Workday

“I don't think vertical SaaS has a system of record. I don't think that's what they do. I think they're workflows. This is the key point where these horizontal monolithic companies like Salesforce are just unique. Workday, Oracle with respect to their GL. It's …”

“Silver Lake circles a forty three billion dollar take private bid for Workday.”

“In venture deals, if you're in the right thing, it almost doesn't matter what you paid. You see cursor for details, see open router for details, right? This is the exact opposite. This is fine, precise financial engineering. If you're wrong by 20%, 30% on pric…”

“I don't think system of record is, I think it's a moat, but I don't think it's a ticket to growth. This is, I think, super important. And it's something that everyone on X gets wrong. It's great to have a system of record, which Workday has. It means churn eve…”

“Jesus Christ, it takes three to six months to get somebody at an enterprise to reply to your inquiry about selling them some software. You know, the enterprise sales cycle is what, 18 months? At best? You know, you want to add a new thing and plug it into SAP …”

“The CTO of Workday is just a member of technical staff at Anthropic, CTO, CTO of Instagram, Box, the CTO. Super.com CTO. They're just like engineers now at Anthropic.”

“Yeah, basically, it's kind of like what the future of the IT role will likely be, which is, it's a, like, you know, you will spend some time implementing Salesforce and Workday, et cetera, but you're gonna spend a lot of time implementing agents for the workfl…”

“Workday makes it extremely difficult to actually, like, get access to the documentation and work with the, like, and they don't expose all the endpoints.”

“Once Workday approved it, like, I think three months after Workday approved it, they made an offer to acquire us. So we got acquired mainly because of the connectors that we built with Workday and how good they were.”

“Workday does three year contracts up front and five year renewal. So the average Workday customer effectively signs up for an eight year contract. Three and five is their standard term.”

“ServiceNow and Salesforce and Workday and all of these companies are being pushed to innovate. Like in other cases, they're like, we have large go to market motions. There's a revenue that we can easily protect and you don't have to, but because they see these…”

“Indeed, Anthropic just installed workday, very famously.”

“We are buyers. We're buying software stocks right now. You know, a portion of our funds can be invested in public equities, so we're buying companies like Procore, Workday, Appian.”

“So basically, every single filing cabinet became a database, and there were benefits to that, but it didn't actually make the world that much more efficient, because whereas before you would have a human go fetch you the HR file, For Eric. Like, oh, go to the …”

“That actually makes Workday stickier in the enterprise and more valuable because you can build all these applications on top, which is the power of AI and vibe coding and creativity to make it more tailored for what I need.”

“Workday has the, it's predictability in both directions, right? It's predictability for the spender of the money, which is the customer. But it's also the predictability for the management team, knowing that you should spend your time trying to sign up GE, and…”

“So one of two things are going to have to change. Either companies are going to have to benefit from AI and re-accelerate the top line. And I think if you, again, listen to the workday earnings call yesterday, Anil, the CEO, essentially said his job is to come…”

“So, like, Workday, I think is, like, nobody's gonna get rid of Workday.”

“The real money, like the stickiness is getting these big multi-year, 10 to a hundred million dollar contracts with, you know, existing public companies, you know, to go in there and like replace a lot of the staff, the SaaS software that they already have in t…”

“If you compared the on-premise software companies to the cloud software companies, so compare PeopleSoft to Workday or compare Siebel software to Salesforce, the cloud version was just 10 times bigger.”

“There are the ones that are almost impervious to everything that's happening with AI. And if anything, it's a huge tailwind because they're going to start being, they have the distribution, they're going to start adding features. And that's things like Workday…”

“It's not that we're going to rebuild workday in Salesforce and Oracle, but our competitive edges are going to be measured in months. And when they used to be years and that compounds that compounds. And if you can't run at that pace, I don't see how you're goi…”

“And I think what large enterprises want to do is not adapt their process to your software, but adapt your software to their business process. And these large enterprise software platforms like Workday and Salesforce and ServiceNow, they're very good at that. T…”

“I think in many ways, what the forward deployed engineer role has actually replaced are the implementation consultants for large organizations, large companies like Workday and ServiceNow and Salesforce that are customizing that software to meet these organiza…”

“AI gives them a chance to compete both on simplicity and user experience and also configurability because you're using AI to set these configurations or maybe achieve value propositions that these other platforms just can't touch.”

“If you use software by others, you have to buy into their vision.”

“In, in, in our case, in HRS, we had some things that were not doable with Workday and all these systems, and so we built it ourselves.”

“Workday could probably triple their revenue if they start doing this because they're already the system of record.”

“A lot of CIOs would, You know, you love to go, okay, yeah, I've vibe code workday and I just saved my company all this money or whatever, but okay, you actually peek into the hood of a workday or a rippling. These are very complex pieces of software that have …”

“Nobody has two sales forces deployed in an enterprise. Nobody has two workdays deployed in an enterprise. Nobody has two SAPs deployed in an enterprise. Why? Because you need end to end visibility, a singular workflow, a singular set of analytics to solve the …”

“Workday acquiring Sana Labs for 1.1 billion dollars. They were at like, 50 in ARR.”

