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Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody, and welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I’m your host, Josh Schechter. I’m going solo today. Christy and John couldn’t join us, and we have a very special episode to present to everybody. I am here with the chief customer officer of Vercel, mister Paul Stalen. Paul, thank you so much for being on the program.

Paul Staelin:
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me, Josh. I’m I’m pleased to be here.

Josh Schachter:
So in the industry that you’re in, your brand, Vercel, is very well known. It may be, you know, not a household name to every every SaaS operator out there. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do.

Paul Staelin:
So Vercel is the leading front end cloud provider. That means that we provide a development platform for front end engineers to build ecommerce experiences, website experiences, logged in application experiences, any kind of web interface. We make it easier to develop that interface, and we make it easier for you to make that, interaction, more dynamic, more personalized.

Josh Schachter:
And and you’ve you’ve you guys have are really kind of leading the space in what you do. The the growth has been amazing. The company’s about 8 years old. You’ve got about 500 employees. You’ve had about 80% year over year revenue growth. You’re you know, you’ve raised several rounds now. You were brought in a little bit over a year and a half ago, I think, to kinda kick things up into 2nd gear on the on the post sales side and and the customer facing side. So let’s actually start there.

Josh Schachter:
For you know, you you have a rich experience, a rich history, at the leadership level with with several Silicon Valley companies. You started in product and grew your way into, more of the chief customer officer role. Why why bring you in a year and a half ago? Like, what was the inflection point, with Vercel at that, you know, that that that brought this up?

Paul Staelin:
Yeah. But great question. So the business had started very much with, open source, next dot JS as kind of a development environment and framework that developers could use to build these more dynamic front end experiences, launched Vercel as kind of the platform that made it easy to develop using Next and made it easy to deploy Next, as well as other frameworks, that are similar in nature and and kind of vision and path, resulted in a very strong, kind of organic growth amongst small companies. We’ve got about several million free accounts in what we would call hobby. That turned into right now, we’ve got on north of, 60,000 paid pro accounts, which is, you know, 202 grand a year. You can go up from there, of course. But the the middle of that bell curve is in that 200 to $2,000 a year level. And a lot of these kinda more dynamic startups that had started using the more advanced tools to launch their new offering, launch their new product, launch their new, ecommerce site, had grown into what we would call the enterprise tier, and there was a lot of momentum there.

Paul Staelin:
As some of the bigger, more tried and true, more familiar logos started to come along and people with fewer x’s, v’s, and y’s in their name, they are not approaching Vercel with, hey, it’s a new product. I’ve gotta launch a new thing. They’re showing up with a big property that could be driving many 1,000,000 of dollars of revenue for them. And they also wanna move on to Next and Vercel.

Josh Schachter:
And there’s much more risk for those folks too.

Paul Staelin:
There’s a lot more risk. And there’s a lot of tech debt, and there’s a lot they’ve gotta retrain people. Like, there’s it’s a big move. So Vercel was looking for a way to engage those companies and really help them move, forward in their journey. And I was brought in to help design kind of that path. My my previous two CCO roles have been in, more established spaces where, you know, I’ve built up some some expertise around how you take a big established company with a big established solution and migrate it to a new SaaS, and, more, modern infrastructure. And trying to bring that skill set here to Vercel to help those, again, logos that you’ve heard of that are hanging in your closet, probably are in your fridge, might be parked in your driveway. Those types of companies.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. You might be reading them their their front page of their newspaper, all those sorts of things. Yes. And and so it’s a classic example of we talk about some of the most successful PLG companies, product led growth companies are the developer tools. And so this is a classic example of that. You guys have millions of raving fans. My my younger cousin, as I mentioned to you previously, one of those folks, one of those developers. And so you’ve got these you call them hobbyists.

