Nasser Ghanemzadeh

Two books · Four chapters · Free

Read the first two chapters of both my books. Free.

Subscribe to my weekly newsletter and I'll send you the opening chapters of Forward Deployed AI Engineering and Founder Mode in your first email. After that, one short letter a week: one real decision, run through one mental model.

Forward Deployed AI Engineering hardcover book
Founder Mode book cover

Free. The chapters arrive in your first email. Unsubscribe in one click.

02 · What's inside

Your first email

Two books, four opening chapters, one email. This is what lands in your inbox the moment you subscribe:

Forward Deployed AI Engineering book cover

Chapters 1 and 2

Forward Deployed AI Engineering

The first two chapters of the 304-page working guide to the role OpenAI and Anthropic put on the map.

 Founder Mode book cover

Chapters 1 and 2

Founder Mode

The first two chapters on how the great companies are actually built.

There's no checkout and no download page to dig through. The chapters are just there, in the first email.

03 · Then, every week

One decision, one mental model

The letter is written for founders who invest and investors who build, and it has one job: better judgment. Each week takes one real decision and runs it through one mental model, the same tools Daily Wisdom works through a page at a time. No frameworks borrowed from Twitter threads. No promises of overnight scale. Just the decision, the model, and what the model says to do.

Get the free chapters

  1. One real decision. A hire, a raise, a price, a term sheet, a pivot. Something with money or trust on the line, not a hypothetical.

  2. One mental model. Base rates, incentives, inversion, margin of safety. One per letter, in plain words, from the latticework Daily Wisdom builds over a year.

  3. Where the judgment slips. The misjudgment the model catches, and why it is so easy to miss in the moment.

  4. What to do on Monday. The same decision, re-run with the model in hand. Short enough to read in one sitting.

04 · The receipts

I publish every week

All posts on Substack

  1. The book I wished someone else had written

    Three books in last several years, and why the first one I started is the last one out.

  2. Cargo Cults: How to Spot a Fake FDE Motion Before You Join It (or Buy It)

    Anyone can adopt the title and redraw the org chart. The substance is harder to fake, and one test separates the two.

  3. Breaking Into the Hottest Job in Software

    Four paths in, a three-project portfolio, and the interview stage everyone underestimates.

  4. Ship the First Slice

    The smallest end-to-end system, on real data, with the customer holding the keyboard. And why your first version should be three Python files, not an agent framework.

  5. Evals Are the New Spec

    In AI engineering, the evaluation set is the specification, and building the right one is the highest-leverage activity in any engagement.

  6. Validation Is Not Optional: The Three-Phase Engagement

    Scope, validate, deliver. The middle phase is the one everyone wants to skip, and the one that decides whether the engagement is worth attempting at all.

  7. I Fact-Checked My Own Book. It Did Not Go Perfectly.

    What re-verifying every number in FDE revealed, what the $9 billion summer of forward deployment means, and what version 1.5 adds.

  8. Echo and Delta: The Two Modes of One Craft

    Palantir split the role in two for a reason. Most AI startups compress it into one person, and the discipline is knowing which mode you're in at any given moment.

  9. The $29 question

    Pieter Levels, Fireship, and the end of the micro-SaaS playbook.

  10. The FDE Arbitrage: Why Failed Founders Are the Most Undervalued Talent in AI

    The labor market discounts failed founders heavily. FDE hiring managers who know better are quietly capturing the spread.

  11. Gravel Roads and Paved Highways: The Palantir Pattern That Runs the AI Industry

    For twenty years the industry dismissed Palantir's operating model as a curiosity. Then it became the consensus in about eighteen months.

  12. The great software rewrite

    AI coding agents are making it cheaper to rebuild software in Rust, Go, C, and C++. But faster code is only part of the story.

05 · Who's writing this

About

I'm Nasser Ghanemzadeh. 17+ years building products and companies across AI, SaaS, and fintech. As CEO and later CPO at Nivo, I shipped AI-powered applications that grew to 200K+ users and 450% revenue growth before the company was acquired.

These days I build Vectig solo with Claude Code and run a 10-business-day AI Feature Sprint for B2B SaaS teams. The books came out of that work. More on the home page.

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06 · Get the chapters

Your first email has the chapters in it.

Then one letter a week: one real decision through one mental model, for founders who invest and investors who build.