Dave Duffield

Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and grew it into the second-largest application software company in the world before Oracle's hostile takeover in 2005. After writing personal $10,000 checks to approximately 5,000 laid-off employees, he co-founded Workday at age 64 with the conviction that enterprise software could be built cloud-native from day one. His founding philosophy was shaped by the trauma of losing PeopleSoft and the determination to create a company that could never be taken through hostile means.

Dave Duffield is a serial enterprise software entrepreneur who founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and Workday in 2005. Born in 1941, Duffield was 64 years old when he co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri, bringing decades of experience in HR and financial software development. At PeopleSoft, he pioneered client-server architecture for enterprise applications and built a company that reached $2 billion in annual revenue before Oracle's $10.3 billion hostile acquisition. Duffield's personal wealth from the PeopleSoft sale was estimated at over $1 billion, yet he chose to return to entrepreneurship rather than retire, driven by what he described as a compulsion to create and 'make the world a better place, to take the drudgery out of work.' He served as co-CEO of Workday from 2009 to 2014 alongside Aneel Bhusri, then remained as chairman until April 2022. Duffield is also the founder of Maddie's Fund, a pet rescue foundation named after his Miniature Schnauzer, into which he has poured over $300 million. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from Cornell University. Duffield's legacy is the architectural purity of Workday's cloud-native platform — built with no on-premise version, no legacy code, and no upgrade cycles — which remains the company's core competitive advantage.