Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva, discusses the company's $400 million annual run-rate, 1,400 employees, and mid-20s net margins. He outlined a public commitment to reach $1 billion by 2020 by shifting non-CRM revenue from 20% to 50% of total revenue, and explained Veeva's strategy of building an industry cloud across CRM, Vault, Networks, and other platforms.
Chapters
Okay, some basics about Veeva. Now 8 years old, about 1,400 employees or so, about a $400 million a year run rate. We're profitable. Our net margins are in the mid-20s. We have about half of our employees and revenue are inside the US and half outside, so that's sort of the framework of what we're doing. This is an important slide for Aviva. This is our vision and values. It's how I run the company. Vision is what we're doing. We're building the industry cloud. And values are how we do it, how we make decisions. Customer's number one. We're a people-based business, so our employees are just as important to us. We have to have them there for the long term. They have to love it. And speed, that's the thing you're most likely to lose as you get big. You get slow, you get bureaucratic. That is where gravity will take you. So we fight against that. And we specifically call out that we're OK with inefficiency, right? Because you have to be. If you want speed and autonomy and you're big, you have to be OK with inefficiency. We started out in Viva CRM very focused. We're doing CRM on salesforce.com. When we started in 2007, there was kind of almost no way to build on the platform, salesforce.com. It didn't have Apex code. It didn't have anything, right? But we knew it was coming, so we jumped on it, and that worked well. And now that's a very mature product. Vault, we started, sold the first piece of it about 4 years ago. And that's really now our growth engine. That's our content management platform and applications. And Networks, a newer application, Customer Master, and Open Data is a data offering we started with 2 years ago. There's different buyers in every industry, and you have to, I think, to become strategic, You can find things to sell to all of them, and it doesn't actually align with the budget sometimes. I don't think you can optimize for the profit on each app. I think you're sort of not a strategic partner if you do that. You need to look at it holistically. This is a slide we showed to our analysts, financial analysts, the owners, kind of the owners of our company, the financial analysts. They would represent these people like Fidelity, etc., that own a lot of our company in the public market. And the first time we showed that to them is this year, and it kind of puts you out there. It's like, oh man, this is on record. I don't think they're going to forget this. It's interesting. I showed this slide for the first time, and it was interesting what happened. I'm talking, talking, and then I showed this slide. I bet half of the room, iPhone out, take a picture. They got that, and then they're not going to forget. And this is tough work to get from $400 million to, in the year 2020, it's only 5 years to get to a billion-dollar run rate. And how are we going to do it? Execution, right? We get 20% of our revenue now, roughly run rate— it's a little more now— from non-CRM stuff. We've got to move that to 50%. That's not easy. It's going to take some people doing some work every day.
