Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   Yes, it is very appropriate to be on here on Zoom with you, recording [chuckles] these before, uh, going into the interview with Eric.

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:08

   If only we had our, uh, our notes on Veeva.

3. BGBen Gilbert0:12

   Although I think it's a little bit out of our strike zone in terms of, like, perfect market. We would be the only podcasters in the world using Veeva.

4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:18

   Peter is very focused on clear and correct target markets.

5. BGBen Gilbert0:22

   Yes.

6. SPSpeaker0:23

   Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

7. BGBen Gilbert0:40

   Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:54

   And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

9. BGBen Gilbert1:00

   And we are your hosts. Today, we have something very unique to share with you all. It is common for top venture capital firms in Silicon Valley to get all their CEOs together once a year in one room for a CEO summit and speak frankly with them. It is uncommon, however, to allow anything discussed to be shared publicly. Well, today, we are doing just that. The good people at Emergence Capital, in particular, friend of the show, Jake Saper, invited David and I to interview two very heavy hitters at their CEO summit last week: Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom, and Peter Gassner, the founder and CEO of Veeva Systems.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:43

    I think this is the first time that any content from any venture firm CEO summit has been specifically created for podcast public consumption. It's so cool.

11. BGBen Gilbert1:55

    I think Peter has never done a podcast before.

12. DRDavid Rosenthal1:58

    I think that's right.

13. BGBen Gilbert1:59

    And he's built a twenty billion dollar company?

14. DRDavid Rosenthal2:01

    Yeah. The Veeva Systems story is amazing, as you will hear. We talk about they raised four million dollars. That's four, like one after three. [chuckles] And on just that four million dollars, that they didn't even consume all of that capital, they've now built a two billion dollar revenue business with incredible margins. It's such a cool story, and Peter is on the board of Zoom, and so as you'll hear, he and Eric know each other very well.

15. BGBen Gilbert2:29

    And it's a super different company that we normally talk about, too. It's, uh, vertical specific, so it's just in the life sciences industry. They sell high-dollar software to pharmaceutical companies, and, uh, I think biotech as well, right, David?

16. DRDavid Rosenthal2:43

    Yep, yep.

17. BGBen Gilbert2:45

    So the topic that we discussed with both of them is capital-efficient growth, and that's something we felt would be super valuable for all the CEOs in the room. And obviously, that means that we think it's gonna be really great for everyone to be thinking about right now. So rapid scaling on very little capital is something they obviously both know a lot about. David mentioned the four million total funding that Veeva raised before going public. As you remember from our Zoom episode with board member Santi Subotovsky, also an Emergence Capital partner, Zoom raised thirty million dollars from Emergence and another hundred million dollars from Sequoia afterwards, and they never touched the vast majority, i-if not all, of those funds.

18. DRDavid Rosenthal3:26

    I think they didn't touch any of that hundred and thirty million dollars. Eric had raised... Well, as you'll hear about, he'd raised some money from angels along the way, and that funded product development, but none of the venture money was consumed.

19. BGBen Gilbert3:39

    It's crazy. So if you're excited to learn about how these companies managed to pull off enormous impact with very little capital to do so, you are in the right place, and if you wanna discuss these topics with us after you listen, you should come join the rest of the Acquired community. I think we're twelve thousand strong now, David, at acquired.fm/slack. You should join us. It is always a riot.

20. DRDavid Rosenthal4:01

    This will be a great one to discuss in there with the community and other founders, and including Jake Saper himself from Emergence, who's active in the Slack.

21. BGBen Gilbert4:10

    It's true. As many of you know, we are excited that these special episodes are brought to you by the Solana Foundation as our presenting sponsor. Now, Solana is a global state machine and the world's most performant blockchain. What does that mean? It means developers can build applications with super low transaction fees, low latency, and not compromise composability, since it is all on a single chain with one global state, and many of you have heard this, Solana is capable of processing tens of thousands of smart contracts at once. Today, we are talking with Frank, the co-founder and CEO of GenesysGo. All right, Frank, welcome to Acquired. Thank you so much for being here. My first question: Can you tell us, what is GenesysGo?

22. SPSpeaker4:56

    Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here. So GenesysGo, at its heart, is an infrastructure project building primarily on the Solana blockchain. We've been bringing decentralized networks to a piece of the Solana network stack that's traditionally been very centralized, and by utilizing our native token, a shadow token, we effectively have been able to take very centralized network architecture, decentralize that in a way where anybody can step in, contribute, compute power, storage power, and receive emissions in exchange for that. And what that's provided software developers on the Solana blockchain is the ability to get highly performant infrastructure at zero cost, thus lowering the barrier for entry for new developers who wanted to come online and needing a stable platform to build on.

23. BGBen Gilbert5:44

    And how exactly are they able to get zero-cost infrastructure, and how does the decentralization element play into it?

24. SPSpeaker5:52

    That's kind of like the magic of Web3. We took a page from all these NFT projects out there. We're issuing NFTs and basically used our NFT as a mechanism by which we decentralize our network. Whenever an NFT is traded, there's what's called an NFT royalty that gets paid, and that pays for our network architecture.... And that's kind of like the backbone, right? The foundational aspect of it. But over time, as a network becomes more and more decentralized, the costs associated with running that network, right, the operational costs, are spread out further and further as more and more operators start to come online. And those operators, they carry those costs because they're earning emissions. It's very similar to, uh, if you think about, like, the Bitcoin network, right? The actual Bitcoin blockchain. People contribute compute. They're paying for the hardware and the electricity and everything in order to contribute that compute, but they're doing so because they believe that the emissions in the token, which in our case is in Shadow Tokens, they believe that their Shadow Token emissions are going to be more than enough to offset their own costs.

25. BGBen Gilbert6:50

    That's awesome. Frank, thank you so much.

26. SPSpeaker6:52

    Thank you very much.

27. BGBen Gilbert6:54

    Our thanks to Solana. If you are considering developing on Solana, head on over to solana.com/developers, or click the link in the show notes. Now, as always, this is not investment advice. Please do your own research. David and I may hold positions in things we discuss on this show, and this is certainly not investment advice from anybody that we had on the show today. So now, on to our interview at the Emergence CEO Summit with Eric Yuan and Peter Gassner.

28. DRDavid Rosenthal7:25

    So, to set the stage, I thought maybe, um, could each of you please give us a brief overview of your fundraising history up to and including Veeva and Zoom's IPOs.

29. BGBen Gilbert7:37

    And-

30. DRDavid Rosenthal7:37

    Which ordinarily, that would take, like, an hour.

Episode duration: 1:11:18