Veeva Systems

I think in February or March, everybody's thesis was Anthropic is going to kill SaaS companies.

ServiceNow, Salesforce, Viva, Atlassian, they're all being priced literally down 40, 50%.

And now they're all back up.

I won't say all the way up, but how do you make sense that companies that are valued at 200, 300 billion are moving up 30, 40%? Just track meta shares.

Leo's post does not establish that ONA is the acquisition he means.

Number six, Veeva says its new AI agent can build a clinical study in a day.

Veeva Systems, Veeva, says its new study builder agent can configure a clinical study in as little as one day, turning a protocol into forms, visits, edit checks, and data quality listings for its clinical software.

Veeva announced the product on September 24.

Early adopter access is planned for December 2026.

Peter Gassner, who co-founded Viva in 2007, built the company around a specific bet.

Life Sciences needed cloud software designed for its own work and constraints.

After studying computer science at Oregon State University, he worked on database technology at IBM, held technical leadership roles at PeopleSoft, and joined Salesforce before starting Viva.

I thought, "Wow, it's gonna work." [laughs] It did work.

My guest today is Peter Gassner, founder and CEO of Veeva Systems.

Peter began his career as a software engineer working deep in database internals at IBM, spent nearly a decade at PeopleSoft, and joined Salesforce when it had fewer than two hundred employees.

Then at forty-two, he founded Veeva and grew it into an eight thousand person public company, powering critical work across the life sciences.

He also led Veeva to become the first public company ever to convert to a public benefit corporation.

In this conversation, we explore why ninety percent of Veeva shareholders agreed to the conversion, elevating Veeva's mission to a formal seat at the table alongside shareholder value, and how that decision unlocked new innovations, including free software for clinical research sites and so much more.

We break down Veeva's unusual practice of auditing its leaders for integrity and energy, not just financial performance.

Peter shares why the best response to market volatility and AI disruption is to focus relentlessly on customers' values and execution.

I mean, to be honest, it was a lot of personal network that I grew over the past 11 years.

I've never worked at a company like Medidata or Viva, which has essentially every single solution you can think of in the world, they have it.

You go there, it's a one-stop shop.

So what I was sort of forced to do in order for me to compete with those guys is that I needed to partner with others, eTMS vendors, eTMF vendors, IRT vendors, other service providers like, you know, boutique CROs who can provide the services because, you know, When I was at Metro, I think they do now, we didn't have a professional services team who can actually build up the database for people.

They have Iconics in construction.

They have Siebel, which has fallen behind Viva and others in clinical trials, but they built systems of record outposts as the dominant enterprise systems of record across almost every major vertical.

And not all are popular in the US.

Some are popular internationally, some are popular domestically, but that was phase three.

And right now the ebb or the flow, the data center pull is tremendous, right? It's unstoppable.

How could you every there's a zero on top of everything else in the conglomerate.

And so with that in mind, Do you change the strategy? And I think if you're saying sell Oracle Health, the question comes to why wouldn't you also sell other business units that vertical specific software business units that are going through not as bad of struggles, but certainly Siebel or whatever it's called now isn't winning against metadata and Viva or and Primavera is, you know, the master schedule that's in every construction site.

But is kind of viewed as legacy, the schedule's always out of date, and is certainly going to be under threat from Procore and others in coming years.

with them.

So when Viva first started out and they wanted to get into the safety world, we had a lot of conversations.

So early 2015, 2016, we were on about there.

I'd worked with Viva earlier on just with ideas and solutions.

And then in 20, I want to say around about 2016 or thereabouts, we worked with Viva for them.

We asked them to start generating the PSMF modules.

I had done that at Tesoro.

We'd created an entire PSMF in the Viva tool, and then we showed them how, for a small company, we used one Viva module, and we built our entire PSMF plus plus.

Oh,

Viva's nice.

17 as well, apparently.

Yeah.

I mean, help them.

I mean, yes, we need to accomplish certain things as a company, but I don't want to hire somebody that's, just for, because they were a project manager for Viva or they were the V, you know, they were the Viva content person and I'm trying to plug a hole.

That's not how, that's not how that just because they did that doesn't mean that that's what they want to do in this current, this, this new role, right? So you don't make those types of assumptions, but helping people along a journey to discover, um, their talents, where they where work doesn't feel like work.

And then how can I plug that into what the company needs as well, too? And if that works, that's great.