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Aparna Sinha: And so we had all started building. And I think over time, we just got used to, okay, every day there's something new. The eyes are always open, the ears are always to the ground. And I think being here in San Francisco in the middle of things, it helps a lot because you are sort of in the middle of shaping the revolution. That's kind of what Vercel's role is. Francois Anjestat: This is Next Gen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. Cloud, mobile, SaaS. We've seen the big shifts before,
but this one, it's deja vu on fast forward. Of course, we're talking about AI. AI is moving faster than any technology wave we've ever seen. If you blink, you're already behind. On today's episode, we'll be talking about building in the middle of the AI tornado, how you can stay ahead when everything keeps changing,
and what it takes to lead through tech's most chaotic moments. Today, we're going to step inside the eye of the storm with someone who's been at the center of multiple tech revolutions. Aparna Sinha is SVP of Product at Vercel. Welcome. Aparna Sinha: Thank you, Francois. I'm really happy to be here. Very excited to speak with you and to talk to other product marketing and business leaders. Francois Anjestat:
Awesome. Well, let's start to talk about you. Let's talk about your career because you haven't had the most traditional career. Started, I think, at Stanford, and now you're the SVP of Product at Vercel. Walk us through your journey. How'd you get to where you are today? Aparna Sinha: Yeah. You know, I don't know that there is a traditional career, especially for product managers. Product managers and product leaders come from all kinds of different paths to product management.
But I think something that we share in common is a real love for users and for customers, an ability to identify patterns and see what customer needs are, as well as like a business acumen. And so, yeah, along the path of my career, I discovered that those are the things that I was most passionate about, was really strategy, understanding customer segments. I'm really, really deeply driven
by technology, particularly cutting edge technology. I tend to run towards the latest deep technical changes, not sort of like small ones, especially high risk ones. So that's just, I guess, how I came to this career. Aparna Sinha: I started at Stanford as an undergrad studying physics, which maybe it's an unusual thing, but I like to understand how
things work, particularly in science and engineering. And I found during my studies that actually the most interesting part was how computers work. And so I got involved and I got interested in computer architecture and realized that I guess it's not exactly physics. I moved to electrical engineering. I don't really care what the titles of these things are. And I did my PhD in electrical engineering.
I like building things. I actually really like building things with my hands and creating things for people, things that other people will use, which I guess is the definition of an engineer. Francois Anjestat: Absolutely. And is that how you ended up eventually going to NetApp? Aparna Sinha: Yeah. Eventually... Well, actually, after my PhD I worked as a research staff member of technical staff, briefly at Intel and briefly