“We'll have more time to do more leisureful activities, like the workday might go down from 12 hours a day to six hours a day, and that means we have more time for, like, art and music and entertainment and, I don't know, like, spending time with, like, our lov…”

“Klarna who's not even using Workday and Salesforce anymore and just like directly agent to the workflow.”

“What's exciting about AI is that it's taking this filing cabinet and now allowing actions on the filing cabinet. And that's what I think is really revolutionary, because you can actually ask the software filing cabinet application, like Workday, hey, I want to…”

“The real thing, which is staring everybody in the face, is it's all about the business rules. Like, that is what drives the lock-in.”

“The fastest growing segment, for sure, is like our upmarket segment, like our, you know, we're moving that market, like very quickly and, you know, used to not compete with the workdays of the world. And now that's weren't a lot of deals with them.”

“In a lot of these verticals, you've got to get to like workday level product or, you know, rippling compound multi-product company to get the ASPs working.”

“And last night for the attention, he made a big announcement saying that they're going to be cutting their entire sales force and work day budgets because they built in house processes that are simpler, faster, Using AI, generative AI, good old-fashioned data…”

“I mean, I do think the like tier below those three big companies are scared right now. I think there's probably like those boardroom conversations are probably tense, right? I think on the one hand, huge opportunity, right? Make the product better. You already…”

“I had one, my friend, Stuart, who we used to share an office with, I put 75 grand into his business and then he sold it to work day. And I 10 X my money there.”

“Yamini got on the last call a couple of weeks ago and said, yeah, we saw a little bounce at the end of the year and HubSpot had a great quarter, but it's not any easier. She said, it's not one lick easier right now. So HubSpot, not any easier Mongo worse. Sale…”

“This company, you know, is pretty well known, and they've got a good SMB payroll business going, but like, at a certain scale, they switched to Workday. When they switched to Workday, they stopped using their own product, and when they stopped using their own …”

“In B to B, you know, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, they command almost all the market cap in their respective markets.”

“I think there's a lot of companies where part of their defensibility is the fact that you basically had to munch specialized data or integrations, you know, that would be the SAPs of the world or different ERP systems, Workday, et cetera. Like a lot of these t…”

“Rippling's building like the next work day and they've taken like, oh, this company does HR analytics. We'll like copy 90% of their good features and we'll make an integrated version that works with your employee directory. Oh, you want to do like global billi…”

“Our whole B to B is based on a behavior change platform, broken down into science-based micro steps for change, and the most important micro step in learning to live with incompletions is declaring an arbitrary end to your day. You have to declare it. You have…”

“When Anil founded Workday with his co-founder, David Duffield, they personally interviewed not just the first 150, but the first 500 employees.”

“What I found is good people with high integrity, you can teach them a lot. There's a lot that goes with just being a good person, and you can teach them to be a good manager.”

“In turn, we've had customer satisfaction above 95% ever since we started measuring customer satisfaction. Probably 10 years ago. Right now it's currently at 98%, and you know, I don't think unhappy employees would be able to do that.”

“It starts with employees, not with customers. Employees are the core of who we are. We hire great employees. Great employees take care of your customers.”

“You can get to that by understanding the way people talk about their accomplishments. If they talk about we did this and we did that as a team, you know, you've got a pretty good fit there.”

“We get additional stock if we hit that 95% customer satisfaction level. So you drive behavior through the incentives, and shared incentives are always the best.”

“When you go, want to go from 50 to a hundred and a hundred to a billion, then you need to build in process and scale, and you need to come in with professional managers, not just being managers, but managers of managers.”

“Nothing drives innovation more than continually to expand your product portfolio. Not, not getting crazy about it, but that's growth. That becomes also a way to become more strategic to your customers.”

“And so I wouldn't, you know, all the usual names, Airtable, Notion, Slack, all of these things, they all sort of presume there's about 15 people, and they're all doing lots of different things, and they all need to share everything that they're doing with each…”

“You know, we spend, as a multiple of what we would sell Slack to ourselves, obviously we get Slack for free, but we spend about two X that on a work day. And I'm thinking of things that are like basically company-wide. We also spend about two X that on Zoom be…”

“Launched in 2018 with their 1.35 billion dollar debut fund, They've already set themselves as leaders in the world of growth funding, with three massive exits in less than two years, in the form of, check this out, Plaid sold to Visa for 5.3 billion dollars, A…”

“When we heard the pitch, it was probably one of the most straightforward pitches I've ever heard in 20 years of venture, meaning we just had to fund that company, and the reason for that is there's the numbers, but you really have to see what is this company d…”

“I would say Tom Bogan. Tom is a senior exec at Workday now. He was CEO of Adapted Insights. I was on a board with him. I was on the Acquia board with him, and I would say just the best board member I've ever worked with just had incredible credibility. He was …”

“We have about 700 customers now, and it's kind of a who's who in technology, so publicly traded SaaS companies like an Okta or Workday or Twilio or DocuSign, big companies that have gone to the cloud like an IBM or an Adobe or a Cisco, as well as companies in …”