DIY, Context layers and the curious growth of the FDE.

This is the third of probably 4 posts that expand on my talk at our Summit 19-20th May.

First part here.

Second part here.

TL;DR. There are some people that are really gifted at vibe coding. Most of us, though, aren’t. Here’s the excerpt of the talk section covering vibe coding. Edited for clarity.

Vibe coding has been incredible. The productivity gains that we’re seeing from software engineers is really quite remarkable. I was relatively skeptical at the beginning, but the more the more engineers I talk to, the more I play with these tools myself, the more I’m gobsmacked and impressed with what they can do. And what’s been fascinating to see is some of the famous programmers that we’d sort of forgotten about, people like Eric Raymond, who wrote The Cathedral and Bazaar and was one of the founders of the open source movement. They’re coding again. The programmers of 40 and 30 years ago are re-engaging with these tools and are super excited about them.

At the same time, I am very skeptical of your average HR person vibe coding heaps and heaps of applications. The metaphor for this that I’m going to use is the circular saw. When the circular saw came out, it revolutionized professional furniture manufacturing. It also created a hobby industry for people to do things in woodwork that they couldn’t do before. A couple of people made really great furniture at home that they were proud of. Most people who bought a circular saw made one thing. It wasn’t very good and then put the saw away. Some people unfortunately cut their fingers off. And that’s my sense of how vibe coding is going to work out in the HR function itself.

There will be some organizations that will build tremendously clever, nifty things. There will be many organizations that will try and then build some things that are quite shit, right? And some people and some organizations are gonna get burnt.

I expand more on my DIY thinking here.

DIY and HR tech, some unsolicited advice for HR folks.

·

Jan 5

There used to be a TV series in UK called Changing Rooms. A pair of homeowners swap houses for 48 hours, each armed with £500, a designer, and a handyman to transform one room. It played cleverly in to all sorts of British mannerisms and property psychoses. It involved a lot of MDF and power tools.

And here, focusing more on the enterprise vendors and SIs.

While we couldn’t talk about it at the event, our first investment in Fund III looks to make building for the enterprise more reliable. We are really excited about this one.

Making Better Enterprise Software with Vcola

·

Jun 2

I’ll pause the Acadian Summit posts, to bring you some deal news. Do check the press release, coverage and our deal announcement on the Acadian Substack. Subscribe if you like

The phrase of the year so far is has been context layer. It was the Eurovision Song Contest last weekend and context layer was my winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, followed closely by by Forward Deployed Engineer. But I’m still trying to figure out what the context layer exactly is. This idea of having to create some kind of translation and guardrail layer that would enable agents to work effectively on top of an existing application framework becomes super interesting. And the battle, I think, over the next year or two is to who defines and owns this layer. And my feeling at the moment is that that there’s not going to be one winner. They’re going to be multiple, they’re going to be multiple winners here. We see activity from the foundation vendors. We’ll see activity from the incumbents, primarily through acquisitions, but they will start to play more and more in this layer. And then we’ll see domain-specific developments. So I think, for instance, of companies in our portfolio like TechWolf, I mentioned on the skills side, Datascalehr in payroll, Compa in compensation, Kombo in integrations, palette in team communications….

I expect that there will be multiple context layers by purpose or function. And there’ll be all sorts of processes in terms of having context layers on top of context layers, but I don’t think this will be a winner-takes all situation.

One point I wanted to explore here, but didn’t is that the context layer over time might change the system of record more than many incumbents expect. This post by Jerome is well worth a read.

What we’ve seen also is there’s been a rapid change, really, I think, in the last 18 months, from where venture capital insisted that you build software that runs on its own and services were super evil to services are super cool. So we now rebranded in many cases, consulting has been rebranded FDE, and everyone’s now super excited about FDE concept. And again, I think the reality is somewhere in between.

I expect that most successful portfolio companies going to the future are going to have a bigger services component than they previously had. Because as you think about things like out outcome-based pricing, you’re gonna need people to help drive those outcomes. And guess what? Those people are gonna be working for you. There’s gonna be a whole lot of upset, I think, around the ecosystems that support software around this concept of FTE. So the big consulting firms or small consulting firms, the we’ve seen the foundation model players starting to move in consulting through partnerships and also through acquisitions. The whole ecosystem is that we’ve had for the last 20 years is going to get a little bit shaken up.

More the FDE here.

On the Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Led Growth and genuine adoption.

·

December 14, 2025

Chunks of B2B Venture capital and the associated punditry are now deeply in love with the Forward Deployed Engineer. Smitten. In no time at all, implementation service work has been transformed from an unfortunate evil into this cool new must have hero thing, that solves the AI deployment challenge, charms customers and simultaneously builds or at the v…

A fascinating example of the FDE model in action is at Techwolf, where one of the founders, Mik, has embedded himself in a customer. He spends a couple of days a week working with them to figure out to make AI work at work. This helps the customer, but in the long run it builds a better product too.

The best thing about the event was what happened between the sessions. Jens Bender summarized this really nicely.

The Room itself: What makes Acadian Ventures distinctive is the room. It is a genuinely global network, with builders and investors from the Americas, Europe, and APAC in one conversation. Across the sessions you would find founders, foundation-vendor strategists, corporate venture leads, technology bankers, and seasoned operators in the same exchange. It is open-minded and generous, with people shaping the industry today sitting alongside others who have shaped it for decades, and there is abundant knowledge and real passion for WorkTech

We need a song. Here goes.