A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the trigger to leave Peoplesoft?

Peter Gassner: The management team had changed at Peoplesoft. I had started as a developer there. At the end of nine years, I was handling a team of 500 people. I worked hard there. I loved the team I assembled. Then, the management team changed. Culture changed a bit. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. This happens slowly. Then the industry became a consolidation industry rather than an innovation industry. I’m an innovator. When people are innovative and they don’t have an area to innovate, they get frustrated. I’ve seen this in many people.

I didn’t realize it but I was slowly becoming more frustrated and little less aligned to the cultural changes. I was slowly getting less satisfied in my work. I just woke up at one point to the fact that I don’t feel like I want to bring new people into this company. That was the trigger. I had to make a change because I can’t keep my team here through the force of my will. I can’t lead this team if I’m not fully invested. You should always separate whether you’re going to make a change and what you would change to. As far as what to change to, that was more complex.

I originally thought I should stop working. I had achieved my financial goals. When I was a young kind, I thought, “If I could own my house, that would be success for me.” I always kept that in my mind. I had a young family and everything was good in home life. It was just too risky not working, so I kept working. I knew at that time that cold was going to be the thing. I was becoming more self-aware. I was very aware in the late 30’s. This was 2002 or 2003. You do things in the cloud. You do it once. That’s going to be better. Specialization of labor has been going on for thousands of years. It’s an inescapable trend. I knew that this way of installing software was going to be on its way out.

I wanted to reboot myself. I was running a 500-person team and dealing with consolidation type of issues. I should go to a small cloud company and get hands on again. I looked around and thought Salesforce would be a good place. I reached out to Mark. Salesforce was young at that time. It had a couple of hundred people. They needed somebody to start their platform. I went from running a team of 500 people to running a team of four people.

Sramana Mitra: That’s fun though.

Peter Gassner: It was invigorating. Then I noticed in the first month that I feel good at work again. It was because of the innovation. I learned a ton. I had a really good time there.

Sramana Mitra: Why did you leave Salesforce? It was a rocket.

Peter Gassner: It was small when I started there and it went public. It was only a thousand or so people when I left. What caught up with me was the thing that I ignored—that question of why I’m working. I became uncomfortable that I was ignoring that. I clearly had all of my financial goals and I wanted to wrestle with that. I took two years off. I traveled with the family.

I became uncomfortable working really hard and not knowing why I’m working. I found out what most people find out. I found out that I like working and you become okay with that. I like working. I like technology. This is one of the good things to do—technology entrepreneurship. It’s challenging. It’s engaging. It can create jobs. It’s not curing world hunger but I’m okay with that. They call that a midlife crisis I guess. Maybe it’s not that complicated. Maybe it’s what’s called the midlife crisis.

This segment is part 3 in the series : A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner
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