Veeva CEO Peter Gassner Shares Veeva's Story

This presentation features Veeva co-founder and CEO Peter Gassner sharing the strategic journey and foundational principles that guided Veeva Systems to become a leader in the industry cloud for the pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors. Delivered at the Emergence Capital Industry Cloud Forum, the talk provides a retrospective on the company's growth, which, at the time of the recording, included a $400 million annual run rate, 1,400 employees, and mid-20s net margins, with revenue and staff split evenly between the US and international markets. Gassner emphasizes that Veeva’s core mission is defined by its vision—building the industry cloud—and its three core values: Customers Number One, Employees, and Speed.

The CEO detailed Veeva's product evolution, highlighting a strategic shift from a singular focus on Commercial operations to spanning the entire R&D and Commercial continuum. The company initially gained traction starting in 2007 with Veeva CRM, built on the nascent Salesforce.com platform, recognizing its future potential even before features like Apex code were available. While CRM remains a mature product, the primary growth engine has shifted to Veeva Vault, the content management platform and associated applications, which was first sold four years prior to the presentation. The portfolio has expanded further with newer applications like Customer Master and Open Data, a data offering launched two years prior, demonstrating a commitment to becoming a holistic, strategic partner across various buyer types within the life sciences industry.

Gassner underscored the importance of maintaining speed and autonomy, even as the company scales, noting that the natural gravitational pull for a large company is toward slowness and bureaucracy. To counteract this, Veeva explicitly accepts a degree of inefficiency, viewing it as a necessary trade-off to maintain agility and empower employees. This approach is tied directly to their strategic goal of achieving a $1 billion run rate by 2020, a five-year target from the time of the presentation. Achieving this ambitious goal requires a significant shift in revenue composition: non-CRM revenue, which accounted for approximately 20% of the run rate, must increase to 50%. This transition necessitates focused execution and daily effort from the entire organization, confirming that the company's future growth is intrinsically linked to the success and adoption of its non-CRM products, particularly Veeva Vault and its data offerings.

Detailed Key Takeaways

• Strategic Vision and Values: Veeva's operations are governed by a clear vision—building the industry cloud for life sciences—and three non-negotiable values: putting Customers Number One, prioritizing Employees (as they are a people-based business requiring long-term commitment), and maintaining Speed.
• The Fight Against Organizational Gravity: As organizations grow, they naturally become slow and bureaucratic. Veeva actively fights this tendency by explicitly accepting inefficiency as a necessary cost to maintain speed and autonomy across its large structure.
• Ambitious Growth Targets: The company set a challenging goal to grow from a $400 million annual run rate to a $1 billion run rate within five years (by 2020), emphasizing that this requires disciplined execution and daily effort across all departments.
• Revenue Diversification is Key to Future Growth: To hit the $1 billion target, Veeva must fundamentally shift its revenue mix. Non-CRM products (primarily Vault and data services) needed to increase their contribution from roughly 20% of total revenue to 50%.
• Product Evolution from CRM to Industry Cloud: Veeva's initial success was built on Veeva CRM, launched in 2007 on the then-nascent Salesforce.com platform. This product is now mature, while Veeva Vault (content management and applications) has become the primary growth engine.
• Holistic Partner Strategy: To become a truly strategic partner in the life sciences industry, companies must find offerings that appeal to different buyers within the sector. Gassner suggests that optimizing for profit on every single application is counterproductive to building a holistic, strategic relationship.
• Early Platform Adoption: Veeva demonstrated foresight by building on the Salesforce.com platform in 2007, even before essential development tools like Apex code were available, betting on the platform's future maturity.
• Data Offerings as a Growth Vector: The introduction of data services like Customer Master and Open Data represents a critical expansion beyond core software applications, providing essential data infrastructure for life sciences commercial operations.
• Financial Transparency and Commitment: The CEO noted the significance of sharing long-term strategic goals, such as the $1 billion run rate target, with financial analysts and owners, treating it as a public commitment that ensures accountability.

Tools/Resources Mentioned

• Veeva CRM: The foundational Customer Relationship Management platform for the pharmaceutical industry.
• Veeva Vault: The content management platform and application suite, identified as the company's primary growth engine.
• Veeva Customer Master: An application for managing customer data.
• Veeva Open Data: A data offering designed to provide reliable, open data to the life sciences industry.
• Salesforce.com: The platform upon which Veeva CRM was initially built.

Key Concepts

• Industry Cloud: The strategic vision of Veeva, representing a specialized, comprehensive suite of cloud applications and data services tailored specifically for the unique needs and regulatory requirements of the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector, spanning R&D through Commercial operations.
• Speed over Efficiency: A core management philosophy where the company prioritizes rapid execution, autonomy, and agility over strict internal efficiency, recognizing that some redundancy is necessary to avoid the bureaucratic slowdown common in large enterprises.
• Run Rate: A financial metric used to project annual revenue based on current performance, used here to define the company's financial scale and growth targets (e.g., $400 million run rate moving toward $1 billion).