Founder Stories: Peter Gassner, Co-Founder and CEO of Veeva

This video features Peter Gassner, Co-Founder and CEO of Veeva, providing an overview of the company’s strategic vision, operational values, and product evolution approximately eight years into its founding. Gassner establishes Veeva’s core identity as the builder of the "industry cloud" for life sciences, emphasizing that its success is rooted in a clear vision coupled with strict adherence to core values: customers first, employees (as a people-based business) second, and maintaining speed. He stresses that speed is the most challenging value to uphold as a company grows, noting that the natural trajectory of large organizations is toward slowness and bureaucracy. To combat this gravitational pull, Veeva explicitly calls out that it is "okay with inefficiency" if it preserves speed and autonomy.

The presentation details the evolution of Veeva’s product portfolio, starting with its foundational offering, Veeva CRM. Gassner highlights the strategic foresight involved in choosing to build on the salesforce.com platform in 2007, even though essential developer tools like Apex code were not yet available. This early commitment to a scalable cloud platform proved crucial for the CRM product’s maturity. However, the CEO identifies Veeva Vault—a content management platform and application suite launched four years prior to the talk—as the company’s current primary growth engine, signaling a successful expansion beyond commercial sales tools into regulated content and clinical data management.

Gassner outlines the necessity of product diversification to achieve strategic partnership status within the life sciences ecosystem. He discusses newer applications, including Customer Master (part of their Networks offering) and Open Data (a data offering), which address different buyer personas within client organizations. He argues that to be a strategic partner, a company must sell across all buyer types and look at the relationship holistically, rather than optimizing for profit on every single application. This diversification is critical to Veeva’s aggressive financial goals: moving from a $400 million annual run rate to a $1 billion run rate within five years. Achieving this target relies heavily on shifting the revenue mix, increasing non-CRM revenue from roughly 20% to 50% of the total, thereby proving the viability and market acceptance of the Vault and Data products.

Key Takeaways: • The Industry Cloud Mandate: Veeva’s foundational strategy is to build the definitive "industry cloud" for life sciences, requiring a comprehensive suite of applications (CRM, Vault, Data) that cover commercial, clinical, and regulatory functions, positioning them as the indispensable enterprise software provider. • Strategic Platform Adoption: The initial success of Veeva CRM stemmed from the strategic decision to commit to the salesforce.com platform early on (2007), demonstrating the value of anticipating and investing in emerging infrastructure even before it is fully mature. • Vault as the Primary Growth Vector: While CRM established the company, Veeva Vault—the content management and application platform—is the explicit driver for future growth and revenue diversification, indicating that the market demand for regulated content and clinical operations solutions is outpacing traditional CRM expansion. • Prioritizing Speed Over Perfection: Veeva’s operational philosophy actively fights against the bureaucratic slowdown common in large companies by accepting a degree of "inefficiency" to maintain high speed, autonomy, and rapid decision-making capabilities. • Holistic Strategic Partnership Model: To achieve strategic status with clients, Veeva focuses on selling solutions across all buyer types and departments, viewing the relationship holistically rather than optimizing for maximum profit on every individual application sale. • Aggressive Revenue Diversification Goal: The path to achieving the $1 billion run rate requires a massive internal shift, necessitating that non-CRM products (Vault, Data, Networks) grow to account for 50% of total revenue, highlighting the urgency of successful cross-selling and new product adoption in regulated areas. • Data and Networks Expansion: Newer offerings like Customer Master and Open Data signal Veeva’s strategic move into providing foundational data services, including master data management and commercial data offerings, which are crucial for AI and business intelligence initiatives. • Values-Driven Management: The company is managed based on three non-negotiable values—Customers, Employees (long-term people-based business), and Speed—which serve as the guiding principles for all major strategic and operational decisions.

Tools/Resources Mentioned:

• Veeva CRM
• Veeva Vault (Content Management Platform)
• Veeva Customer Master (Networks Application)
• Veeva Open Data (Data Offering)
• Salesforce.com (Underlying platform for initial CRM development)

Key Concepts:

• Industry Cloud: A vertical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model designed specifically to address the unique, complex, and regulated needs of a single industry, such as life sciences.
• People-Based Business: A business model where the long-term retention and satisfaction of employees are treated as equally important strategic assets as customer relationships, essential for providing consistent, high-quality expertise in a specialized sector.
• Strategic Partnering: The business approach of embedding solutions across multiple functional areas within a client organization, ensuring the vendor is integral to core operations rather than just a provider of single-point solutions.