Josh Schachter:
Right? Some of them may may take slight offense to that, but you’ve got, like, these these these individuals and small teams that are that just kind of ticked up virally and and grew the business that way. And now you’ve got the larger enterprises that are, you know, they’re the laggards. This is for looking at the crossing the chasm framework. Right? And so now they but that like you said, they have much greater risk for any migrations that they take on and much greater complexity, probably a little bit more sluggish inertia and and and kind of working style and and and and processes as well. And so they bring you in to help really anchor that ship of let the PLG keep flying, but then let’s take care of the the big elephants, you know, the cash cows to to give them a great experience. Is that a fair, you know, synopsis?

Paul Staelin:
I think that’s an excellent synopsis. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
So how do you how do you structure your your side of the organization? What is what is your side of the organization look like first? And then, yeah, let’s talk about how you structure across the different segments.

Paul Staelin:
Yeah. So in general and and both at Vercel and at at prior places, having kind of, CSM organization that that by and large is the captain of the relationship, once the original contract is signed. Leaven that with, kind of the account project management skills. Leaven it with a technical success manager role. At Vercel, we call them TCs, so tech consultants. And they really are kind of providing that architectural advice forward looking. How do you make this migration succeed? It’s light touch, but over the duration of the entire relationship. And, fundamentally, they’re designed to help keep the customers out of the ditch.

Paul Staelin:
Mhmm. Keep them on the paved road and the good path, forward. Also, you have to have, customer support. So, things, do occasionally go wrong in software, unfortunately. And you do need a support organization that can, rally and respond and help people get out of the ditch once they find themselves there. So so the support organization is a big part of, you know, customers for life, which is what I call my broader org. We also have a professional services organization that can help kind of upskill your team and get them used to Next and Vercel on the way in, and help move your, migration, forward, and partners that we work with as well, for that those particular tasks. We’re spinning up right now in academy, so this is the kind of the last piece to put on the chessboard for us.

Paul Staelin:
And that would be mostly recorded and self paced learning, but really trying to to make it easier for folks to learn how to be, you know, functional in Next and in in in leveraging the Vercel platform, but ultimately actually quite good at it, if not expert. So that academy piece is the last piece to go on there. And we do have an online community because there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career. As much as my customers like talking to me and I like to think they like talking to me, They love talking to other customers, and creating that online community where they can exchange ideas, stories, ask questions, say what happened in their experience. That online community is a big part of feeling more comfortable that you’re doing the right thing as you progress forward.

Josh Schachter:
Is that also a little bit the nature of of the space that you’re working in, the the developer oriented type of of environment that they’re used to those Reddit forums and the, you know, those very technical chat room type of things?

Paul Staelin:
I it plays a big part in Twitter. Sorry. X, the everything app. Yes. There’s quite a bit of, looking for validation from others.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That makes sense. And so you have about 85 folks, I believe, under your purview in your role. And so you have these different, vectors of of the work that you guys do. Right now, as we’re in the heat of the thick of q 4 and everybody’s thinking about, you know, q one and budgeting and whatnot, What are the biggest priorities for you maybe related to some opportunities or or some challenges?

Paul Staelin:
The I mean, the 2 two big things in these challenges never go away. It’s just every year the bar gets raised a little higher, in terms of helping drive the overall effectiveness of the motion. Are we doing a a good job? The best measure that I’ve ever seen and or found is, net dollar retention. Because if you’re doing a good job by your customers, they’re generally going to renew and they’re generally going to adopt and buy more. So that, making sure that we are providing the most effective journey possible. Some of the things we’re doing today, we’re we’re gonna cut out at some point in the future, or we’re gonna do differently, or we’re gonna do it a different cadence, or we’re gonna find a way to kind of fine tune those best practices, but always trying to drive that effectiveness up so we get stickier, more successful outcomes. And then ultimately, you can never hire the same number of heads as your revenue grows. So trying to get a little more efficient and a little more of the benefits of scale as well.

