Insight
Grosser: Great founder brand marketing alone cannot build a predictable revenue engine
“A lot of founders, Guillermo's a good example, John and Patrick were examples of this well, are like excellent brand marketers, but that does not a predictable revenue engine make on its own.”
Disclosure
Grosser: Vercel deployed AI lead qualification agents matching human SDR performance
“I launched a GTM engineering team in the first six weeks on the job at Vercel. So basically, we took Three sales engineers were like, congrats, you're now founding members of our GTM Eng team, where we're gonna go bring agents to bear across everything in GTM.…”
Disclosure
Grosser: Stripe executives donated headcount across P&Ls to self-solve budgets
“Stripe got much, much, much more rigorous about the budget is the budget, like, the, we've got headcount OpEx, and, like, that will be the number that we have collectively as a company. And across the course of the year, opportunities would emerge that you wou…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grosser: John Collison said cross-functional colleagues she doubts are "dead to her"
“He said, within your own organization, you do a great job of being both demanding and supportive. Cross-functionally, when you don't think somebody's good at their job, they're dead to you.”
Insight
Grosser: Transitioning to second-line manager is one of leadership's biggest leaps
“I think actually one of the biggest leaps in leadership to make is going from a frontline manager to a second line manager. So there, you gotta learn to delegate and get comfortable with that, but you're gonna, you know, seven direct reports on average, like, …”
Insight
Grosser: Direct reports should independently mirror the executive's decisions 90% of the time
“If I've done a good job of helping you understand my mental model, then nine times out of 10, you should be able to ask Ask yourself that question and come up with the answer I would have come up with had I been there alongside you.”
Insight
Grosser: Early enterprise wins lead product to blame sales and sales to blame gaps
“If you work in product and engineering, that suggests in your mind, well, if one enterprise brought it, surely all of them can, right? And so this must be a go-to-market problem of, like, you're not doing a good enough job of bringing forth the value of our pr…”
Insight
Grosser: COO role is whatever crucial functions founders choose not to manage
“I often think COO is sort of like the set of functions that a founder knows are incredibly important and doesn't personally want to manage at this particular moment in time.”
Insight
Grosser: Laying out real problems in first interview tests candidate motivation
“Mostly telling you these are the problems that, this is the reason I'm hiring your role. I have the following issues that you will need to come and resolve. And I find that by putting those things out on the table in the first meeting, basically, you get a sen…”
Insight
Grosser: Strong executive candidates teach interviewers new mental models early on
“Typically, I have learned something. I have learned multiple things. Yes. You know, often, Early, like, you know, that second meeting, they already are giving me a mental model I didn't have. They're talking to me either about a thing they did where I can imme…”
Disclosure
Grosser: Vercel is not yet excellent at executive selling
“We are not yet excellent at executive selling”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grosser: Stripe ran a 30-person leadership team across product, GTM, finance
“There was a lot of work that Will Gabrick did, to his credit, to get all of product, go-to-market, finance in sort of the same room. Like, we ran basically a thirty-person leadership team for a while, which is a lot to have in a weekly staff meeting, to have i…”
Disclosure
Grosser: Vercel CEO and COO compete in outbound SDR cold-prospecting
“So Guillermo and I currently have a contest on who's going to be the top SDR at the company. So, you know, he's beating me actually on, like, the founder outreach to startups. I'm probably winning an enterprise CXO outreach. But, you know, I, I'm personally do…”
Disclosure
Grosser: Personally leads customer onboarding sessions for every new Vercel hire
“Now actually every new hire I deliver, one of our company values is KYC, know your customer, and I deliver the KYC onboarding session where I walk through every new hire at the company. Here's how we think about customers, how we break it down, here's what our…”
Assertion Supported
Grosser: Nike self-hosts Next.js on Akamai rather than using Vercel
“Nike's on Next.js. They're not on Vercel. They, you know, have Akamai as their CDN and WAF.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grosser: Vercel's revenue growth model was most sensitive to ACV
“When we did the lead to revenue model, it, the model for Vercel this year was most sensitive to our ACV. So the most credible way for me to increase revenue growth rate was that particular area.”
Disclosure
Vercel standardizes on GAAP revenue for executive-level business reviews
“So that's one of the things in at Vercel we've just decided We're gonna look at things on a gap revenue basis. Just make it simple. Again, I'll have my forecast call, but I'm gonna translate that into gap revenue basis when we talk about it as an executive lev…”
Assertion Supported
Grosser: Vercel headcount exceeds 600; Stripe reached 8,000 before departure
“When I was at Stripe, we were, I think, 8000 people by the time I left. Vercel is now north of 600.”
Assertion Supported
Grosser: Claire Hughes Johnson managed People before marketing at Stripe
“If you took Stripe under Claire, She had people, but didn't have marketing at the outset, had marketing at a later point.”
Disclosure
Grosser: Vercel CPO participates in every executive interview loop to ensure alignment
“Tomo, our CPO, is on all of my executive loops because he's got to be as excited about this person as I am, so that's meant to correct for that one.”
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser