A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about funding?

Peter Gassner: We had funding from angel investors. We started off with $3 million. Then we said, “This is good, but we need some funding from outside. We were looking for validation and professional funding, and the things that a VC could bring.” We raised $4 million. We thought we needed the money, but it turns out we didn’t actually need that money. We never actually dipped into that $4 million. The sales came faster than we thought. I didn’t know what I was doing there, and I got lucky.

Sramana Mitra: How did Emergence find you? At that time, Emergence was just starting to evolve. I’ve known them for a long time. I’m friends with Brian Jacobs.

Peter Gassner: There’s a funny story there. We were raising funds in 2008, which wasn’t the prime time for fundraising. We said, “We’re doing this industry-specific thing.” We’re building on Salesforce. The prevailing wisdom from all the VCs was, “That’s a very small market. You’re building on >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we now?

Joe Kinsella: 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the relationship with Northbridge? Is that the company that had funded the company that you went to work for?

Joe Kinsella: Yes, Northbridge was one of the investors in Silverback. One of the partners there, Jeff McCarthy, was on the Board at Silverback. I looked at two firms for an EIR. I also looked at a newer firm in Boston. I ended up deciding to go with Northbridge.

Sramana Mitra: How did you utilize your EIR time?

Joe Kinsella: I needed the brand to work under. As I started making calls and engaging with people, I had something more than just me as a one-person >>>

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. >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you go work for Dell?

Joe Kinsella: I did. I like to tell people that I spent three years at Dell, two of which I can explain because I was under a contract. I wasn’t sure why I stayed the third year. Dell is a great company, but I’m a software person.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a hardware company.

Joe Kinsella: It’s better now. I noticed this morning, they actually sold out their software group. At that time, it was really hard because I think they were trying to morph from system integrator DNA into hardware DNA. There was a very early form of that software group where Dell was doing acquisitions on a steady basis. One of the West Coast companies that was acquired was Evergreen. They had a whole series of SaaS acquisitions. >>>

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? >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 2)

Joe Kinsella: From there, I decided that I wanted to start a business. I started a company called Tarragon. I wanted to build out a tools business. It ended up being more of a consulting services business. I wasn’t able to balance the consulting and software side. I built a small team of people. We would build backend infrastructure for the fast-growing dot-com businesses. I did that for several years.

I do combined equity deals with companies. Some of them are successful and some are moderately successful. There were some that were not so successful. It was a great experience. From there, one of my clients was a company called Silverback Technologies. >>>

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. >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 1)

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Joe founded CloudHealth as an EIR at a Boston VC firm. Last year the SaaS company had 300 customers. The story explores how he achieved product market fit and found its stride.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Joe Kinsella: I grew up in a little town outside of Syracuse, New York. It’s just a little urban town out in the middle of nowhere. I spent my life right through college in the New York area. I took a Computer Science degree. I noticed that there were a lot of tech companies in Boston and San Francisco. I put a lot of thought into it and decided to head out to Boston and started looking for a job. >>>