Shannon Scott

Vercel's COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser joins Georgie Healy to unpack what the next era of engineering actually looks like and why founders and operators need to rethink how they build right now, not later. They start with something close to home: Jeanne landing in Sydney for just 48 hours, squeezing in the Bondi to Coogee walk before flying out, and building a product PRD on Claude somewhere over the Pacific. But the conversation quickly moves into much bigger territory. From the real bottlenecks holding back AI agents in production to why 2026 is the year enterprises finally stop talking and start shipping, Jeanne explains how Vercel is building the infrastructure layer that makes all of it possible. They get into what the future of engineering actually looks like, why the best engineers of tomorrow will be defined by vision and taste rather than lines of code, and how a single well orchestrated founder with 20 AI agents could build a unicorn. Jeanne also shares what Stripe taught her about design partnerships, how Vercel is closing the loop between go-to-market and engineering, and why non-technical people are already winning with tools like V0. Plus: the GTM engineer role most companies have not hired yet, why AI ROI frameworks are broken, what she built on Claude on her flight over, and the one sales adage from her Stripe days that every founder needs to hear. 🎧 Link in comments

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Matt McFarlane runs FNDN, and he knows compensation in Australian tech and startups better than anyone I know. And you can't have a podcast about Building Tech Teams without talking about compensation. His opening line set the tone: “the number is only half the story.” Most companies, in his experience, have no rationale behind the figure. “Someone’s negotiated for it or they’ve plucked it out of thin air or a mate in the ecosystem has said that this is what the role’s worth.” Three parts I found most interesting: ✅ Why AI salaries actually spiked, and it is not the hype. “Payroll’s always been, in SaaS, the biggest cost”. AWS has been up there as well, but token costs and AI infrastructure are being considered now, too. When the infrastructure bill increases, companies are paying the people who understand it. ✅ Companies are banking the upside. A new hire negotiates above the person already doing the job. Matt’s view is that the incumbent is worth more, not less, because of the context they carry, and that most companies sit on it: “a lot of companies think, oh, let’s just see if we can bank that upside until it becomes an issue. But by that time, the trust’s gone.” ✅ What promotion looks like when the team has agents. He described a CTO who now expects his people to be promoted by building agents that automate the level of the role they are doing. “They’re probably never gonna hire a junior again, which is crazy, and then eventually those, and there’s maybe eight or nine of them, they’ll all just be principal-level roles with a whole bunch of agents under them.” A key line for managers who are promoting AI within their companies: AI usage is not a performance indicator. “I could spin up a loop right now that just spends tokens and would make me look brilliant despite achieving nothing.” His answer is that we will need a way to judge whether what an agent produces is worth more than its token cost, or the cost of hiring someone to do the same thing. The episode is live across Youtube, Apple, and Spotify.

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