5 Things I Learned From 5 Years At Vercel
Lee Robinson reflects on growing from an individual contributor to VP as Vercel expanded from 30 people and $1M ARR to 650 people and more than $200M ARR. His lessons center on sustainable intensity, execution speed, scaling through people, collaborative leadership, and relinquishing control.
5 Things I Learned From 5 Years At Vercel
Author: Lee Robinson | Published: 2025-07 | Generated: 2025-07-11 | Domain: leerob.com
Tags: ‘#leadership’ ‘#management’ ‘#startups’ ‘#vercel’ ‘#hiring’ ‘#productivity’
TLDR
After five years at Vercel—during which the company grew from 30 employees and $1M ARR to 650 employees and more than $200M ARR—Lee Robinson shares the management principles that shaped his move from IC to VP. Sustainable high performance requires clear offline boundaries and a team capable of owning work; competitive advantage comes from compressed timelines, focused priorities, strong hiring, and fast iteration. Effective leaders build alignment before changing direction, avoid becoming approval bottlenecks, and revise their processes when evidence shows they are wrong.
Key Takeaways
- Work intensely, but build real boundaries: Passion can become burnout without a support system. Robinson learned to hire and delegate enough ownership that he could fully disconnect from work and focus on family when offline.
- Speed is a leadership responsibility: Aggressive deadlines reveal complexity and force prioritization. Even when a two-week target takes a month, it can yield a first version roughly 3× faster than an undefined project; high-agency DX and design engineers can accomplish dramatically more by designing, coding, and shipping directly.
- Scale through hiring and ownership: Leaders must “own the thread”—take responsibility for outcomes and reset expectations when needed—rather than personally doing every task. Continual recruiting prevents strong team members from being overloaded, while timely, empathetic performance feedback gives people a fair chance to improve.
- Create alignment instead of issuing late overrides: Robinson recounts “swooping and pooping” on a product launch: arriving late, lacking context, challenging decisions, and relying on title. Leaders should involve themselves early, share evidence, listen seriously, and let teams participate in the decision before an announcement.
- Avoid heavyweight approval for reversible decisions: Reviewing every Vercel social post made Robinson the bottleneck. Treating most posts as Bezos-style “two-way door” decisions, documenting quality expectations, and granting autonomy maintained quality while increasing team ownership.
Images & Media
- Next.js Conf 2024 — Team photo from Next.js Conf 2024.
- Vercel team dinner — Vercel team gathering.
- DX team in 2025 — Developer experience team as it scaled.
- The crowd at Ship 2023 — Audience at Vercel’s Ship 2023 event.
- Behind the scenes — Behind-the-scenes content production.
- Our amazing community — Vercel community gathering.
Referenced Links
- “Give Away Your Legos” — First Round Review guidance on delegating ownership while scaling.
- Burnout reflection — Robinson’s post on the risks of unbounded work intensity.
- Go hard at work — Robinson’s view on pursuing high performance.
- Hours — Video cited in support of putting in sustained effort.
- Own the thread — Bozoma Saint John? Actually Boz’s leadership concept of accountable ownership across concurrent workstreams.
- Single-threaded leadership — Framework for accountable leadership ownership.
- Hell yes or no — Derek Sivers’s hiring and decision-making principle.
- Two-way door decisions — Jeff Bezos on using lightweight decisions for reversible choices.