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

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

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

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.

Peter is very focused on clear and correct target markets.

Yes.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

I think Peter has never done a podcast before.

I think that's right.

And he's built a twenty billion dollar company?

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.

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?

Yep, yep.

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.