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? >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The ratings and the Internet recommendations were free. There were no monetization model around any of that?

Yaron Galai: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: The first monetization effort was with the paid recommendation of external content into these larger publishers. What was wrong? Why did the first iteration fail? >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 1)

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Peter Gassner is a self-described late bloomer. In a wonderfully authentic interview, Peter describes here how he turned his middle-age crisis into a multi-billion dollar market cap company. Veeva, in 2016, will do well over $500 million in revenue and trades at a market cap of over $4 billion. There’s nothing foo foo about this company. It’s raw execution. I love the story.

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

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I have three questions as you were relating that portion of the story. It sounds like this is an experimental period. Were you financing this period yourself?

Yaron Galai: Yes. I did finance our early days. I also had a couple of our investors at Quigo.

Sramana Mitra: The second question is the people who were putting your recommendation or rating button on their sites, how did you distribute? How did you get to them? How were they finding out about you? What were the ways of recruiting this army of sites?

Yaron Galai: The reason why we decided on top RSS readers to focus on bloggers was exactly that. We needed distribution for this. We said, “What better way than journalists that can both use it on their own sites and also talk about it?” Bloggers read bloggers. We thought that was a great way to do it. Our first KPI for the entire company, before we focused on revenues and click-through rates, was how many times does a blogger write about us in a positive way. >>>