Engineering Careers

PETER GASSNER: January 2021, 99% of voting shareholders voted for our proposal to become a public-benefit corporation. And Veeva became the first public company to convert. When thinking about corporate governance, it’s really about ethics, about corporate ethics, about trying to do the right things, about realizing you have a responsibility to all your stakeholders, not just your shareholders. When I started Veeva, I signed our articles of incorporation. And I read them, and it sounded overly simplistic to me.

It was basically you need to make money for the shareholders and don’t do anything illegal, and that’s it. And I thought that’s strange, that’s not quite aligned with who I am. But this is just what you do. You sign it and you move on. And I thought, hey, Veeva– it’ll probably go out of business anyway.

It’s a small company, you know? It’s a startup. But then we didn’t go out of business. We started growing. And then we got close to 1,000 people, and I started hearing about this public-benefit corporation concept.

And I thought, wow, that is more like the type of company that I would want to run. I remember being on a bike ride and realizing I have to act here. I know what the right thing is to do.

When I was growing up, I didn’t know anything about a public-benefit corporation. I just knew about small business. My dad had a small machine shop. I loved to work. I always had. So I worked in that machine shop, and I learned a lot of lessons from my dad.
He had this big sign that said quality is job one. I would do a little job for him, and I’d come back. And I’d ask him, is it good enough? And he’d say, if you have to ask me, it’s not good enough. Good enough is not good enough.

So just this idea of quality– and then he also taught me about customers. I remember him telling me the importance of customers And him saying we have about three big customers. And if I lose one, we probably have to move out of our house. Small business has to take care of its customers and its neighborhood, because there is no external safety net.

I think it’s very important that the internal ethos and way of working of a company matches its charter. And that’s why I think the public-benefit corporation is a great structure, because it puts that right in the charter. You have to pay attention to all your stakeholders, not just shareholders.

We always lived by our values. The company, we always operated by our values. And I’ve been very proud of employees for doing it that way. As we grow, and as we look for the decades to come, it’s important to write things down and to formalize them in your articles of incorporation for a couple of reasons. One, when you write them down, it’s a better way to communicate efficiently to lots of employees, lots of customers.

But also it sets the tone and the legal obligation. When we bring in new leadership into the company, into the board, into the executive team, that’s the rules. It’s not just my opinion anymore. So for employees, what that means is we have to take care of each other. It’s part of our legal duty. It’s part of the board’s responsibility. So employees have a seat at the table, the very important table, the board table.

We were afraid about some unknown thing that was going to harm us, because we were the first. There’s been no downsides. The positives that we expected have happened, helped us attract the right employees that are attracted by our values, deepened our relationship with our customers. And then very importantly, it’s increased our source of ideas. Our ideas before would come from really what can we do to grow the business, and then double check them with our values.

Now, we find, hey, what can we do that’s aligned with our values, and maybe then double check them with our business purpose. So it’s increased our source of ideas and I think that’s going to be a very durable thing for Veeva. I’m so proud of the Veeva employees. I’m so proud of you. You live our values every day.