Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
19 May 2022 Acquired Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner)
“By the way, related to this question, I want to share with you a conversation I had with Peter. I think, probably, it can help some of the founders' cases as well.”
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- Speaker unverified
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- Not verified from this transcript
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 19 May 2022
- Publisher
- Acquired
Transcript context
…It's more like a sport. We need to focus on both offense and defense on both sides. Back to Peter's point, even if your products work today even better than any other competitors, you have to be paranoid. You have to keep thinking about what you can do differently. Keep innovating, either the new services or new features. That's the most important thing. Do that and at the same time, you also need to think about, what's next? From our perspective, we started from a unified communication. The next step will be not a unified communication, but a collaboration platform. At the same time, how do you build new departmental obligations? You also need to play offense as well. The better offensive play is probably for the defense as well. That's our strategy. I'm very similar. Product excellence, you can get there, but you also have to work hard to stay there and keep reinventing yourself. Also, you do want to expand to different areas. Critically, I think something that people don't realize is if you get a high market share in an area and you don't expand to another area, what will happen just because of the nature of your company and the creative people, you'll do more stuff in your established area than you should. That creates its own set of problems if you do more stuff. If Eric is constantly rewriting his codec unnecessarily, it's disruptive. You got to expand to give yourself a creative outlet. These may be more particular tasks, but we also have a goal that we set out about five years ago to be the leader and liked—that was our codename for it—because if you get to be quite dominant, there are a few things that will knock you off. Arrogance, the customers will get turned off over that. They'll naturally find an escape hatch. Also, we audit for integrity of the leadership team because when you're quite well established, that can throw you off. Integrity issues in the leadership team, so we audit myself and others. Also, energy in the leadership team because these are things that you got to audit for because if you wait for the results to show those things, it's too late. Determine to have product excellence. Have a goal to be the leader and liked. We actually tell our customers about that. That holds us to a higher standard. We want to be the leader and liked. Now, they bring that up sometimes like, hey, that's not the leader and liked. Oh, God, why did I tell you that? It's a way to set yourself out there. Not only do we want to be the leader, we want to be liked. Product innovation as an outlet and avoid that arrogance. and liked. Oh, God, why did I tell you that? It's a way to set yourself out there. Not only do we want to be the leader, we want to be liked. Product innovation as an outlet and avoid that arrogance. By the way, related to this question, I want to share with you a conversation I had with Peter. I think, probably, it can help some of the founders' cases as well. I forgot which quarter. A year before we went public, I looked at our growth plan. I realized, wow, we wouldn't have one service. If we have another service, we also can monetize. The gross trajectory was very different. At that time, Peter told me, that's the ideal case, but that basically should be made two years ago or three years ago. If you wanted to have a new service, you cannot have a new service today. You need to think about trying to make this in two or three years before that. I clearly remember that conversation. Looking back, that's the biggest mistake. The reason why is because we have one service. At the same time, I always think about, what's the next service? Always plan ahead. That's probably a better way, back to your question. You always have to build another service and another service. That's exactly what I was going to ask as a follow-up. Peter, I know Veeva launched a second service after the first CRM service around content, CMS content management. When did you start planning for that second product and then when did you launch it relative to your first product?…
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