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

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Yes, it is very appropriate to be on here, on Zoom with you, recording these before going into the interview with Eric.

**David Rosenthal** (0:08)
If only we had our notes on Veeva.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:11)
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.

**David Rosenthal** (0:18)
Peter is very focused on clear and correct target markets.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:22)
Yes. 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.

**David Rosenthal** (0:54)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:00)
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.

**David Rosenthal** (1:43)
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.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:55)
I think Peter has never done a podcast before.

**David Rosenthal** (1:57)
I think that's right.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:58)
And he's built a $20 billion company?

**David Rosenthal** (2:01)
Yeah, the Veeva Systems story is amazing, as you will hear. We talk about, they raised $4 million. That's four, like one after three. And on just that $4 million, that they didn't even consume all of that capital, they've now built a $2 billion 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.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:29)
And it's a super different company that we normally talk about too. It's vertical specific. So it's just in the life sciences industry, they sell high dollar software to pharmaceutical companies. And I think biotech as well, right, David?

**Eric Yuan** (2:43)
Yep. Yep.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:45)
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 going to 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 4 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 $30 million from Emergence and another $100 million from Sequoia afterwards. And they never touched the vast majority, if not all of those funds.

**David Rosenthal** (3:26)
I think they didn't touch any of that $130 million. Eric had raised, as you'll hear about, he had raised some money from angels along the way and that funded product development. But none of the venture money was consumed.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:39)
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 want to discuss these topics with us after you listen, you should come join the rest of the Acquired community. I think we're 12,000 strong now, David, at acquired.fm slash slack. You should join us. It is always a riot.

**David Rosenthal** (4:01)
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.

**Peter Gassner** (4:10)
It's true.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:11)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (4:16)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. Because Crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.