Veeva: The Biggest Vertical SaaS Success Story of All Time with Founder/CEO Peter Gassner

All right, let's welcome Peter Gassner from Viva Systems.

Super cool.

Peter, thanks for coming. This is great.

Thank you.

So, I appreciate you coming. I know you're not on the traditional speaking tour, are you?

No, I'm not.

Did you miss the Crunchies this year? Were you able to go?

You know, I might not even know what that is.

You don't even know what it is? So, this is a great, it's a great con. I mean, Twilio is one of our most iconic last IPOs, and Viva is just, it's my favorite success story, so it's fun to share it here. So, let me hit a couple highlights on Viva, or actually give us 60 seconds on Viva and then I'll add a couple other highlights for folks that are in here. Tell us your version of the history.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] So basics, 10 years old, about 1,700 people. We're building the industry cloud for life sciences. So our customers are people like Pfizer and Novartis, etc., that are making medicine to help improve life. And we provide a variety of cloud solutions for them. So in a nutshell, what we say is, We're building the industry cloud for life sciences. So we want to be essential and appreciated to every CEO in the life sciences industry and help them be more efficient and effective. Because what they're trying to do is bring better medicine to people, and we want to help them do that.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. So we'll get into that. So 10 years old, just about now. We'll come back to that. About a $600 million run rate at this point.

Yeah.

It's pretty, pretty impressive. What do you guys think? It's pretty cool. And, uh, And started off primarily as pharma CRM, right? And now we've got a couple different products, which we'll chat about in a minute. And what's the suite like today?

[Speaker] Well, we have a suite of products. So started off in pharma CRM 10 years ago, really focusing in there, build this CRM product on salesforce.com. About 2010, we started a completely different product line, this Veeva Vault around content management. That makes up about 35% of our revenue now. And then we have some newer products. Some of our newest products are actually in the data area, where we're generating unique data that the life sciences industry needs. So we're a real multi-product line company now. We didn't start that way, but that's where we are.

OK, I want to hit that in a minute, because we just talked with Jeff Lawson about his thoughts. And you and I chatted about those before. But let's go back for a minute. The early days. So your background, you were early to just about everything, right? You were early at Siebel, you were VP of technology at Salesforce back in the day. Yeah, yeah, back in the, with the, with the, with the OG, right? And then you came up with the crazy idea to start Viva like in 2007, um, like just before the worst 2 years that we've experienced in, in the industry, right? '08 and '09. So we've talked before, tell us a little bit, what, what, what gave you the bug to start Viva? What's the, what's the background story for for the company?

Well, I think, you know, part of it is just how I was born. I never liked to follow the herd. I think I probably frustrated my parents at times about that. I mean, literally, I never liked to follow the herd. I remember coming back in first grade and telling my parents, "I don't want to learn how to read. I don't think I need to." And literally, and my mom, bless her heart, she said, What do you think she said? She said, "That's fine, you know, I never met an 18-year-old who didn't know how to read, so I'm sure you'll get there." Figured out one way or the other. Yeah, she knew I was hard-headed. So what I figured, what tipped it for me is I realized, man, I can't read the road signs and I want to know where we're going. Okay, I better learn how to read. So I've never followed the herd, so that's one thing, it's just, I think you're born with it. But the other thing is I've studied enterprise software for literally 30 years. I was an intern at IBM mainframe software when I was 20 years old, and that was 30 years ago. So if you take this ability to not follow the herd and the experience, you can spot trends. Because when you think about it, when a trend is early, everybody thinks you're wrong. That's the definition of being early. So I have this knack of doing that. I'll give a little example of Veeva. I'd always done you know, general software things, database software on mainframes, PeopleSoft, ran that technology group, Salesforce.com platform for everybody. And then in 2007, I had this idea, I'm going to make something very specific to an industry, very specific to an industry in the cloud. And I remember sitting down with this friend, and he actually drew on a napkin, paper napkin, look, here's enterprise software. Okay, now here's life sciences. That's a very small wedge. And here's pharma CRM, that's like a pinprick. You know, what are you doing? You've got so much potential. And that's when I knew, hey, I'm on to something. I think it could be good. Most people think it's dumb. That's a very encouraging thought. So I would say to the entrepreneurs, recognize that. When you get that thing where you're a rational person and you think it'll be great and, you know, 99 out of 100 people think it's bad, that's when you have opportunity. Don't get discouraged.

