Early Life
David Arthur Duffield was born on September 21, 1940, in Cleveland, Ohio, but grew up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. He graduated from Ridgewood High School in 1958. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from Cornell University. During his time at Cornell, he played in a band and was a pitcher on the baseball team.
Rise to Success
Duffield's career began at IBM in 1964 as a marketing representative and systems engineer. In 1968, he founded Information Associates, a company designing exam scheduling software for universities. He then established Integral Systems in 1972, which provided human resources management systems for higher education. In 1979, he co-founded Business Software Corporation, which sold human resource software to commercial enterprises. In 1987, Duffield founded PeopleSoft, which grew into the world's second-largest application software company before being acquired by Oracle in January 2005 for $10.7 billion. In March 2005, Duffield co-founded Workday, Inc. with Aneel Bhusri. He relinquished the co-CEO role in May 2014 and became chairman of the board, resigning as chairman in April 2021 and becoming chairman emeritus and ultimately CEO emeritus by Workday's board. In 2017, he founded Ridgeline, a cloud software firm for investment managers.
Key Business Strategies
Duffield's key strategies included identifying market needs and developing user-friendly software. He focused on relational database-driven systems that disrupted traditional mainframe-based enterprise software, prioritizing employee experience and scalability.
Philanthropy
David Duffield and his wife, Cheryl, are actively involved in philanthropy. Their giving extends to various causes, including animal welfare through Maddie's Fund, education, and support for military veterans. They've given over $500 million to Cornell University and over $900 million supporting animal welfare, education, and other causes. He has also donated to the College of Veterinary Medicine, where they have funded and named the Maddie's® Shelter Medicine Program and the Duffield Institute for Animal Behavior.
