Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Gassner: Veeva raised $7M total and never spent its Emergence Capital Series A

Peter Gassner · Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired · May 19, 2022 · at 7:46

Peter Gassner, CEO and founder of Veeva Systems, details Veeva's early fundraising history prior to its IPO at the Emergence Capital CEO Summit.

0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Peter Gassner

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
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, nearly 80 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.