Yeah.

So that's, I've always done that. I mean, even Salesforce.com in the early days.

When did you join Salesforce?

2002, I guess, or so.

All right, yeah. Another terrible time to be in technology.

Yeah.

A world that ended in 2002 too.

And most people thought that cloud thing would never be big, and I always remember people asking me, they would start to learn about it, and then at some point they would say, "I get it, I get it. Who are you trying to be like?" I was like, "Oh no, you don't get it." I'm not trying to be like anybody. That's the whole point. So I think it's that, experience and a willingness to not follow the herd.

So, and then we chatted about this before on the phone. So you start, you leave, you see this white space. It seems small in the beginning, but you know it's there. And how did you know you wanted to be a CEO?

Well, I didn't actually. I specifically didn't want to be a CEO. So that's the real story there. I'd retired a little bit after Salesforce.com, and I didn't want to be a CEO. Software developer, product person. I thought that's the most creative thing to do. So that's what I wanted to do. Happened to be I ran into some folks who wanted to fund me, and I thought, well, that's kind of good. So I can be like the head of products and the CEO. And if it— you know, most startups fail, so I don't have to worry about it.

But pressure was off.

Yeah, I mean, but it doesn't—

pressure the first 6 months.

Yeah, I always thought, hey, if it doesn't fail, Then we'll get a CEO.

Ah.

So that was my plan. And then, you know, it didn't work out that way. We happened to— because actually it's the truth. Most startups do fail. You know, most restaurants that start up fail. Most technology companies. That's the odds. Otherwise you're not being aggressive enough, right?

Yeah.

You can open a hamburger stand. You know it's not going to fail, but you know you're not going to make a lot of money. So you're most likely going to fail. That's the facts. I thought that was going to happen, but then the unexpected happened. We didn't fail. It really started going, and I started enjoying— I thought, man, I really enjoy being a CEO, and I'm pretty good at it. And I started feeling I can improve myself enough to remain the CEO. So it was never my plan to be the CEO.

Yeah.

And where—

and what percent of your customers today are 7-figure deals and up? It's— well, balance the revenue, right?

Yeah, balance of the revenue. We have you know, not so many customers, less than 500 customers.

But that first year when you decided you didn't want to be CEO and you'd see how it goes, how did you get the passion around closing those big deals?

Oh, I am competitive, right? I like to do a good job. I like to do a good job. You feel responsibility for your employees. I'm a hard worker. I think most entrepreneurs are. So, you know, I was I knew the likelihood is it wasn't going to work, but I knew it wasn't going to be because of lack of effort, right? And that's what really matters. So just iterative decisions every day about what product to make, when to cave in to a customer, when not to, who to hire. We always had a quarterly plan. We did not have any plan that extended beyond 90 days in the company in the first year, because I always said, "It's irrelevant." 6 months from now we could be out of business. Why do you even want to think about that or talk about that?

[Speaker:BILL_BENSON] There'd be no 12-month goal for revenue, customer count.

[Speaker:JASON_M_LEMKIN] We had only quarterly plans.

[Speaker:BILL_BENSON] Quarterly plans.

[Speaker:JASON_M_LEMKIN] Period. For the first year and a half of the company. Then we graduated for the next 2 years to an annual plan. Then after that we have a 3-year plan. Then just now we're starting to do the vaguest of 5-year plans. It's true. It doesn't matter. Most cases for most startups, the next quarter doesn't really matter. It's this quarter.

Yeah. One related point to that, you are sort of legendary in terms of working with customers, providing huge value, and getting, getting good contracts out of them. So what's the secret to know when to walk and how to work, especially in the early days when— yeah, I mean, now you have the iconic brand, at least in your verticals, but how do you pull that off in the early days? I was terrible at this.

In the early days, you don't have any brand. You tell your customer the company name, and they're like, "What? Let me write that down." Right? They don't know what that is.