Paul Staelin:
So

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Paul Staelin:
The the efficiency and effectiveness are, are are top of of many meeting agendas right now as we start to look for the next year.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So so, you know, keep growing the NDR and and, keep driving efficiency with the team. Can we tap into either of those? Like, what what specifically are are in the conversations here of of tactics and strategies to to help drive both of those?

Paul Staelin:
Yeah. So in terms of, the support side, we’ve had a huge success this year in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness in, leveraging AI to help kinda obviate questions before they became cases and had to go to an engineer. Again, I think as we have an academy in place, we’ll have fewer just basic enablement questions, but we actually had quite a number of basic enablement questions come into support. And those can be answered right away without waiting for someone to get back to you. In a in a case, you can actually get the answer right away, and it can be excellent. So that’s been a a pretty good, investment there. This year, we’ve actually started to use, AI in terms of identifying cases that are more likely to escalate so we can pre escalate them before they get hot. That actually we just deployed, I think, since you and I chatted about 4 weeks ago.

Paul Staelin:
We’ve already seen, the number of cases that that, do go up the chain very quickly, has basically disappeared. So it’s done a very good job of picking the right places to intervene. Probably a few more false positives. So far, no false negatives. But I’d rather be jump on, you know, a few extra cases with, you know, diligence and and verve, than miss a few and have them go hot.

Josh Schachter:
So this is this is a this is a case that, a support issue that had had come up and you’re analyzing the attributes of that issue and automatically making an escalation before it needs to get there kind of on its own. Is that right?

Paul Staelin:
Yes. Yeah. Looking for changes in tone, types of problems, other things. So basically, elevating, a case that looks like it’s going to be escalated. Before it escalates.

Josh Schachter:
How about on the on the NDR, side? I mean, I think you guys have been experiencing great growth with your NDR. So how do you it’s gotta be a tough goal is when you already have good NDR, and I’m not gonna ask you to share yours. But, how do you keep on pumping that up?

Paul Staelin:
Well, it one of the motions that we are, making sure that we’ve we’ve added to the motion in the back half of this year, but I wouldn’t say it’s part of our regular operating rhythm yet. We’re we’re doing it routinely is, executive, business reviews. I’m a big believer in the EBR rather than a QBR. QBR, you show up. Well, QBR is you show up and your champion beats you for the case that was open 3 days too long. Or the or the feature request that they asked for, the product management has never prioritized. EBR, you’re talking with the executive buyer about why they invested and what goals they’re trying to accomplish. And in general, instead of being beaten by the champion, you and the champion present together about how well everything is going.

Paul Staelin:
And it’s a much more fun moment where you’re kind of celebrating the successes together, talking about the work that needs to happen. We’re really doing it within the lens of why this customer is paying you at all, and what it is you need to do and much less about the time you call them back 10 minutes late.

Josh Schachter:
How how often are you doing the EBRs? Are those annual reviews?

Paul Staelin:
With most accounts, you can get them annually. But with the biggest accounts, you know, every 6 to 8 months is about as much as I’ve seen most organizations absorb well in prior roles. But again, this this is the motion we’re really starting now. So I’m very excited to to have the, have the first ones under our belt and very much look forward to, this becoming part of our just operating.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. And so it sounds like that that, we’ll we’ll pay more dividend dividends and and maybe already, doing so. That’s great. So, when you think about I mean, you mentioned the AI triaging and the interception of of support. Are there any other ways that you guys yourselves are using artificial intelligence, I mean, I know in your product, but then also just continuing to think about, the workflows around your organization.

