Jeanne Grosser
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Grit · How Vercel Is Rethinking Go-to-Market With AI | COO Jeanne Grosser
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How Does Vercel Keep Support Lean With Agents?
Jeanne Grosser says an agent resolves 91 percent of Vercel support volume, so support runs far leaner than it did at Stripe. Business development is way leaner too. All inbound goes through a homegrown agent, all inbound qualification is done with an agent, and a large share of outbound is done with an agent.
At Stripe the plan was a go-to-market evolution every six months: take the natural next step in focus and never reorganize. For years the motion got slightly more specific on that cadence. Vercel is starting to follow the same pattern. Selling into e-commerce is a very different sale from selling into a tech company, so the company had just carved out an e-commerce vertical. The people
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Why Does Jeanne Grosser Want the Smallest Team?
Jeanne Grosser thinks one human can do a job that now takes a team, when the work is the right version of the content and AI is applied to it. Her goal for a leader is the highest performing team with the least amount of people.
She was talking today with a woman who runs a team and would join as an individual contributor. If the woman does the job right, a team will never be hired under her. A lot of people still value themselves as leaders by empire building, the claim of running a 500 person org or a 1,000 person org. She thinks they will have to value actual output instead, revenue and impact, and treat people as an input. People may start asking for the head count to revenue ratio rath
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Will Jeanne Grosser Always Grow Lean?
Jeanne Grosser will probably always stay on the leaner side of grow as fast as you can. Overgrowing slows the whole machine even when revenue is fine, because people stop having well-defined jobs, step on each other's toes, and add coordination cost. More of the team is brand new and does not know the work than the share that does.
She has to push herself on hiring speed because she liked the efficiency-is-leverage phase at Stripe. The phase forces a deep look at priorities and at how automation and data can meet them, and she calls that a more intellectually interesting way to grow. She also thinks Stripe could have grown revenue faster at some points by adding more people. A leadership of
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How Does Jeanne Grosser Sort Founder Feedback?
Jeanne Grosser sorts a founder's small complaints by looking for a repeat pattern. A single misplaced semicolon can wait while she stays on work meant to build a billion-dollar business. Bad grammar called out in emails three times in two weeks counts as a systemic problem, a sign the group sucks at grammar.
She gets good at signaling that she is on it and will act, then stays with the larger build and leaves the semicolon for the fullness of time. The test is signal versus noise. A pattern can show a flaw in her broader understanding of the work, or a topic the founder cares about deeply that she may still treat as a P2. They either talk directly about why the founder treats the point as a
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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 leader
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Why Did Vercel Change Sales So Early?
Jeanne Grosser changed Vercel's sales team four and a half months after she arrived, a little faster than she naturally would have, because at six months the company would have been in the middle of the third quarter and that would not have been workable. Quotas make go-to-market hard to change, since livelihood depends on hitting them, so a team cannot on a random Tuesday decide to change everything. The easiest time is the beginning of the year or the middle, when a plan can be closed out.
The executive team sat down, locked arms, and agreed the plan was right even though it ran a little faster than they all wanted. She warned the faster timing might cause some near-term downside, even a
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Why Did Vercel Hire a Marketing Chief First?
Jeanne Grosser made the marketing chief her first leadership hire at Vercel because the lead to revenue model showed the company was not creating enough pipeline to hit the number.
The model is full-funnel math by segment and by geography. The data was messy after she changed the segmentation, so she put in reasonable assumptions. A handful of weeks after she joined, her first board meeting laid out the trajectory: the first two quarters would be fine, then the planned ramp would fail. Pipeline from Q4, before she arrived, and from Q1 was not enough to reach Q3. Looking at the whole year made the later drop visible while the early quarters still looked good.
She needed several leaders and
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Should a New Sales Leader Trust a Founder's Number?
Joubin Mirzadegan says a new sales leader who takes a founder's number without knowing the data will get fired in a quarter. Founders are default optimists, extremely exuberant, and do not know how to forecast a business. He thinks they are, for the most part, probably out pitching the dream to investors and need a big number to justify the valuation they want to raise.
On Tuesday he met an early-stage chief revenue officer who was three months in, or two months in, and expected to reach 10 million after starting the year at one. Asked how much pipeline existed today, the officer had no answer. Two reps had just been turned off and two more hired. The path to 10 million rested on a self-ser
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Did Vercel Have Enterprise Product Market Fit?
Jeanne Grosser says Vercel did not have full enterprise product market fit when she joined, even though her first view was that the product was ready and the real gap was go-to-market.
No one has ever come up with a test for product market fit. When growth is slower than people want, the standing question is whether the problem is product market fit or go-to-market. At Vercel, large existing enterprise customers were already using Vercel but did not yet have Vercel in front. The team picked 10 of the customers and ran the product manager and the lead engineer through conversations with all 10 in a row so they could get pattern recognition. After the 10 sessions, the group concluded they did