Is that with 3s or 1s? Yeah. How many are in the name?

You know, I remember this one meeting with a large customer. We're trying to win business, and the guy in the back of the room stood up and said, "We have more people in this room than you have in this company. Why would we ever buy anything from you?" Why would they? And I told him, I mean, you have, those are the moments of truth where you have to tell the truth, right? You have to say what you believe, and I said what I believed. I said, we have great people, and we're working on great technology. And that's it. So that was the reason. And I, so my secret on it is always sell yourself first. So when I'm talking to a customer, it might be a negotiation or something like that, or give somebody an employment offer, I will sell myself first. I will really understand what is the price I want for my product. I have apples for sale. I get to set the price of the apples.

Yeah.

Because they're my apples. The other person can decide if they want to buy the apples. And so you just understand that, and then that way it becomes very simple. It's not actually my problem if it doesn't go through. The other person just didn't, you know, they didn't see it the right—

They didn't decide they wanted the apples.

They were incorrect. They didn't want to, you know.

They were incorrect.

So it's, otherwise it, so I'm never trying to get the most out of something.

Yeah.

You know, I'm trying to get the right value.

The right value.

Yeah.

That's still a challenge for many of us.

Oh yeah, that's a challenge.

Most of us tend to back off because we don't want to blow the deal. Yeah. We don't want to lose the logo. So I think we all leave, a lot on the table until we get help.

I leave a lot— leaving on the table is fine, but selling it for not knowing what you think something is worth, that's not fine.

That's not fine.

Especially because when you're making a product, the price you set will determine how good your product is, right? It's self-fulfilling.

It is self-fulfilling.

Yeah, because it's the expectation. Am I building A premium product that's great, well that should cost a little more and the money will come in and you'll just, that's the expectation. Of course this product's, of course I can't accept anything wrong with this product. Do you know how much we're charging for this? I can't accept anything wrong. This is a premium product. So it just starts—

I think the better your team is, the more you should anchor high because you can deliver that, that the best solution in the market.

Yeah, it starts with— the CEO, actually. Are you going to make something that's great or not? And then if it's great, it must have value, and you have to assign the value. So I guess I've always felt strongly about that.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] So let's talk a little bit about where we started, because I want to dig in on sort of multiple products. So you've got 3 lines now, right? I want to talk about some of the stuff we talked about before. We had Jeff Lawson from Twilio out here, which is throw teams of 5 on it, see if it works, see if it doesn't break. We had yesterday, we had the CEO of Trello talking about, that's a spin-out from a company called Fog Creek, and seeing where it breaks. But you and I didn't, when do you add a product line, right? What's your view on this?

[Speaker] Well, so we're in this enterprise software, which is slightly different, right? We're selling to these large customers, and they're really running their business on it, So it's a little bit different. You have to be a little more measured. But what I always think about is a company usually starts up from a product, right? You have a product idea, and wow, I find some product market fit, right? And it starts growing. And then my company is my product, and my product is my company. The two things are intertwined, and that's the stage. Many, many companies fail or become suboptimal when they break that, when they say, I'm going to really start another product line. Not an add-on product or something like that. But this is like Amazon saying, I'm in e-commerce, now I'm in web services.

Yeah. That seemed crazy at the time.

Web services is not an add-on product to e-commerce, right? So when you decide, I really want to make something big and different, two things. One is, it should be bigger than the first thing you're doing.

Yeah, that's the side I love. If it's not bigger, is it worth your time?

Yeah, is it worth your time? And then you have to realize when you do that, you're breaking apart your product processes from your company processes. And that's super, super, super hard. And it took Veeva about 3 or 4 years, and it's just persistent effort. And a lot of times you can fail at that. So I think, really realize that. When's the right time to become a real multi-product company? Pick a clear market that's clearly big. You won't know if it's correct until later. There's no way. We say pick clear and correct markets. You won't know if it's correct until later. But if you can't write down, this is what I'm making, this is who I'm going to sell it to, this is roughly how many people I can sell it to, and this is roughly the price I want to get, then you don't have a clear market.

Yeah.

