A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 6)

Peter Gassner: The thing that most people thought why it wouldn’t be good was that they’d say, “Hey, there are no big companies doing pharmaceutical CRM. Therefore, it’s not possible to build a big company doing it. What do you mean you will build your product on somebody else’s platform? Nobody had done that before. By the way, don’t you know that nobody would be able to buy you other than the company you’re building the platform on. There’s no exit. This is an absolute dead end.”

I didn’t take that as discouragement. I took that as encouragement. By the way, the guys who started Peoplesoft made this big bet. They were going to develop this client server on OS2. People thought, “You’re crazy. You make money on mainframe software. You don’t make money peddling around on this other thing.” They had to pivot, but they made it. >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you find traction? In building the product for the pharmaceutical industry, how did you scope the product? Did you have some anchor customers?

Peter Gassner: This wasn’t that complex really. This was pharmaceutical CRM. We just decided to go there. It’s a known area and these companies had systems for it. Either they were custom-made or they bought it from customized vendors.

Sramana Mitra: What’s special about pharmaceutical CRM that is dramatically different from a Salesforce system? >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you came back, how did you re-engage with the working life?

Peter Gassner: It was just a matter of deciding. That was the first decision. I also wanted to do something I was good at. I didn’t want to open a coffee shop and compete with a 23-year-old who knew as much about coffee as I did, but had five times the energy. It’s not that I was motivated by winning, but I didn’t like losing.

Sramana Mitra: Later on in life, you want to do stuff that you have some mastery over. You don’t want to start from scratch and learn everything and operate at baby level.

Peter Gassner: You want to have a flow. >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the trigger to leave Peoplesoft?

Peter Gassner: The management team had changed at Peoplesoft. I had started as a developer there. At the end of nine years, I was handling a team of 500 people. I worked hard there. I loved the team I assembled. Then, the management team changed. Culture changed a bit. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. This happens slowly. Then the industry became a consolidation industry rather than an innovation industry. I’m an innovator. When people are innovative and they don’t have an area to innovate, they get frustrated. I’ve seen this in many people.

I didn’t realize it but I was slowly becoming more frustrated and little less aligned to the cultural changes. I was slowly getting less satisfied in my work. I just woke up at one point to the fact that I don’t feel like I want to bring new people into this company. That was the trigger. I had to make a change because I can’t keep my >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did IBM figure out, given that you have a strange background from their perspective, that you would be good at this stuff?

Peter Gassner: My first internship was at IBM.

Sramana Mitra: They noted you then.

Peter Gassner: Yes, “That’s a kid that can work hard. He gets work done. He’s got work ethic.” That doesn’t go unnoticed. By hiring me, they knew I was able to work hard.

Sramana Mitra: That makes sense. They had some validity with your work and then you come back after graduation. Five years later, the Internet is now coming to the marketplace. What happens next? >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Also, what you have going in your favour is that the market is starting to understand that on the Internet, content is the brand. I think that understanding is going to drive further and further into the industry in general.

Yaron Galai: I don’t view Facebook as being in the business of social networks because I don’t remember when I last paid my social networking fees, so I do view Facebook and Twitter as content discovery. The social folks side is a category that’s in the more specific content recommendation. It’s a category that’s becoming meaningful. I think the companies in the space were certainly over a billion dollars in revenue between them this year. Outbrain is the category leader and the leader on most of the parameters that matter.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve talked to a lot of publishers who have terrible monetization. I’m sure most of them are your clients. There are sites >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The publishers are paying a lot more than $10 a month.

Yaron Galai: We kept it, initially, at $10 a month but it couldn’t sustain them that way. The publishers said, “If you let us pay on a per-click basis, then we know exactly how many audience we get.” We pivoted on the pricing model as well. That all started working and going up. For the next couple of years, 100% of our revenues were from publishers.

Sramana Mitra: What scale did that reach with just publishers?

Yaron Galai: Probably closer to $10 million. >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Computer Science is not ambiguous. It’s clear and logical. Part of the thing that I’ve observed at this point in my life, having seen a little bit of life, is that there is a lot of ambiguity and a lot of lack in logic in how human beings operate. I’m a very rational, logical thinker so I have a hard time dealing with people who behave in irrational ways.

Peter Gassner: I would also say that I’m a late bloomer intellectually. Some get to most of their intellectual potential very early. By the time they’re 22, their brains are fully developed. I was a late developer in intellectual capacity. Especially in my high school and college years, I was focusing on things I understood. I read Moby Dick in high school, but I couldn’t conceptualize the idea of mortality or anything like that. I wasn’t thinking that deeply.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after college then? >>>