What Makes Veeva Systems So Successful?

Matt Wallach is the co-founder and oresident of Veeva Systems (VEEV 1.22%), the second-fastest software company to ever reach $500 million in annual revenue. In this clip from Industry Focus: Healthcare, Matt reveals the key behind his company's success.

Kristine Harjes: Clearly this is a company that has been able to infiltrate this market and really expand a customer base fairly quickly. Veeva was, in fact, the second fastest software company to ever reach $500 million in annual revenue. Matt, how were you able to achieve that?

Matt Wallach: I think some of it was good timing. We certainly came into the market at a time that the world was moving to cloud computing. And life sciences companies had been coming off -- we founded the company in 2007. If you look at the two decades before that, the life sciences industry really had a large string of very successful and very profitable years. Operational excellence was not the most important thing to pharma companies, it was getting products to market and selling them any way that you could. So, in 2007, there was a need to start to get more efficient as an industry as some big drugs were coming off of patent and it was getting more competitive. And the life sciences industry had not invested in any cloud computing up until that point. We were really the first cloud computing option that these companies had, and we really became synonymous with cloud computing, starting with our CRM product. The CRM product hit the market at just the right time, and I think that we created the right kind of product team that understood the importance of running to the complexity, where things are difficult for our customers.

Many software companies might think, "We'll do the easy stuff, and we'll let them custom-code the hard things." We ran toward that complexity, and that created a lot of fans within our customer base. So now that we have 10 years of operating experience under our belts, where we're really known for having great products because of that focus on the details and getting everything right and making them reliable, and we've expanded over time, now, I think companies look at us and think, "That's a pretty safe investment. I know that if the Veeva guys say they're going to do it, the product is going to work, we're going to be successful and be able to focus on doing things more efficiently."