So I think it's possible to know if you have a clear market. And correct, I don't worry about because it's It's impossible to know.

Yeah, because we were talking before, it's the easy choices that is the adjacent product that clearly attaches, but ultimately is a smaller market than your core market, right? That's the one, that's the easy—

That's the trap.

That's the easy ones to grab. That's the trap, right?

It's a trap, because when you think about it, you're going to get that anyway.

Yeah, one way or the other.

Yeah, so that's not aggressive, and sometimes if you focus on those, you can lose the intellectual capital or the mojo You get busy and you pat yourself on the back for, "I'm doing that little thing. I'm doing that thing and that thing's a big thing." Okay, well, how big is it? Put a number on it. Well, okay, it's not as big as the original thing we're doing. Okay, well, don't kid yourself.

Yeah.

But you have to be ready though too. You don't want to be reckless. Like if you don't have the financial capital or the intellectual capital in yourself or your management team or the energy, you know, don't take tackle something that's obviously way too big, because then you'll let people down.

Is— now is— let me ask you a really good question, then let's talk about money just briefly. Is capital an excuse to not do something that's big? How much money did Veeva raise again?

We raised $7 million, we only used $3 million.

Okay, you only used $3 million.

Yeah, we only used $3 million.

You burned $3 million for a night. So sometimes when I hear capital as an excuse, I wonder if the root cause is something else.

Well, I think it clearly depends on the business. Some type of business, or you're building a semiconductor factory, I think you—

That, that, that—

You do that without capital, and then you wouldn't be following the herd, that's for sure. But I think, so it depends on the business, and then you have to be, you know, intentional, and scarcity of capital can help you. You have to have enough, but you shouldn't have too much. You have to have enough to hire people to dedicate on it. That's all you need.

You do need that.

Yeah, you need that. Dedicated people.

And so for like Vault, what was the initial core team size?

Oh, you know, again, Vault, Vault was starting off and it was nothing at first before we hired our first person, right? So we only had quarterly goals for Vault for the first year and a half of it. And the rule was get to a dozen great people as quickly as you can and then After that, figure out what would be next.

So it was get to a dozen.

Got it.

That was the first, first base.

Why a dozen? I think it's a good set of people that can kind of work together and be multidisciplinary software and engineering product management strategy. It's sort of a cohesive group.

Yeah.

So it was get to a dozen, and hey, if we get there, figure it out, what's next.

That's good.

No long-term plan. But it was get to a dozen quick. It wasn't like, "Hey, let's get 3 people." Because otherwise it's a distraction. Yeah. Right? So we didn't have enough money to hire a dozen great people. We shouldn't have started to do anything. Yeah.

So let's just chat for a minute on that capital efficiency. It's such a visceral thing we could spend all our time on it, but you did only burn $3 million, right? So what are the learnings there? And I don't think it's all '08 and '09, although I suspect that's a little bit of it, right?

Oh, I don't actually think it had anything to do with '08 or '09.

Right, but you're still crushing it then anyway.

Well, the thing is, when we started out, I had a lot of pressure from people, including early investors and stuff, spend more, spend more, spend more. I had a lot of pressure on that. I was the guy who just didn't get it. I just didn't get it.

I didn't get it either.

They were saying spend more, and they were convinced I was the guy who just didn't get it. I was too conservative. But that's OK. You get all kinds of outside pressure. And you have no chance for being great if all you're doing is following the herd, right? So I thought it wasn't right. I thought, no, I think it's good to have top line and bottom line. And I don't want to take any more money because then I'll dilute the company. Why would I do that?

Why would you do it?

So I just sort of, hey, we have what— you know when you're making software, they would always say, hey, change the scope or the investment or the schedule, right? But don't change them all at once. I thought, well, we have the capital we have, don't change that scope. Make a profitable business in the capital we have. And that's easier. It's less decisions to make. And so we set that discipline and that just became what the thing, you know, that's just what we did.

Now I want to dig into a little bit more, but just from the physics of cash, doing bigger deals that prepay annually probably helped at the margin.

Yeah.

I mean, because your customers did fund you.

Yeah, they did.

Right?

