Happy Tuesday, y’all. Today we’re dropping an Antimemo on How to Build Your First Forward Deployed Engineering Team.

Yes, we know, this term is everywhere these days. But that’s precisely why we wrote this: to separate hype from the hard work. And this one’s been in the works for a while. Part playbook, part field manual, we’ve put this together with the perfect partner: Mark Scianna. Mark was one of Palantir’s earliest FDEs, with deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq long before “forward deploying” became fashionable.

Whether you’re just curious or committed to trying this strategy yourself, keep reading to learn how to do it right.

P.S. Have a teammate, friend, or fellow builder with obsessive drive and endless psyche to pursue hard things? Send Per Aspera their way.

P.S.S. Are you that teammate, friend, or fellow builder who was forwarded this email? Subscribe to Per Aspera here.

Mark Scianna, the co-author of today’s Antimemo, is a former forward deployed engineer at Palantir who now runs Forward Deployed Venture Capital, fresh off of raising a $45M Fund II. He’s seen “forward deployed engineering” from both sides of the table: first as one of its early practitioners, then as an investor helping others create their own FDE strategies.

Now, just like the rest of us in tech, he’s seen the term permeate popular consciousness — often, deployed as a buzzword stripped of its original meaning and intensity. Given that Mark now spends time clarifying and reclaiming what FDE truly means, and that he built a fund that quite literally carries the name, we at Per Aspera couldn’t think of anyone better to help clarify what FDE is, what it isn’t, how it really works in practice, and whether the strategy makes sense for your company.

FDE has been cargo-culted, and today, it seems the tech world has been one-shotted by FDE’s seductive promise. Plenty are talking the talk, but who is doing the real work?

For the Palantirians dispatched from the artist’s colony to the proverbial (or real) front lines, this is a rigorous discipline. Engineers embed deeply within a customer’s organization, wield unusual autonomy, and bear full accountability for driving tangible, operational outcomes.

“I felt total ownership for making sure our software succeeded,” Mark writes. “Deploying it in the field wasn't just a responsibility — it was deeply personal. When it didn't work, there was no one else to blame."

The frontier has always belonged to people who sit closest to the problem. If you’re in hardware, and you’ve been doing something that looks and feels like FDE, this Antimemo should arm you with sharper language, cleaner metrics, and a clearer operating model. If you are new to this game, hopefully this helps clarify whether this is the right rodeo for you.

Forward Deployed VC backs mission-critical teams, with a newly raised $45M Fund II supported by 150+ operators from the Palantir Mafia alongside AngelList Systematic Fund, Bain Capital Ventures, Garry Tan, and more. GP Mark Scianna served as a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir, where he built products for Special Operations Forces, set up servers in Kandahar, and deployed alongside warfighters at forward operating bases. This isn’t just operator experience — it’s embedded execution. That context shapes how the firm supports founders: with capital, clarity, and domain fluency. It’s been said, “software is eating the world” — yet many of the systems that underpin national and economic security are still catching up. Forward Deployed VC exists to bridge that gap, led by Mark Scianna’s firsthand experience and network purpose-built for founders taking on the most consequential problems facing the country.

Industrial Design, in the limelight
Apple has designed a remarkably thin iPhone. Just 5.6mm thick with a Grade 5 titanium frame, the iPhone Air’s sleek aesthetics, we think, are a red herring. The real story: this “iPhone for the Ozempic era,” as the WSJ called it, represents strategic miniaturization, as Apple repositions for a new class of lighter, more powerful, and ultimately wearable form factors on the horizon.

A Narrative Violation Takes Flight
Northrop Grumman has flown the second B-21 Raider, which completed its maiden voyage last Thursday. The B-21 program is “basically on time, basically on budget,” as an Air Force general has said. In an industry where the F-35 ran $183B over budget and the KC-46 tanker arrived years late, delivering a sixth-generation stealth bomber without too much drama feels almost subversive. Sometimes the most radical act in aerospace is simply doing what you promised.

FRIENDS IN HIGH, HARD PLACES
What did friends of Per Aspera get done this past week?

Sophia Space 🤝 Armada. This past May we had the honor of announcing Sophia Space as one of Per Aspera’s Founding Sponsors. Last week, Sophia Space and Armada announced a first-of-its-kind, Earth-to-space edge AI platform — linking Armada’s ground assets with Sophia’s orbital compute modules. The goal is to form a seamless fabric of real-time intelligence across land, sea, air, and space. While much of the hype has been on centralized intelligence (e.g., AI datacenters), the push to the edge will be a key storyline in the coming years and months — especially in defense, energy, and autonomy contexts.

Now that’s a proper round. Divergent, also one of our Founding Sponsors, has raised $290M at a $2.3B valuation to expand production. If you don’t know the backstory, Divergent was started by a father-son duo, Kevin and Lukas Czinger, who first proved themselves in the auto world, reshaping how Aston Martin and Bugatti built their cars. Divergent’s central claim to fame is DAPS, a software-defined factory that supports rapid design, additive manufacturing, and automated assembly. This is clearly a winning combination. Divergent has grown revenue by >5x this year and now makes 600+ unique parts (+50% in H1 2025 alone) for dozens of auto, space, and defense customers. Here’s to the Czingers and the whole Divergent team, as they help America rebuild its arsenal with the speed, adaptability, and pride that this moment demands. 🥂

PER ASPERA AFTER DARK
Think of this as the Director’s Cut, filled with surplus stories, developments, signals, and data that stood out while we were pulling together today’s edition.

House passes NDAA, with $840B topline // Datacenter developers call on NRC to unleash nuclear power // Navy taps four primes for CCA concepts // NOAA robotic surface vessels set sail in tropical storm forecasting test (sadly, none of them are named Boaty McBoatface) // IBM racing, and leading (?), in push for quantum advantage // How China’s propaganda and surveillance systems really operate // A 10,000-word engineering history of the Manhattan Project, with an excellent overview of the new factories, machines, techniques, and materials that had to be invented // Lonely people prefer robots over human interactions 😔 // Palmer Luckey takes delivery of first-ever personal eVTOL, the Jetson One // Saudi Arabia in midst of petrostate-to-PV diversification play, building some of the world’s biggest solar and battery farms // OpenAI is ramping up its (humanoid) robotic work.

Got news to share? Breaking ground, shipping hardware, or hitting a milestone? We want to hear about it, and so might thousands of your fellow Renaissance-pilled readers. Whether it’s a factory floor, the test stand, or your unique trials & tribulations on the hard path, show us your work and strut your stuff. Reply here or drop us a line at [email protected] ↗