Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, COO at Vercel and former Stripe executive, discusses why go-to-market and demand generation must be paired with founder brand instincts to drive B2B growth.
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…”