What Did Jeanne Grosser Want to Be at Vercel?

Jeanne Grosser wanted to be number two at Vercel, a strong right hand to a technical founder. So far she has not totally wanted to be a CEO. She likes taking a technical vision and turning it into something people are buying, and she wanted to own enough of the work that the revenue outcome rested on her ability to drive it.

At Dialpad she already ran go-to-market from soup to nuts, not support, and Vercel is the first time she is owning marketing at a legitimate scale. She is glad she has a CMO, and she has learned a ton from him. She treats the human-based customer experience as a product just like the actual product. Marketing, sales, and support commonly roll up to three separate leaders, so the experience never becomes integrated. Multiple times in her career, support and sales used different segmentation, which she does not think is workable, and the dollars marketing spends often sit apart from where sales puts people. Making the motion one unified thing is now her problem.

Owning all of it is hard because she cannot point a finger at anybody. If there is not enough pipeline, the fault is hers. She cannot say she is the CRO and marketing is at fault, or the reverse.