It’s safe to say that Veeva is not a household name, but 10 years ago this month the company launched the first of a set of enterprise tools, like content..<\/b>
It\u2019s safe to say that Veeva is not a household name, but 10 years ago this month the company launched the first of a set of enterprise tools, like content management and CRM, designed for the unique requirements of the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.
You have to remember, this was a fairly revolutionary notion a decade ago when very few companies were running enterprise software in the cloud, except perhaps for Salesforce. \u201cStarting Veeva, I had the idea or vision you could make very industry-specific software in the cloud and it would be bigger than anyone would have thought. In 2007, [most] people thought that was incorrect,\u201d company founder and CEO Peter Gassner told TechCrunch.
That\u2019s putting it mildly. In 2007, most people had no concept of cloud software, let alone in a regulated industry like life sciences, but Gassner and his co-founders firmly believed that they had a sound idea and that it would be successful.
The company pushed the bounds of conventional thinking even further by building Veeva on top of Salesforce\u2019s fledgling development platform , Force.com.
It\u2019s not a coincidence that Gassner came out of Salesforce in 2007 where he helped build that very platform, meaning he probably knew how to build software on Force.com better than anyone at that time. One of the company\u2019s earliest backers was Gordon Ritter, founder and general partner at Emergence Capital, who saw potential where most investors saw pitfalls. Emergence invested $4 million into Veeva in June, 2008.
\u201cEveryone else was looking at Veeva with a knee jerk reaction: \u2018This can\u2019t be done.\u2019 They were forgetting that Peter built the platform and that he knew the details and knew the internals and how to strike the right balance to take advantage of the platform,\u201d he said.
Ritter was willing to take a chance when many investors were put off by what they saw as a risk of using the cloud in a regulated setting like life sciences. \u201cPeter and the team had a unique way of mitigating those risks,\u201d Ritter said.
Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said that the state of software in the life sciences industry back in 2007 consisted of ancient companies making software that was hard to use. People were actually hungry for a better solution and Veeva came along with a bold idea to sell software in the cloud. They were able to show that they could handle the security concerns of the industry, while building a CRM tool sales people would actually use, Wang said.
\u201cVeeva succeeded at a time where existing tools, perceptions of regulatory hurdles and a nascent cloud seemed to be an unlikely bet. Yet building a product that met the unique needs of pharma sales people, betting on the Force.com platform, and strong vertical expertise eventually helped them break out and lead an industry vertical within the Salesforce ecosystem,\u201d Wang explained.
Gassner admitted it wasn\u2019t always an easy sell early on, and he just had to trust that the technology was good enough. He believed if they could get one company at a time to buy in, they could build on that, and of course that happened \u2014 but there were trying times at the beginning.
\u201cI remember in the early days of Veeva, we started selling CRM. A guy [from the customer\u2019s team] stood up and said, \u2018we have more people in this meeting than you have in your company. Why are we even talking?\u2019 I just answered it truthfully that we have great people making great technology and this is a chance.\u201d
That kind of negativity was actually all-encompassing, except internally and with the early investors. People said that his whole vision was wrong, that focusing on a vertical in the cloud was a bad strategy and building on someone else\u2019s platform (Force.com) was even crazier. Gassner was told that this approach would limit his ability to exit.
He never listened to the naysayers. He believed in his vision, as any good startup founder should, and the company has grown and thrived. What\u2019s more, it did eventually exit, going public in 2013 , raising $217 million in its IPO with a market cap of $2.4 billion. Today, with close to $600 million in yearly revenue, the company has set a $1 billion revenue goal , and the market cap has grown to over $6 billion.
In Gassner\u2019s view the negativity was just proof that he was doing something that nobody else was doing. \u201cI wasn\u2019t [ever] discouraged. I was encouraged. If you are doing something that most people think is impossible, but you think it could be possible,\u2026then you are ahead of the game.\u201d His company proved that to be the case.<\/p>\n