Reflections on Vercel

My favorite thing in the world is helping people realize their potential. In the 2.5 years I spent at Vercel, I got to do that with folks I hired or managed time after time.

• Alli runs about half of Vercel’s marketing and dev rel today. She was an IC 9 months ago. 5 years from now she’ll be the best CMO in the world.

• Harpreet left a wildly successful academic career (multiple first author Nature publications!) to join Vercel. He has the best combination of Smarts and Drive I’ve ever seen – the only person that gives him a run for it is Alfred Lin. He’s the mind behind many of Vercel’s best product ships.

• I found Jasdeep sharing superlative pricing takes in a video Ricky Doar shared, and immediately decided I needed to lure him out of the company he co-founded to join our pricing team. He now runs all of Pricing for Vercel, leading an A++ team.

• Fernando joined Vercel as an IC, built the excellent v0 mobile app, and now runs all of v0. I’ve never met a clearer technical communicator (ok, maybe Lee Robinson).

• Casey was the first hire on my team, built the wildly impactful “Big Pro” program, and now leads the team responsible for EPD<>GTM interlock (a particular challenge at Vercel given our insane shipping velocity).

• Shar joined as an IC and had the highest impact first month I’ve ever seen, taking us from mediocre to best-in-the-world billing infrastructure. He switched focuses to launch Eve (today!), the best agent framework around.

And countless others – If I could buy stock in careers, I’d back up the truck for Gaspar, Ido, Max, Christie, Cade, Y. Yvonne, Pranav, Bani, Jeremy, Eleni, Shu, and countless others.

Vercel is a wonderful place to be a capable ambitious person looking to grow your career. Kudos to the incredible culture Guillermo Rauch built that enables this. Each of these folks has taken full advantage of it.