There's talent everywhere; we just have to make technology accessible to them.Collection: Technology
The iPad is an amazing phenomenon. It is disrupting the enterprise. If you are an average employee, you can do anything for HR and Finance on the iPad.Collection: Finance
There's no question: the finance market is moving into the cloud.Collection: Finance
Happy employees build great products, and they take care of customers.
What's great about the iPad and iPhone is that they are easy-on, easy-off.
The best way to avoid bureaucracy is to have small teams who are empowered to make decisions and get their work done.
I think, in general, data protection really matters.
You don't see a lot of great companies built on easy problems to solve.
You can't replace luck and timing. With Workday, our timing was perfect. We started in 2005 right as cloud computing was beginning to take off.
I found a great mentor early on in my career, Dave Duffield - a legendary software innovator, great individual, and a wonderful leader and human being.
Every employee at Workday thinks about how they are going to help customers be successful. It is a simple formula, but a lot of companies go out, and they don't listen to their customers; they don't try to solve hard problems, making it tougher for themselves to create a great business.
I liked business. I found it fascinating.
Oracle is not known for its high levels of customer satisfaction.
NetSuite was a really good company.
We work as a team, and that is a huge part of why we have been successful; we run fast as a team.
We invest very heavily in the employees. We get the return, and the employee gets the return if they stay with us for a while. So, we focus on people that will commit to us for the long run.
When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.
What I hope is, over time, users should not have to read a training manual. They should say, 'I totally get the Workday iPad app, because it runs the way my consumer apps run.'
We spend a lot of time looking at the things we like: Amazon, Google, Facebook.
San Francisco is a wonderful city, but you do have housing issues. If tech companies don't do the right thing, they can dislocate a lot of what makes San Francisco special. At Workday, we want to be on the right side of that.
If I could get Office on a tablet, I'd throw my laptop away.
Candidly, when you go back to '07 or '08, it was hard to sell cloud. We started out by focusing on large enterprises on day one. Everybody thought cloud was for SMBs (small and mid-size businesses), but we made the leap that it was going to be for large enterprises, that they were going to replace their core systems.
Small companies tend to go out of business. Large ones don't.
If you've got five or six cloud apps, do you want a different user ID and password for each one? No.
Every time you see a new paradigm emerge, it's always new vendors that lead it. I can't think of one case where an incumbent led a paradigm shift.
I would have loved to invest in Salesforce when I was active in venture. I didn't know the founder, Marc Benioff, well enough, and he didn't really rely on venture capital, but I remember the first time I met him and got to talk about Salesforce when they were still private. I thought, 'Damn, that is going to be a huge company.'
I'm hard-pressed to think of companies that don't need venture capital that are going after big opportunities. I think, in almost all cases, if they're going after big opportunities, they are going to need to raise quite a bit of money.
To really disrupt a big market, you have to look at the marketplace from a long-term perspective. You have to move very fast but knowing that disruptive solutions just take time to build.
Workday is constantly looking into the future and, you know, building applications that stay modern and relevant.
Because everybody else was investing in the consumer Internet, I did, too.
I started to invest in very-early-stage companies where, even though I wasn't the founder, I could help shape the early strategy and culture.
I hired a guy named David Sze to do consumer investing at Greylock. And he went on to invest in Facebook and LinkedIn. So I guess I did something right.
When we started Workday, we were originally very focused on the core HR system. Then we added payroll, and then we got into performance management.
People like me, when we're interviewing, we're not going back to our desktop to fill out a recruiting form. If I can quickly submit my evaluation through an iPhone or an iPad, that makes me a lot more productive.
I'm not a stock expert by any means. Stocks go up; they go down.
All you can worry about as CEO is making sure your company continues to build great products, deliver the revenue, and keep your customers happy.
There's nothing slowing down about the shift to the cloud. I don't see anything on the horizon that is changing that.
The goal isn't just to make transactions: it's to make better decisions in the way you run your business. If that's not at the top of every executive's priorities, then they shouldn't be an executive.
I would be amazed if Oracle does not buy NetSuite.
The debate between the cloud and on-premise is largely dead. The cloud has become mainstream.
Tablets are more intuitive than a PC or laptop. They also have more real estate than a smartphone.
In a slower economy, companies look for more value. The cloud provides this. So does Big Data.
I have long been fond of comparing Workday strategy to the process of sending a rocket to the moon.
Success begets success in terms of customer deployments and having truly happy customers.
If you stay very focused on customers and customer success, people pay attention to that - and in turn, they also want that same type of success.
I think the bring-your-own-device is the best thing that ever happened to CIOs. Now employees are paying for their own devices.
I sit on the board of Cloudera, a big vantage point of big data.
I don't think anyone is better than Amazon, and all the new generation of enterprise companies are basically copying them.
The enterprise cloud is a very secure cloud at this point.