How Vercel Is Rethinking Go-to-Market With AI | COO Jeanne Grosser

Jeanne Grosser (0:00)

Vercel gets a lot of support volume, as you'd expect, and 91% of it we resolve with an agent. A lot of outbound, we do with an agent. All the inbound qualification is done with an agent. So like the remaining support team that we have really is now finding legitimate problems in the product, and then working really closely with engineering, or in some cases, writing PR to go fix things versus turning through tickets. We have a great data science agent that you can ask it anything you would have sent to RevOps. Even sales, we've raised quotas every six months. You join a company like Vercel, because you believe you're gonna be part of building something more generational. Certainly a big reason that I'm there is I wanna go write the go-to-market playbook for this era.

Joubin (0:53)

Welcome to Grit. I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel, and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on Grit, I'm talking with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, the COO of Vercel. Jeanne spent nearly a decade at Stripe, helping take it from $100 million in revenue to billions, before leaving to run go-to-market at a company a fraction its size.

We get into why she walked away from one of the most valuable private companies in the world, what it's like to take a 10-person sales team down to one person and an AI agent, and the brutally honest feedback that reshaped how she leads. Enjoy the episode. How big was Stripe when you joined it?

Jeanne Grosser (1:33)

About 400 people.

Joubin (1:34)

And when you left? How long were you there?

Jeanne Grosser (1:36)

I was there a little over nine years. I think it was 8,000-ish.

Joubin (1:40)

What job did you have when you left?

Jeanne Grosser (1:42)

Chief business officer.

Joubin (1:43)

Can I ask you maybe more of a simplistic question?

Jeanne Grosser (1:45)

Yes.

Joubin (1:47)

What is that? Why are you working?

Jeanne Grosser (1:49)

Why am I working?

Joubin (1:49)

Like, why, like, if, like, why, yeah, why, like, you don't need the money.

Like, why, like, let's just be honest. Like, why do any of this? Stripe is one of the most, like, why do any of this? Like, why are you even doing this?

Jeanne Grosser (2:00)

I mean, why, like, if in any area, like top athletes, like, they, why does LeBron still want to play basketball? He doesn't need the money. Like, I think it's cause you have a passion for the thing that you've been getting out of bed for, for, you know, however long that you're not, you don't feel like you've left it all out on the field yet.

You know, there are things I still would like to do to sort of feel professionally self-actualized. I think I'd be bored if I weren't working. Certainly going through the moment we're in right now, you sort of have a sense that you'd be, you know, quickly irrelevant if you aren't in the thick of it. So, but I think a lot of it is just actually legitimately enjoying problem-solving, intellectual stimulation, the people that I end up being around, things I think about as a result of doing my job.

Joubin (2:51)

Do you actually enjoy it? Or have you told yourself that over time, you enjoy it?

Jeanne Grosser (2:58)

No, I mean, I think I actually enjoy it, because I get out of bed in the morning, ready to go.

I mean, is that 365 days a year? No, like there are certainly things that are hard about a job. There are days I wish it were Saturday, not Wednesday. But like on average, like I wake up thinking about the things that I want to go tackle today. In fact, I often wake up at two o'clock in the morning thinking about the things I want to go tackle.

Joubin (3:23)

Do you actually?

Jeanne Grosser (3:24)

I did this morning.

Joubin (3:25)

Come on. But do you think, like maybe let's play this forward. Like let's imagine you had no job.

Do you think you would still be the type of person that wakes up in two and can't fall back asleep?

Jeanne Grosser (3:33)

Oh no, that's definitely work really.

Joubin (3:36)

Meaning you wake up and then your brain just can't turn off.

And do you find that you loop on the same thing, or maybe like for me, I start with one loop and then I almost like have this unique ability to then hopscotch to a bunch of other things that are worrying me. And by the way, like they're not actually that worrisome. I'm just like, I then project my worry of this one thing onto like basically my entire life. All in one long loop, but it's not one loop on one specific thing. Does that make sense?