Two things funded us, yes. Making that product— so don't waste any hire, right? I mean, don't waste any money. Be frugal. Get the product out quick, and sell it for a good price to as big a customer you can. Don't be too reckless, but just thread that needle. We also didn't give away our people. We had professional services. and we didn't give, we had a rule very early.

That's a good thing to chat about briefly.

Very early in the company.

I gave it away. You didn't give it away.

Very early. I always had this mantra that, look, if our, if our people are not worth the customer paying for them, then they're not actually worth anything. Because if they're worthwhile, the customer will pay for them. So that was a rule. Hey, you don't give away professional services.

Services have to be accretive.

Yeah. If the, what about if the deal was gonna tank? Well, then I guess the deal's gonna tank because the one thing we're doing is not giving away professional services. So that's a, that's just a rule.

Yeah. So then that is because if you look, I haven't done the scientific study, but if you look at a lot of companies when they go public, services are loss leaders, right? They lose, it's negative 20% margin. You can't do it, you can't do 60 on it, but if you can make it cash flow positive, especially in the early days, that's, that's a bit of magic.

It is, it is.

And the customers will pay if they get the value. Well, they don't really push back if the value is there, right?

No, they don't, because they're generally rational, right? They— if they can get more value from that person, then they'll do it. And you have to look at yourself. If your services are not profitable, gosh, why, why cannot I make valuable enough services? Why do, why do our services cost less than the cost of our people? What am I doing wrong? Yeah, and it's the pressures on you. Now, if you So it's very simple. I view it as a problem if we can't sell services because we're doing something wrong.

Yeah, I think we all, you didn't, I made this mistake, a lot of us do, is we just want the customers to be happy, right? And so subsidizing services is a natural thing to do because if you don't provide good services it's even worse, isn't it?

Yeah.

Bad services is worse than not even closing the deal sometimes.

Right, absolutely. But you just have to understand, hey, I'm selling a product. A product comes with a certain amount of service. It might, it might come with customer support, or it might come with training, or whatever you decide it comes with. Okay, you don't charge for that. But there's some things that it doesn't come with. And if you want that, you pay for that. And you just lay it out real clearly, and that helps you operate.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] So one last question about money, and then I want to talk about stages. So you talked about in the early days when you started to take off, the investors wanted you to raise more money to go faster, right? That comes in and out of fashion. You resisted that, and then usually there's another time as you start to scale, whether it's $20 million, $30 million, when you really, when you wanted to, you want to get ahead of the curve, and also sometimes your efficiencies kind of, your inefficiencies increase, right? Sales efficiency goes down, you want to start doing more on brand and other marketing that isn't ROI positive. Was there a moment in time there when you wanted to step on it more, or was it still It's still organic.

No, there was no moment in time where I wanted to step on it more, because I always thought, gosh, if we're building a lasting company, a lasting company should have a, sort of a reasonable profit margin.

One would hope. Software used to be really profitable in the old days, didn't it? Yeah, well, time is rain cash back in the days.

In the long term, like you go back the last 1,000 years, I mean, that has been the trend. Profitable businesses, they stay in business. Unprofitable doesn't, overall. Capitalism for you. But I always thought, "God, it's sort of like a drug. If I get on that nonprofit drug, like, when am I going to get off of it?" and stuff. So it just seemed like, "Nah, you don't do that. That's not the way to do it." So no, I was never tempted. I was pushed, right? On the IPO roadshow, and then people would say, "Hey, well, you've got X number of salespeople, 50. Why don't you just hire 50 more?" You know you'll grow 50 times as, you'll grow twice as fast.

Occasionally that works, but not usually.

I just, it didn't make sense. Okay, well if we're running a profitable business, that was just not in the parameter. So we just, it's not important that you do all things or all things that everybody wants to do, but as a CEO you have to decide, hey, what are you gonna do? Which I don't know, we decided to do a certain thing. It's not that it's the best thing, the best thing to do or it's the only way to do it, but we just said, "Hey, we're running a profitable business," and we thought that was good, and that's a parameter, and so that's that.

There's sort of two models that people come and ask. Does revenue drive headcount, or does headcount drive revenue? It sounds like you're squarely in the former camp, that you derive headcount from revenue.

