Vintage Shirts, Pet Rocks and Forward Deployed Engineers
What's old is new again and that's OK. But remember: the fundamentals always matter.
Every few years we convince ourselves the rules have changed. We slap a new name on an old idea, ride the hype, and tell ourselves it’s innovation. People are always clamoring for new.
Real change does happen. The internet, mobile phone (remember the iPhone launch?) and now AI have reshaped everything. But there’s a difference between change and hype. Change endures because it’s built on fundamentals. Hype fades because it’s not.
We’ve been here before. What’s old is new again, and that’s fine—as long as we learn from the past instead of forgetting it.
Let’s take a quick walk down memory lane…
I’m pretty sure I owned this t-shirt in the mid-to-late 80s.
Today there’s a massive market for vintage clothing. I just liked Run DMC (and still do). 😄
The thrift store market is estimated at $10-$15B in North America. That’s just for physical stores. Thrifting is a regular activity for my university-aged kids (technically they’re adults, but whatever). Sometimes they go to bulk stores and buy “by the pound”. Sometimes they go to “high-end” thrift stores where t-shirts like that Run DMC one are proudly displayed.
The broader resale market for second-hand clothing is even larger, and there are many digital platforms you can use to buy and sell your stuff.
What drives this market?
For older folks it might be nostalgia (same reason they love old Pokemon cards or collecting 80s-90s toys). For younger people (like my kids) it’s about what’s cool, the thrill of the hunt, necessity (they’re broke and can’t drop $200 on jeans) and rejecting fast fashion. I always thought it was because they wanted to look as cool as I did back then. It’s not. 😝
People are irrational but they don’t do things randomly.
There’s always an underlying reason.
People Get Caught in the Hype, But It’s a Crappy Way to Build a Sustainable Business
Hype is powerful. It draws people in and creates momentum. People want to belong and be in the know, that’s what makes hype so alluring.
But what goes up, must come down.
Hype is fickle. The next big thing is always around the corner, and if you’re not there with the cool kids (wearing Run DMC t-shirts) you’ll miss out. So you panic, chase every thread that might become a movement, aiming to stay ahead of the curve or at least ready to ride the wave and not drown.
If you build your business exclusively on hype, there’s a good chance you’ll fail. When hype fades and becomes nothing more than a fad, you’re in trouble. You might catch the wave, make a lot of money, and jump off at the right moment, but timing that is almost impossible.
Pet rocks, fidget spinners and NFTs
The Pet Rock might be the purest example of hype turned profit. In 1975, Gary Dahl sold literal rocks as pets, boxed up with air holes, a straw, and a training manual. It was a cultural joke that made him a millionaire for about six months. The brilliance wasn’t the product, it was the packaging, the timing, and the collective willingness to be in on the gag. Then it vanished. You can start with irony, but you can’t stay there.
A few decades later, fidget spinners spun through the same cycle. Marketed as stress relievers, they were everywhere—schools, offices, gas stations—until overnight they weren’t. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t work; it’s that there was nothing underneath the hype. They were easy to copy, impossible to differentiate, and had no repeat value once the novelty wore off. Schools banned them, prices collapsed, and retailers were left with unsellable stock. The fundamentals weren’t there: no defensibility, no ecosystem, no reason to keep spinning once everyone had one. What had been a billion-dollar toy category turned into clearance-bin plastic. I don’t even want to tell you how much I spent on fidget spinners for my kids at the time. 🤮
Then there’s Bored Ape Yacht Club: JPEG monkeys that rode the NFT hype wave straight into the speculative stratosphere. People spent hundreds of thousands on cartoon apes to flex digital status, and for a while the cheapest Ape (“the floor price”) traded for more than a luxury car. Then crypto winter hit, floor prices collapsed, and the club wasn’t so exclusive anymore.
The underlying technology—blockchain and Ethereum—still matters. It’s enabling real infrastructure shifts in transparency, finance and digital ownership. But NFTs like Bored Apes were a speculative expression of that technology, driven more by social signalling than substance.
Each of these moments had explosive energy. They made real money, for a minute. But hype isn’t a moat. It’s lighter fluid: quick ignition, short burn, and nothing left once the crowd moves on.
What’s Old is New Again
Live long enough and you realize everything is cyclical. For example, every generation rediscovers what was great before, like the Beatles, and convinces itself it’s found something new. They create their own music too, but it’s often derivative, or at least inspired from the past. Every generation thinks they’re the exclusive purveyors of taste, while simultaneously buying up vintage clothing, vinyl and old school memorabilia.
