How Veeva Became the First Public Company to Convert to a Public Benefit Corporation

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What if maximizing shareholder value can actually make a company less valuable?

Peter Gassner is the founder and CEO of Veeva Systems, a cloud software company serving the life sciences industry. Before founding Veeva, Peter built enterprise software at IBM, PeopleSoft, and Salesforce. Under his leadership, Veeva became the first publicly traded company to convert to a public benefit corporation.

In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, Peter joins me to explain why profit is necessary for a healthy company but should be the result of fulfilling its mission, not the mission itself. We discuss his belief that companies create lasting value when their employees, customers, and investors are aligned around a larger purpose, his discomfort with founding documents that prioritized shareholder returns, and Veeva’s two-and-a-half-year journey to becoming a public benefit corporation.

We also explore how shareholder primacy can narrow a company’s thinking and limit innovation, how Veeva’s new structure opened the door to providing free software to clinical research sites, and why Peter believes the conversion has benefited employees, customers, and investors alike.

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Where to find Peter Gassner:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pgassner

• Website: https://www.veeva.com

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In This Episode We Cover:

(00:00) Intro

(03:34) Signing the founding papers for Veeva 

(05:38) Why Peter founded a for-profit company despite his discomfort with shareholder primacy

(06:31) Peter’s original thesis for Veeva 

(09:01) Peter’s career journey from IBM to Salesforce

(09:50) Why Peter chose life sciences as the industry to build for

(11:02) When Peter knew Veeva was going to work

(13:09) What a public benefit corporation is and Veeva’s path to becoming one

(17:44) Peter’s argument for converting Veeva into a public benefit corporation

(21:56) How Veeva defined the public benefits in its charter

(24:22) How Veeva is doing now 2 years after the PBC conversion 

(26:27) How becoming a PBC opened the door to new projects

(27:24) Why Peter has no regrets and sees no downside to Veeva’s PBC conversion

(29:30) How Veeva embodies the “harder is easier” principle

(32:22) How Veeva creates alignment around its values at scale

(34:59) Market volatility, AI, and the future of SaaS

(39:19) Peter’s hope for Big Tech