No, no. I actually drive revenue from headcount, but I make sure I have enough stocked away. Any revenue that generated in Viva is because of people.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah. And you gotta, you gotta hire those. If you want revenue 4 years from now, you gotta hire those people now.

Yeah.

Right. We're starting up a brand new, probably our biggest product area to date. And this year we hired 30 people. Those people produce real good revenue for Viva 4 or 5 years down the road. That's when that'll be 100%. $100+ million business, but you gotta hire 'em now. Revenue follows the people.

How do you think, related to that, how do you think about how many of your sales team should perform? How do you think about that? Do you believe in that bell-shaped distribution?

In terms of salespeople?

Yeah. If you're waiting 4 years for them to perform, it's terrible if you have that attrition, isn't it?

Yeah. No, I'm really thinking more about the product, the ingredients and the product people. That's like a Soup that has a—

They start to hit their stride.

A product has a 4-year cooking cycle, right? It's the soup. They're like, oh my god, I want to eat it 4 years from now. I've got to start cooking it now?

Really?

That's not good. But yeah, product takes a long time. With sales, we have a philosophy that we say we don't overcover. So we want to leave top-line revenue on the table. We don't want to get all the top-line revenue, because if we push all the way for that, we will get some inefficiencies, and that's not so good. But also, we will get bad customer feeling.

Yeah.

Because a desperate rep will do desperate things, and the rep's in front of the customer, and they'll feel it.

You don't want those desperate things, do you?

No, because for us, we have many customers that are, you know, they're over— well over $20 million a year customers from us. Do we want them ever Having some relationships, right? Yeah, this is— these are 20-year relationships. Do we want somebody in there saying, I got to close this thing on my quarter because of my commission, and I don't really care that you're paying us $20 million a year? So the way you do that is you, you don't— you sacrifice top-line revenue, and you don't put too many reps on there. So then the rep is not desperate.

But let's, let's unpack that, because that's, that's something we all think about, right? As founders, the work— we don't want a bad customer experience during sales. So we struggle with this yin and yang, right? So what does that mean? Does that mean that the effective quotas are lower, or does that mean it's okay to miss a quarter as long as you make the annual plan? How do you productize?

The way I do it is I always think, um, undercover on reps, quota and everything that comes out, right? I always want to know I'm hiring slightly fewer salespeople and I'm sacrificing some top-line revenue in the short term. Then after that, the quota just comes out of the annual plan. How much do we think we're going to sell? How many people do we have? I think as long as you don't overcover with reps, salespeople are internally motivated. They're going to want to sell more. I've never been a—

Yeah, the overcover, I call it lead poor, but overcover is maybe a better way to put it. There's an incentive over time to just overcover, and that does get you the extra nickel. It does get you the extra nickel.

It does. That's right.

It has a cost.

It has a cost. The cost is you get sort of going on that drug a little bit. But also, if you're in a business like ours, it's probably unique to ours. If we were just selling payroll to thousands of companies, who cares?

Might still be a 20-year relationship though.

Might be, but this is a deep one, like $20 million a year relationship. The CEOs of these companies really know us, and they expect something.

Yeah, this is one of the biggest bets they're they're gonna make their career in software, right?

Yeah, and it affects the IT and the business side. So you just can't afford that. It's more of a long-term relationship, like for example Morgan Stanley in the banking business, right? It's a long-term relationship that they want, and they don't wanna sub-optimize little interaction here or there. So that's, we learned this stuff as we went along. That would be very unique to sort of Viva and our large customers.

Interesting on that one question, quickly I want to get to some other stuff, but when you said $20 million, my limited experience in a Fortune 500 software company, what I learned is pricing's relative on these big deals. There were two pieces of software, I won't name names, but one you might have used to work at, and it was like $20 million a year, and then there was another product, which I won't name at all, that was almost as important, but it wasn't for sales, it was for another group, And that was $18 million, right? And if you think about who's gonna, like the one that's almost as important, but they're just bits, right? And in the day it may cost as much to ship this Google Doc I'm looking at as that software, right? So do you find that's true that it's, I mean, Viva can do these bigger deals, but it's because it's one of the most, it's a system of record, it's a system of managing customers. This is one of the most important things that your customers are gonna buy, right? Is it relative at some level?