Paul Staelin:
Yeah. So we AI is a very interesting space for us, because we provide a great interactive experience that makes it very easy to build, you know, a streaming experience for your end users. We have a a huge, number of AI customers, who use our AI, SDK to build their AI solution. So we’ve got a pretty pretty, good pulse on what’s happening in the space, what folks are doing, who they’re working with, and those sorts of things. So we’ve been very much leaning forward into AI, internally. Mostly, we have, invested in what we would call v zero, which is basically, it’s a developer AI. Think think of it like copilot.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Paul Staelin:
But for Next and Vercel. And we have kind of built an experience where you can ask it, questions about how should I design this or what what do I need to

Josh Schachter:
keep in mind, and you can get some tips, tricks, advice, and

Paul Staelin:
even some code gen out of it. And that has become, customer facing for us. And and we do have people internally who will actually, wanna ask a technical question for which they have no answer. We’ll go there first. The, but in terms of really using AI to accelerate and streamline our our processes, so we have the customer facing part of our solution. It’s been most heavily aimed at, our support experience

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Paul Staelin:
In terms of actually putting it in the process, using it, deploying it, making sure it’s working, tweaking and tuning and doing all those things outside of our product.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. Yep. That makes sense. This is a this is a great quick take. And and to to lead us to the end here, I actually wanna go back to the beginning, Paul. So, you’ve had a very established and successful career that you’re still growing in customer success. Again, started out in product and and through success now, and at the executive level. When you think back to your earliest roles, whether that’s customer success or in product or whatnot, what’s the biggest kind of learning and growth that you’ve noticed in yourself that you would impart onto your younger self? Oh, I know I’m catching you on the fly there with that one.

Paul Staelin:
Yeah. No. One of the things that’s interesting for me is I started life, very much in the engineering mindset and that there’s there is a a right solution, if not a best and work, you know, if if not that, then a best solution. The older I get, the less I know. The, the the part that’s, I think caught me a little by surprise and probably, you know, later in my later in my thirties than I would have guessed, really is, for me, the realization that when you are building product and software, by and large, you’re shipping a demo in enterprise software. I should make that very clear distinction. This is not true in consumer software. What you ship is what the customer experience is.

Paul Staelin:
In enterprise software, that’s just the starting point. Like, it becomes a real solution once they absorb it into their organization and customize it and tune it and make it really sing for them. To accomplish their goals, it could be different from the customer across the street, from their competitor down, you know, down the way. And that, to me, is where the fun stuff happens. And I’ve had to kind of embrace the messiness and the process, and it’s less technology and design, and it’s more people and process. I would not have predicted this. The 26 year old me would never have predicted that I would actually like the people and process side more, and I would get more, you know, emotional compensation, from my role from those items, than I would from, the technical side. But that’s the part that, I’ve really, enjoyed.

Paul Staelin:
And and, you know, much like the reason I like engineering more than physics, engineering is when physics becomes real and enters the world. You know, delivery is when enterprise software becomes real and really does enter the world in a real way. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
It’s a 100%. I mean, as you had said to me before, a software is a demo until a customer uses it. I thought that was a very profound very simple and profound statement. And I actually have the same type of similar type of career as as yourself. Started out in product management, started out, really hardcore hardcore about, okay, a huge amount of of pride and, you could say, hubris about, here here’s what the product is. I know what’s best. We’ve shipped it. We’ve we’ve tied a ribbon around it, and it’s good to go into now, you know, most of my role is in in customer conversations and just developing more of a real curiosity for, you know, how what we’re doing is gonna be received, what they need, and making sure that that, it’s fully baked in in the right way that’s going to our product into, you know, the way it’s going to deliver the most value.

Josh Schachter:
So I think you’re right. I think there’s something about a maturation process there of going from, like, the proud engineer product developer to the more maybe humble listening centric, customer facing role.

Paul Staelin:
So Yeah. My two favorite phrases now are are why is that and tell me more. And, I don’t know if the 26 year old me has that same conversation.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well, patience. Right? Good, Paul. This was great. Appreciate it. Best of luck on the rocketship that you’re on. You know, hold on tight. Sounds like you guys are are still have such a huge future ahead of you.

Josh Schachter:
And, it was great, having this quick check-in to learn about your your history.

Paul Staelin:
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me, Josh. And, I hopefully, we’ll have a chance to chat again soon.