Episode 15 | Jeanne de Witt Grosser, COO at Vercel

In this episode of the Benevolent Disruptors Interview Series, we were joined by Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, COO of Vercel. Jeanne worked on Gmail and helped shape Google Workspace at Google, then helped grow Stripe’s revenue from $100 million to several billion dollars. She now leads Vercel’s push into AI-native web development and sits on the boards of Shopify and Upside. Throughout our conversation we cover: The agentic era has arrived faster than anyone expected. In January, 3% of deployments on Vercel were written by AI agents. Less than a year later, it’s 60%. Jeanne explains why a new era of software needs new infrastructure: platforms that agents naturally reach for, new primitives like AI gateways and sandboxes, and infrastructure that essentially heals itself. Open source as a growth engine. Vercel was born open source with Next.js, and that ethos has become a strategic advantage. Companies talk about product-led growth, but Vercel has pioneered framework-led growth, and now agent-led growth, where well-documented, community-backed tools become the default choice for AI agents. Lessons from hyperscale at Google and Stripe. What Jeanne kept and what she left behind: Google taught her to think in orders of magnitude and to ask “what needs to be true?”, while Stripe’s narrative culture taught rigorous thinking. Jeanne and Chris also discuss the now widespread OKR mindset, and talk about needing to be mindful of a company’s greatest strengths becoming its biggest weakness. 👉 Learn more at www.bnvtcapital.com