How This Entrepreneur Grew a Company to $100M in Revenue in Less Than Five Years

David Schmaier had a clear vision for Vlocity from day one. He kept his sights set high, growing his industry-specific cloud and mobile software business to $100 million in revenue in less than five years, and then proceeding to get acquired by Salesforce after the company’s sixth year. Now the CEO of Salesforce Industries, David has no plans to slow down. As he takes this next step forward in his journey, we spent time talking with David about the key elements that lead to this all-time height in his entrepreneurial career.

“Build an A-team of people around yourself that share your vision and your passion.”

What’s your story? Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey.

David Schmaier: I’ve been blessed to have been involved in a number of successful companies in my 30+ year enterprise software career. I began as an engineer by training and then went to Harvard Business School to pursue my MBA. After graduation, I thought it would be interesting to work in the software business. So in the 1980s, I went to work at a small software company, leaving after five years to help found Siebel Systems with a guy named Tom Siebel. From there, I went on to found Vlocity in 2014 with a number of friends of mine from the software industry, who also were the founders of Salesforce partner Veeva Systems, and brought a wealth of knowledge about the Salesforce ecosystem.

Watch David Schmaier share his story on how Vlocity came to be what it is today.

What makes Vlocity different from other solutions?

David: Vlocity was the first company to build more than one industry vertical application on the Salesforce Platform. We found our success by helping the industries that are known to have the worst customer service and transforming them to become digital, omni-channel, and easy to work with.

When you launched Vlocity, what words went through your head?

David: Veeva times ten. When I walked around the Cloud Expo at Dreamforce in 2013, I saw 2,799 applications that were not industry-specific. One of the few that was industry-specific was called Veeva. When Veeva went public, nobody had ever seen a company like this. However, Veeva’s total addressable market for Life Sciences was limited. Because the industry wasn’t so big, people were very worried about the total addressable market.

So that is how we came up with a strategy to build Vlocity. We built not just one vertical, but four industry cloud product suites at the beginning, and now six. The idea was to have a total addressable market that was ten times larger than that of Veeva.

“We found our success by helping the industries that are known to have the worst customer service and transforming them to become digital, omni-channel, and easy to work with.”

Vlocity has been an AppExchange partner since day one. What benefits did you see as a result of joining the AppExchange Partner Program?

David: The AppExchange Partner Program accelerated our trajectory by five years from both a business and a technology perspective. We didn’t have to build a platform that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We got to use the Salesforce Platform. We didn’t have to build relationships with various companies by ourselves. We got to do that in concert with Salesforce.

How did AppExchange help you scale and grow faster?

David: Because our apps are built on top of the Salesforce Platform we can integrate with third-party applications seamlessly. For example, we did a partnership with DocuSign and thought it was going to be a challenge to integrate their solution with ours. However, because we were integrated with Salesforce, and DocuSign was integrated with Salesforce, there was literally zero work to do. We just plugged in DocuSign like magic.

“The AppExchange Partner Program accelerated our trajectory by five years from both a business and a technology perspective.”

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs looking for business success?

David: It’s important to remember a few key things:

1. Build an A-team of people around yourself that share your vision and your passion.
2. Being an entrepreneur isn’t as glamorous as everybody might think. There will be late-night meetings with customers and weekends working with the engineering team to really get the product to do what it needs to do. But, ultimately, it’s incredibly rewarding to build the product, to build the team, and build the company.
3. Follow a pathfinder to model your company. The two companies that we modeled Vlocity after were Veeva and Workday. We constantly compared ourselves to those two great software companies.

To learn more about David’s entrepreneurial success, watch his full story here. If you are an entrepreneur with a new business idea, learn more about the AppExchange Partner Program and how you can sell into a market of 150,000+ Salesforce customers.