Vercel hires for the ability to direct many agents

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:16:56

   So I've heard that you're also involved in the hiring process. You have around 800 employees. Yes. And you're hiring. So let's talk about what you're looking for in those hires so we can help when people watch this video. You know, this AI leverage is extremely key to the hiring process. If you can, first of all, you know, it used to be that if you had a static resume, it was already kind of hard to hire you.

2. 1:17:21

   You needed to show borrowing from the crypto world proof of work. What have you shipped? But now the barrier to shipping has also gotten lower. And so it's not, I'm not even interested in like, oh, yeah, I have this little demo or I bi-coded this thing. I'm actually looking for your ability to commandeer swaths of agents and really get leverage back from this new ecosystem. So maybe you can call this agentic engineering.

3. 1:17:52

   You can call it, you know, people sometimes call this building software factories. And so I'm looking for people that are at that level of execution. I still really, really, really value the communication quality of people or like the communication competence so I believe that the future is going to have two extremes there's going to be human-centric interactions that have to be the most humane and highest quality interactions that you can possibly find so I give that example if you go to Vercel.com you're going to find this beautiful human-centric experience it's for your eyes and communicates our values and our craftsmanship and our design.

4. 1:18:38

   The same goes for how you speak to people. I don't want to read your AI generated tweet slop. I want to hear what you actually think. And so I really care about people being able to be great human communicators because that's going to matter a lot. Especially, look, we employ fantastic AEs who are selling our agent platform to the Fortune 500s and they're establishing trust-based human relationships.

5. 1:19:08

   And so I really care about how they show up and how they communicate and their technical understanding, by the way. I expect a much higher level of technical competence. Why? Because with curiosity and the ability to prompt, every problem, every subject becomes tractable to you. Does that mean that you're going to become as competent as a 20 years of experience Rust? It doesn't even exist. Like C++ engineer at C++?

6. 1:19:43

   No, but now an AE can be foredeployed and speak way more eloquently about our technology and about its impact and its APIs and its data flow and all the things that were more in the realm of engineering. I borrowed a quote from a friend of mine who was CEO of Splunk of, you know, the two most valuable people at the company are the ones that are close to the code or close to the customer. Code is the engine of everything and is the thing that powers the products that we sell.

7. 1:20:14

   Customer is who we live for, is who we serve. but now it's almost coded both extremes because more and more we're forward deploying our sales force our sales engineers our forward deployed engineers meaning I'm helping people migrate over sell in record time so we did this example with Mercedes so when we started partnering with them they asked us how can you make our F1 team better and I being sort of a performance maniac I said, well, we can make your website much faster because when people go to buy your merch or want to get the latest results from the race or whatever, I want to make you faster.

8. 1:20:56

   I want to make you agentic. And so that process would have taken quite a bit of time. But the first iteration of the migration of their old stack to the new one actually took five minutes. We used an agent to rewrite the code from the old platform to the new one. Five minutes. when I saw the agent's result I was like this used to take months in fact a lot of what could have been a slowdown to our business in the past was that enterprises were fully bought in to the vision of the cloud and acceleration etc but everyone dreaded migrations yeah because they would hire consultants for this and it would take a year cloud consultants a year and scrum masters have you ever heard of scrum masters and agile coaches, and everyone would talk about the migration.

9. 1:21:50

   I can now forward deploy an engineer and do the migration. And so that's why it's no longer even just close to the code or close to the customer. It's close to the code and close to the code. It's close to the customer's code and close to the code. And so, or close to the agent and close to the agent, right? And so I expect a much, much, much higher level of technical proficiency, curiosity from everybody at the company.

10. 1:22:17

    And yeah, we're still hiring humans very happily. So that's not going away. Fantastic. So as we close out, one of my partners is Brex and they're all about performance, spending smarter, moving faster.