At the end of the day, over the long term, it'll be relative to two things. What is your competition out there? Right? Because, OK, somebody else has something exactly as good as yours, and they're going to sell it for— [Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] If it's direct.

[Speaker:BILL BRYANT] Yeah.

That's one thing. And then the other thing, it's related to the value. You can't sell it for more value than it provides the customer. Over the long term, you can't. So the things that we sell that are quite expensive, they're probably automating and increasing the efficiency of thousands of people, right? So that's, that's pretty important now that that adds up, right? A good example, one system we sell is about collaborating around clinical trials for a life sciences company. They might, a big one might have 5,000 people around the globe collaborating on these trials in a very specific business process to get the drug approved. It really— so that's a big expense, 4,000 people. If they don't have a good system for getting that done, their efficiency goes down. And if they make mistakes, they might not get their drug approved. And that's hundreds of millions of dollars.

Hundreds of millions.

Yeah, it is, right? So you have to pick a problem worth solving that's hard, right?

My guess is I just hadn't thought, but that $20 million, it's so similar to these other $20 million price points I saw. Living in the Fortune 500, that it wouldn't surprise me that that would be an organic price point that if you provided enough value, right, you would end up at. But $200 million might be tough, right?

Well, thing is, we have no one thing that's $20 million, right? We have lots of things.

Of course not. But it's an interesting—

it's an interesting— They add up. I don't like to— I always like to focus on the value. I do think it's interesting. We're making life sciences more efficient. I can feel that only in the little 10 years that we've been operating.

Yeah.

And it, it actually makes a difference. It makes— many people out here will, you know, 1 in 10 people gets a rare disease in their life, and to varying degrees of seriousness, right? And far less than half of them have effective cures.

Wow.

So it's kind of— it makes a difference, you know. It's pretty cool. If you ever have a person that you know and they don't get the right medicine, and then they do. They get the right medicine. You can see that difference. A lot of times that medicine was already approved 3 or 4 years ago, but somehow that person wasn't taking it. That's the inefficiency of the system. The life sciences company makes less money, and the patient's not well. We're trying to make that better. Yeah. And that's a ton of value.

It's huge value.

It is. It's a great place to work. I guess that's why I work there.

Do you hire folks that are mission-driven around that? Does it resonate with the average hire now? Or is it—

You know—

Or are they joining a software company?

Honestly, I think we're just growing into the mission. At first, like I said, at first, the start of the company, the mission was, let's not go out of business this quarter. That's the vision.

That was the vision.

But now we're realizing our place in the world. We can really affect change. We are respected as a company that can do what we say we're going to do. And life sciences trust us. Now we have a responsibility. So I think increasingly we are getting more mission-driven. And it's really fun to see. That's like the transformation of Veeva. Right? We're becoming more mission-driven.

But that isn't— you get more mission-driven over time. Right? You can find your bigger mission over time. Time, right?

Yeah.

You start off this atomized level and, uh, and so let's tie that into one topic. I want to hit two things to make sure we don't run out of time. So let's talk about how, and we can even just start right there, how the stages of EVA we chatted about before. So now you're thinking about how to build a 100-year company, right?

Yeah.

Does that seem crazy looking back? Uh, it's 10 years ago. Could you, did you even think that at the founding? Did you think about building a 100-year company?

Again, I'm not, you were thinking about one quarter back then. Yeah, I'm real honest about that. I thought, gosh, I, I don't want to go out of business. And if we don't go out of business, then it'll be good. We'll have time to figure out what to do. Then the other inflection point was about 2010 when we really had to look at ourselves, the management team. Do we really want to become a multi-product company? Once you do that, you either crash the car or you make it big. Most likely—

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Could have been a little smaller but more focused.

[Speaker:MICHAEL R. SLOANE] Yeah, a little smaller, maybe got public, got bought by somebody, product as a company, but we decided decided in 2010, uh, we can do it. We thought we could do it. Multi-product company, which that means you're sort of on your way to a billion dollars.

