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Peter Gassner

Founder & CEO, Veeva Systems · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineerveeva.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Peter Gassner co-founded Veeva Systems in 2007, pioneering vertical industry cloud software and building the company into the primary operating system for the global life sciences and pharmaceutical sectors. Before founding Veeva, he served as Senior Vice President of Technology at Salesforce and held senior technical leadership roles at PeopleSoft and IBM.

14statements → 5claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓

2 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 1 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 7 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Peter argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Gassner: Pfizer was Veeva's first multi-million dollar annual contract
“The first multi-million dollar annual deals were a big customer, Pfizer, and, ah, it was just hand-to-hand combat.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 27:28 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Gassner: Veeva Vault has 5x to 10x the potential of Veeva CRM
“The second one is a bit bigger but the second one has also quite a bit more potential. You know, maybe it's a five X or 10 X potential.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 58:29 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Peter Gassner on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Peter Gassner said on Acquired that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Gassner: Outlier success requires pursuing ideas most people expect to fail
“You have to pick something that most people think is going to fail to be an outlier. Otherwise, by definition, you're picking something that most people think is going to work, and therefore a lot of people are picking it, therefore you're not an outlier.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 15:42 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Insight
Gassner: Multi-year lock-in discounts shrink SaaS market size and breed complacency
“Cause I was always optimizing for the longterm value, which is the annual value per customer. So if I had to give the customer terms that would lock them in, I thought that's actually shrinking my market. Cause they'll pay less if they're locked in. That's one…”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 32:31 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Insight
Gassner: A company's second product should be radically distinct, not an add-on
“Your new product, if you have a chance, it should be way out here, and maybe have the potential to be bigger.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 58:18 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gassner: Veeva's initial prospective customers rejected the idea but later all bought
“I talked to three or four potential customers for our first product, and they all said, we don't need that. You know, that's not interesting. It's not a good thing to do, but I wasn't listening for that. I was listening. Are they emotionally attached to where …”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 16:56 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Gassner: Veeva funded early development via a $3M upfront Pfizer payment
“I thought, oh, we've just raised a three million dollar round of capital here and it didn't cost us any dilution, right? The check came in.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 29:07 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Insight
Gassner: High market share companies must expand to avoid disruptive over-engineering
“If you get a high market share in an area, and you don't expand to another area, what will happen? Just because the nature of your company and the creative people, You'll do more stuff in your established area than you should, right? And that creates its own s…”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 53:37 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Disclosure
Gassner: Veeva audits executive team for integrity and energy
“We audit for integrity of the leadership team, because when you're quite well established, that can throw you off. Integrity, integrity issues in the leadership team, so we audit myself and others, and also energy in the leadership team. Because these are thin…”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 54:31 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Assertion Contradicted
Gassner: Veeva Vault has 5x to 10x the potential of Veeva CRM
“The second one is a bit bigger but the second one has also quite a bit more potential. You know, maybe it's a five X or 10 X potential.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 58:29 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Disclosure
Gassner: Veeva raised $7M total and never spent its Emergence Capital Series A
“Angel investors, I think that was three million, and Emergence was four million. We never actually used the Emergence four million, but I thought we might at the time, and we got to him within about a 100,000 of using it, and then we went public.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 7:46 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Insight
Gassner: Cash-generating businesses always retain value while unprofitable ones eventually reach zero
“Cash generating business is always going to be valuable to somebody. At some point, a business that's not cash generating is going to be valuable to nobody, right? You might be able to sell it before it becomes It, you know, not valuable, but you can only, the…”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 14:03 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Insight
Gassner: Hiring optional employees burns startup cash and complicates decision-making
“In the early days, there's no wasted people, like no optional people, no wasted people, because it just adds a, it'll burn through your money and it'll just make your decision making smaller and sorry, more complicated. It's like sand in the machine.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 25:01 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Assertion Supported
Gassner: Pfizer was Veeva's first multi-million dollar annual contract
“The first multi-million dollar annual deals were a big customer, Pfizer, and, ah, it was just hand-to-hand combat.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 27:28 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Insight
Gassner: Spending $100K on account relationships pays off with massive cross-sell potential
“It's fine for us to spend a 100,000 dollars a year maintaining free relationships and just putting into developing relationships. That's not wasteful. So because we have a lot of, we're showing up the door with a hundred million dollars worth of product. So if…”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 34:09 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Assertion Supported
Gassner: Veeva generates about $2B in revenue at ~30% profit margin
“We're doing about two billion, about 30% profit or so.”
Peter Gassner May 19, 2022 ▶ 8:44 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired

The other half of the tape: Peter Gassner's own voice is left out of every number here. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Statements about Peter Gassner, by other people (2)

Opinion
Rosenthal: Zoom's massive cash flow stems from capital-efficient DNA, not pandemic hype
“They're two of the greatest of all time. Literally two of the goats at this, which is so funny. You know, now everybody thinks of Zoom as the, you know, pandemic, you know, high flyer, and it's like, I was just thinking every time over the last few years, like…”
David Rosenthal May 19, 2022 ▶ 1:08:05 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
Insight
Yuan: Not building a second product years before IPO was Zoom's biggest mistake
“If you wanted to have new service, you cannot have a new service today, right? You need to think about, you know, trying to make a decision two or three years, you know, before that, right? That's, I clearly remember that conversation. You know, that's why, th…”
Eric Yuan May 19, 2022 ▶ 55:53 Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired May 19, 2022 17m
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