

Talent intelligence is our newest practice, led by Beth Scheer. Beth sits side by side with founders to work through:

• which gaps to hire for, and in what order 
• who to partner with to find, source, and close candidates
• what to watch for in recruiting agency contracts
• how to set comp levels and ensure internal equity
• how they can run a strong process

Beth has run each of these cycles herself. She ran PhD/Research Scientist recruiting at Google and then executive recruiting at Salesforce after a few years focused on Sales Leadership and Customer Success recruiting. She spent the last eleven years at Homebrew Ventures doing exactly this kind of hands-on work with portfolio companies. 

A FINAL NOTE 

Forward-deployment is only possible for Theory because of how we invest. Theory runs a concentrated strategy, backing a small number of companies in each fund. Follow us on X, LinkedIn to see where we deploy next.