v0’s GM on powering the next 100m builders, monetizing infra products, and more | Zeb Hermann

V 0ero we think is a a second act for Verscell. We said hey we think if we operate this more as a its own startup and have that built on top of Verscell and give each other birectional feedback we think that's going to allow us to move faster and better serve this different audience. What's surprising to me is how much the PLG motion actually feeds the enterprise motion. We see at almost every one of these enterprises there's a handful of people who started using it nights and weekends for are free and self-s serve us about 60% of usage is nights and weekends which is mindboggling um and they started using

it nights and weekends and they got kind of addicted or they started to realize wow this can actually really transform what I can do and then they come to us and say I need this for every product manager at my organization the best pricing teams in the world are very intimately connected with their engineering counterparts there was a hypothesis that took token cost would fall to zero. I think a year ago, people were really excited about that and people kept saying like, "Oh, token costs are going to cost nothing." So, especially around when Deep Seek came out. Um, that has not come to pass.

Welcome. This is Second Axe, a podcast where we document how SAS leaders chart the exacting foundational shifts of scaling up. And I'm your host, Chris Subraman, co-founder and CEO at ChargeB. This season, we are diving into AI's all-out enterprise embrace and how that's accelerating second acts everywhere, reshaping software categories, business models, and teams to meet never-before-seen stakes. Now,

on to the episode. This week's guest, Zeb Herman, joined Versel with a mandate to lead projects with an asymmetric upside beginning with monetization and their fledgling A initiatives. He wrote then if we get these things right we have this opportunity to meaningfully inflict the business that's exactly what we have done we have scaled complex infraring across dozens of SKUs and Vzero one of their AI efforts is now among the fastest growing software products ever built and has become

Versel's defining second act zeb now focuses solely on scaling VZ as a GM as they chart the goal of enabling 100 million builders in this conversation We spoke about what Zeb learned about scaling ambition first as a GM leader at segment and then as a partner at Sequoia. How Vzero is structured as a startup and more importantly customer zero to be precise within Persal. What they mean when they say no long-term random acts of AI it takes Caltech PhDs

to run pricing at Persal. How the pricing teams are intimately connected with engineering. Y Z believes that the token markup era of AA monetization is coming to a close and the hybrid shape he feels it'll assume their radical two-year vision for Vzero, the two books he recommends most, algorithms to live by and scale and so much more. Let's dive in. Zeb, thank you so much for joining us.

It's excited to be here. Thank you. Thank you. And you said you're joining from Portland, Oregon. Today I'm in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday, San Francisco, last week, New York. So, all over the place and I'm dialing in from Washington DC, even though now my home is uh Amsterdam. Awesome. Right. I'll uh start with the introduction question. Right. Vers and Versel and Vzero don't need an introduction and yet I think it'll be great to hear uh how you describe VZO's

mission. Yeah. Um, I'll start with Burcell actually. I don't know if folks are familiar with it. Burcell, what they did really is make it incredibly easy to um build new applications with much of their open source software and then especially to deploy and host those things. So, what what that has done is it's expanded the universe of people that can be engineers or web developers. Um, a handful of years ago that number was below 10 million. Now, it's 30 million plus. Vzero we think is a a second act for Purcell. they can take