I’m joining Vercel after 5 years at RudderStack

My first professional trip to San Francisco was over 10 years ago. I took a cohort of startups from The Iron Yard Accelerator (part of Startup America) to Silicon Valley to network and pitch investors. I went back through old files and dug up a picture from the trip:

One of the accelerator’s mentors was Keith Messick¹, who happened to be from my city. I’ll never forget meeting with Keith and Lane Becker² that first day. I was green and starry‑eyed, with a thousand questions, and they spent the afternoon patiently teaching me about tech startups.

Little did I know those lessons would pave the path to founding and selling my own startup, running a successful consultancy, and helping take a seed‑stage infrastructure startup from zero to tens of millions in revenue.

Today, after 5 years at RudderStack³, my journey is taking me back to the beginning: I’m joining Vercel to work for Keith.

I'm returning to my marketing roots and my first charge is partnering with the incredible team building technical content.

Why Vercel

It goes without saying, but the chance to join Vercel in this next phase of growth—especially working with Keith—is an incredible and humbling opportunity. In many ways, my experience in marketing and building a product for technical users at RudderStack was the perfect preparation for this next phase of my career.

Some time ago, I resolved to pursue only two career paths: start another company or join a team building something I believe needs to exist. I’ve followed Vercel closely—as a student of the landscape and as a customer—and my bone-deep conviction about the product and the market opportunity laid the foundation for this move.

Long before this job was a twinkle in my eye, I’d been thinking deeply about Vercel’s platform, AI and their opportunity to build generational experiences.

In April of this year (2025), I joined a panel discussion on how AI was shaping product management. The host asked me about Vercel’s v0 product, which I’d incorporated into our product development process for rapid prototyping and customer feedback (it cut our feedback and design cycle from weeks to days—or even hours).

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast where I share my perspective on Vercel⁴:

Host question:

You came in my office and had just built this prototype [in v0] very quickly and said, “Dude, check this out. It took me maybe an hour and a half to do this.”

From a pace of change standpoint, you seemed really excited and surprised at how well [v0] worked. We’ve been exposed to the power of AI for 3-ish years now, so I want to understand, from your perspective, was it surprising? If someone had told you 8 months ago that you could do what you did with v0, would you have believed them?

My response:

It’s a great question. Let me explain really quickly what v0 is. So Vercel is a platform that allows you to deploy software on the Internet. So you have a web application where users can sign up, etc. That needs to be deployed on servers and there’s a whole process around actually delivering that to end users. So Vercel is a platform that does a number of things in that space. It’s a truly incredible platform.

They launched this tool called v0. It’s a chat interface, oddly enough, but that probably makes sense for this use case. But it’s a tool that allows you to build a website or web application. If you had told me just at a basic level that it would be that good, maybe I would have struggled to believe it, but the thing that I was missing was that the LLM aspect of it—asking an LLM to write the code, you can see it write the code, you can edit it, it’s really neat—that is actually already a commodity. You can do the same thing using GPT, using Claude Code from Anthropic.

What really is amazing about the decision that Vercel made is that they have the infrastructure and system that makes it a complete experience. Think about a platform that deploys websites and web applications. They have millions and millions of examples of those that they are deploying on their platform.

And one of the biggest factors for LLMs and AI generally is context and frameworks. So if you can give an LLM a very high level of context and guardrails within frameworks, then it can produce some really unbelievable things.

So, I think what makes v0 special is not the LLM. They are doing some really interesting things under the hood with prompts, but what makes it amazing is that their level of accuracy is good because of the [Vercel] system within which the LLM is operating.

So I think two things. One, like a lot of other people, I underestimated the actual power of LLMs, so that’s probably a reason I wouldn’t have believed you. But I’m becoming more enamored with companies who are figuring out how to deploy an LLM in a system that gives them dramatic advantage over everything else, including the raw models themselves, because that creates this experience and the ability to execute things in a way that truly feels like magic.

A heartfelt thank-you to RudderStack

I’d founded several companies prior to joining RudderStack, but it was my first time working directly for a Silicon Valley startup—and one that was building and selling a highly technical product to developers, no less.

I’m deeply grateful to the founding team for taking a chance on me. The last 5 years have been life- and career-changing for me, from humble beginnings and zero revenue to leading our product organization and joining board meetings.

The impact you leave at a company can be measured in many ways. Here are a few comments and notes from coworkers that offer a small picture of my time at RudderStack.

One super important thing. It’s a sad day that Eric is leaving. Why? Because he made work not feel like work. He made it very easy to figure things out and solve difficult problems. He was the guy who knew the product in the best possible way. Hiring product talent is going to be a huge task. We’ve had a lot of PMs in the past, but up until I met Eric, I hadn’t worked with a PM who knew what he was talking about. Replacing that is going to be super, super hard.

—Staff Software Engineer

Really sad to see you’re leaving - thanks for all the support on deals over the last couple of years, it’s been so great to meet you and work with you. All the best with where you’re headed next and don’t be a stranger!

—Enterprise Account Executive, EMEA

Hey Eric, it’s honestly a sad feeling to see you go. I second what Aris mentioned in the meeting that you are amazing at what you do and how deep your knowledge about RudderStack product is. Working with and knowing you has been an honor. Thank you for being best Head of Product in history of RudderStack 🙌

I wish you all the best for this new journey of yours and hope we get a chance to work again together 🎈🎉

—Senior Software Engineer

Man! This is huge! I don’t think we ever had a product team that understood the product deeply to its roots. You made that happen and I don’t know how RudderStack can ever fill this gap!

—Engineering Manager

I’ve learned so much from you, and I will cherish this experience for a very long time. I truly appreciate everything you’ve done for us, and it’s sad to see you go. I’m sure the next team that gets to work with you has no idea how fortunate they are to have you.

—Senior Technical Account Manager

To everyone at RudderStack, past and present, thank you.

Footnotes

1. You can learn more about Keith Messick on his LinkedIn Profile. ↩

2. You can learn more about Lane Becker on his LinkedIn Profile ↩

3. 5 years and ~1 month ago, I wrote a blog post about joining RudderStack. ↩

4. You can listen to my thoughts on Vercel and AI in this Data Stack Show podcast episode (the link is timestamped to the beginning of the Vercel bit). ↩