Executive Function: Building Systems That Can Make Decisions Without You

• COO job: build systems that decide without you, not put out fires.
  • “Build fire departments, not put out fires” — Sam Corcos.
• Vercel replaces nearly every internal SaaS with generated apps or agents.
  • One GTM engineer replaced a 10-person sales team; $1K/yr vs $1M salaries.
• Operating at 30K ft and ground level simultaneously is the exec unlock.
  • Most rising leaders fail this transition: they stay tactical or go too abstract.
• “Give away your job every few months” — Molly Graham — is the growth rule.
  • Delegation isn’t abdication; it’s the only way to scale scope.
• Executive hiring: workshop prompts reveal capability better than interviews alone.
  • Common failure pattern: can’t create shared language across the business.
• Driver tree philosophy: map every metric to its upstream levers.
  • Alignment breaks when teams don’t share the same causal model.
• “I trust you, make the call” — six most powerful words a manager can say.

X discourse

• @rauchg: “Almost every SaaS app inside Vercel replaced with generated app or agent interface.” (1951 likes)
• @levie: “Agents can break free of human context limits if they don’t need prompting or review, but for now require human manageme” (405 likes)
• @J_Bradley01: “What it lacks is someone who can say: ‘That’s noise, this is the constraint; let’s act here.’” (234 likes)
• @rdominguezibar: “‘A single GTM engineer at Vercel replaced a 10-person sales team. $1K/year vs $1M salaries.’” (2 likes)
• @Amplitude_HQ: “@Vercel COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser: Start with the work everyone hates. Run a survey. Get rid of it by Friday.” (8 likes)
• @NYSE: “AI takes mundane research, follow up, content crafting out so more true human interaction.” (6 likes)

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel; ex-Stripe ~10 yrs, global revenue + product partnerships), interviewed by Brett Berson (First Round Capital) · 2026-02-05 · Read on review.firstround.com