Technology makes the cycles spin faster. Every time we think something is brand new, it’s usually the same human impulse in a different wrapper.
AI is swimming in hype. The mistakes made during the dot-com era are resurfacing, although I believe we’ll plough through it. It’s a messy, experimental process, but we’ll get there.
A few months ago, I did an interview with Sidney Madison Prescott, who previously worked at Spotify, E*Trade, BNY Mellon and others, where she said, “AI is rebranded robotic process automation (RPA).” That struck a chord. We also chuckled about “Prompt Engineers” being an actual job title.
Sidney is super bullish on AI, and believes it will transform industries because the tools are amazing (and rapidly getting better), but the desire to automate things isn’t new.
Meanwhile, Kyle Poyar recently conducted a survey of go-to-market teams on the impact of AI. Here’s a quote from the post (paid access, but worth it):
The impact of AI is a mixed bag. More than half (53%) said they see either no impact or limited impact from AI. The disillusionment was most acute around AI SDRs. In the words of one survey taker, “We tried an AI SDR for six months and were unable to generate a single opportunity.” Ouch.
Despite signals like this (and the fact that most AI projects within companies seem to be failing), AI is a genuine step-change. We’re still figuring things out, but AI isn’t a fad.
Forward Deployed Engineers: Old Job, New Myth
The thing that sparked this entire post was the growing hype around Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). Everyone credits Palantir with coining the term, but FDEs existed way before. Honestly, they’ve probably existed since the first enterprise software was built for companies.
I heard the term in 2023. By 2024 the hype was in full swing. A SaaStr post noted that, “Forward-deployed engineer job postings have increased from around 30 per month in early 2024 to 375 by April 2025—a 12x increase.”
Forward Deployed Engineers sounds super cool. Kudos to Palantir for an excellent rebranding. But this is not a new concept.
In 2012, I was working at GoInstant when we were acquired by Salesforce. I spent two years there, which was a great experience. Salesforce always deployed people to work with their enterprise customers. These people had the customers’ employee badges and access to everything. Some were project managers, others were technical salespeople, and some were engineers building software with and for customers.
At one point, our GoInstant team was selling into a large insurance company. We went in-person to demo our tech and learn more about their challenges. It turned out most of the people we were selling to were Salesforce employees. They’d been embedded for years. They knew everything that was going on inside the company. The customer was paying for them to be on-site full-time.
Being embedded with a customer for enterprise-level sales and deployments makes complete sense. The likelihood of project success goes up, and you can upsell constantly.
It turns out, in-person works. That’s how real relationships are built. Today people are “discovering” in-person events as if it’s a shock that meeting someone face-to-face is a good thing. I’m not arguing for full-time in-person, fully remote or hybrid, because all three are feasible. But I do laugh a bit when someone says, “You know, meeting people in person really makes a difference.” No kidding. We were rocking that in the 90s.
The Fundamentals Don’t Change
Rediscovering something that used to work is completely fine. Rebranding it is fine too. Value doesn’t come exclusively from net new inventions.
“Forward Deployed Engineer” sounds serious and cool, like Army Rangers going into a battle while simultaneously coding and solving every problem imaginable. Bring ‘em on!
But remember two things:
First: Most new things are built on what came before. If you ignore that, you’ll repeat the same mistakes or get caught in the hype without understanding how to navigate it.
Second: The fundamentals still matter.
A while back I wrote a post called “Did AI Kill Lean Startup?”. The short answer is no. AI doesn’t destroy the fundamentals of building a business. It doesn’t make customer discovery irrelevant, eliminate the need for right-sized MVPs, or erase the hard work of creating something people actually want. It just changes how quickly we can learn, test, and iterate. The scientific method still applies.
People are irrational, but they don’t do things randomly. There’s always a reason behind the behavior, even when it looks like hype. When you understand those reasons, you stop chasing trends and start seeing patterns. If you can uncover a genuine insight, something you know that others don’t because you’ve done the research and understand your customer deeply, you have a real competitive advantage. Insights may be the last true moat, or at least the spark that gives you a head start.
When the hype fades and people are tossing their AI pet rocks into the digital trash, what remains are real problems, real customers, and real value. That’s where great companies are built: not on novelty or noise, but on substance that endures. The fundamentals aren’t the enemy of innovation, they’re what make real innovation possible.