Success begets success in terms of customer deployments and having truly happy customers.
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.
Tablets are more intuitive than a PC or laptop. They also have more real estate than a smartphone.
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.'
If I could get Office on a tablet, I'd throw my laptop away.
When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.
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.
We work as a team, and that is a huge part of why we have been successful; we run fast as a team.
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.'
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.
If you've got five or six cloud apps, do you want a different user ID and password for each one? No.
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.
Workday is constantly looking into the future and, you know, building applications that stay modern and relevant.
In a slower economy, companies look for more value. The cloud provides this. So does Big Data.
Happy employees build great products, and they take care of customers.
The debate between the cloud and on-premise is largely dead. The cloud has become mainstream.
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.
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.
You don't see a lot of great companies built on easy problems to solve.
