CRV | Fireside Chat With Vercel's COO | The Complete Discussion

That's good. That's good. Thank you all for coming. I'm Reed, one of the general partners here at CRV. Hopefully, you're enjoying our wonderful office. It's hopefully a little bit different than stuff your other VC offices. We're very proud of it. The

design was no thanks to us though. It was an actual designer who ran a design studio and we commandeered it from him like every good venture capitalist does. I am very very excited to have Jean Dwit here with me on stage, COO at our portfolio company, Verscell, a company I'm on the board of. Jean joined Versell I think it's seven months ago. >> Eight. >> Eight. She's counting every single day and getting so much done. Um, Jean has

had a great go to market and operational experience career across Google, Stripe, and now the best of the best, Verscell. Uh, I can unequivocally say that she's the best executive I have ever worked with. And I truly mean that. I tell my partnership this after we came out of the first board meeting and have felt it as we've interacted since then. So Jean, thank you so much for doing this. We'll be diving into some questions here on Verscell and and go to market and of

course go to market meets AI. >> Yeah. >> So with that, >> yeah, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, let's let's start with the easy one. You joined as as COO, which is a broad title, but what was the mandate when you came in and and what were you expected to do in the first six nine months and what have you done? >> Yeah. Um, so I have more of a go to market shaped COO role. So basically I sort of say if it touches a customer or makes a dollar, it's in my remit. So that's marketing, sales, all of your

technical sales functions, customer success, support, partnerships, etc. which I was really excited about and was important to me actually when G and I were discussing this role because throughout my career I've always felt like go to market orgs are this sort of ven diagram of strategies like marketing's got a strategy mostly overlaps with sales but not entirely which sort of mostly overlaps with support but not entirely um and I've always wanted to be able to actually design something end to end to have this

really integrated customer life cycle so that was sort of broadly the remitt is is come in and kind of turn that actually from what was a somewhat siloed set of functions into a more integrated machine and then turn that into an engine. Um so when I was interviewing I think the company was more about 150 million in in ARR maybe a little less even and was starting to get early at bats in enterprise. So, you know, felt like there was a there there. How do we

go from getting a couple of those to turning that into something more replicable? Um, was starting to get into multi-product. So, originally started, you know, more of this front-end hosting platform. Was starting to get serious about CDN and security super early on AI, which feels crazy to say at this point, but okay, how do we go build a multi-product machine? And then with such a large open source footprint across our across Nex.js JS also how do you capitalize on that and build a global business? Um so that that's

really exciting. I got to go through a lot of those chapters at Stripe of going single product to multi-product startups to enterprise etc. Everyone's excited to do it again and maybe avoid a couple mistakes we made. >> Love it. And you've been at now three companies I guess that have been largely product and engineering le from the founders all the way through to the organization. Um what are the what are some of the challenges in dealing with yeah building a go to market engine at a kind of engineering le company? >> I think like I kind of have this really