Yeah.

Um, so that was a big phase. And now this phase is we're starting to think about mission-driven digital disruption. How do we really help you guys get into the clinical trial you, you need to get into, which, you know, that's pretty important if you can, both for the patient and for the life sciences company. Yeah. How can you get in the clinical trial? How can you get the right medicine? How can your doctor know about the right medicine? So that's the phase. But I would say one of the things I could— maybe I could talk about execution a little bit because I think that's underrated. If we have time enough to go into that one.

Sure.

It's, you know, I can maybe talk like a visionary or something like that, but I'm a Swiss American. I like trains to run on time. My parents were Swiss. It's it's sort of ingrained, right? Do things the right way. My dad, I don't know how many times he used to say, I'd go to him and say, hey dad, is that good enough? He'd say every time, good enough is not good enough. Meaning, if you're asking me the question, it obviously ain't good enough. So I like the execution part. And it starts with picking those clear and correct target markets. That's number one. But as you scale, as you get to about 150, 200, 300 people, past Dunbar's number, past the number of people that you can know. It's this engaged teams working together. That's a core, you'll hear everybody at Viva saying that, engaged teams working together. How do I know in my company who's supposed to do what?

Yeah.

And this culture of managers, I trust that other team. I manage my team. which is counterintuitive, right? People want to say, "Hey, I got my team. I got my team." We rail against those words. That's not your team. That is the team that you manage. My sales— head of sales is not on the sales team. He's on my team, and he trusts the services team, but he manages his sales team. So this engaged teams working together is really key. We actually developed an app on that because I couldn't We couldn't find anything to help us do that. So we developed an internal app. Yeah, it's called Org Wiki. You can find it out there. You can subscribe to it if you want. That's— it's been a key to our growth. And then lastly, I will say, we say execution matters most. All that other stuff is hoo-ha. I spend 90% of my time executing. What am I going to do today, this week, this month, this year? Write down a plan, execute the plan, measure yourself to a plan. Execution matters most, and over the long term, any good idea gets copied. Yeah, but execution is enduring. So if you start to see yourself growing, execution will matter most at the end of the day. And it's hard, and it's maybe not sexy, but it's the thing that will separate you. There's a downside of capitalism, meaning there's no free lunch. If you want to be great, you have to execute.

You do have to execute. So one last thing, we're over, and then, or one and a half last things, but related to that, so you spend how much of your time in execution, you said? 90-some-odd?

Yeah, probably 90.

I think you told me every 3 weeks you try to take a break, right?

Yeah.

And meet with someone to challenge your thinking. Yeah. Tell us quickly how you do that, 'cause that's a great takeaway if we can all do that.

We use this term, we have a vocabulary, we call it the adjacent possible, a bar—

Adjacent possible.

Adjacent possible.

I like this adjacent possible. It's gonna be our next book. Alright, just stolen this today. Last one was "From Impossible to Inevitable." The first is—

It means take some time, about every 3 weeks I take about a day, and I usually go to San Francisco or I'm in some other place, and I meet with people that are outside of my daily routine but somehow adjacent. So it might be somebody that's starting a software company that's focused on banking. Yes. Or hospitals, or any number of things, or somebody making a medical device, or a physicist or an actual doctor or something like that, and I just force myself to talk to them and be open because otherwise you become myopic as a CEO.

You become myopic. Sitting in conference rooms, meeting with the same customers.

Adjacent possible is a way to bridge. When a chemist talks to a physicist, something might happen. But if the chemist only talks to the chemist, that thing ain't gonna happen. So you gotta make time for that and enjoy it. Enjoy that.

Yeah, I love it. All right, everyone, let's give it up for Peter Gassner. I think we may have one memento of the— do we have a memento backstage of the 10th anniversary of Viva? We may, we may not. Let's see. Do we have a cheesy memento? We may or may not. Bring out the memento. Roll the prop.

Oh, there we go.

All right, hold on. We just have to have one toast for year 10 and then we will take a coffee break.

Aha. So what color do you like? Yeah, I always never follow the herd.

We can take two. All right, cheers. Congratulations, Peter. Thank you very much.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you.