Workday

Today, I’m talking with Gerrit Kazmaier, the brand-new president of product and technology at Workday. Gerrit’s new on the job, maybe a little bit braver than most, and to his credit he came on the show and took the heat. We spent a lot of time talking about what enterprise software really is, what it does and why it has a reputation of being so deeply frustrating for so many people.  Links:  Workday names Gerrit Kazmaier president of product and technology | Workday AI Index Report | Stanford HAI IBM AI Study | IBM How generative AI will impact the future of work | Workday Workday launches platform for companies to manage all of their AI agents | TechCrunch Everyone hates Workday | Business Insider Judge: Workday must face novel AI bias lawsuit | Reuters Workday lays off 1,750, 8.5% of employees, in AI push | Associated Press Why Workday's CEO made a layoff decision to invest in AI | FastCompany Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/667538 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gerrit Kazmaier

President of Product and Technology

Workday

Workday CEO and Sequoia partner Carl Eschenbach explains how the company is evolving its platform to handle both human and AI workers. He shares Workday’s three-pronged approach to monetizing AI through seat-based pricing, role-based agents and consumption-based API access. Eschenbach discusses why domain-specific agents with curated data will be more valuable than general-purpose models in the enterprise, and how Workday is helping enterprises navigate the transition to an AI-powered workplace while maintaining human connection. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Carl Eschenbach

Partner

Sequoia CapitalWorkday

Guest: Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO of Workday When Carl Eschenbach decided to leave VMWare after more than 14 years as COO, no one believed it: Not chairman Joe Tucci, not CEO Pat Gelsinger, and maybe not Carl himself. But he needed a more predictable work-life balance to help raise his teenage children. For the next seven years, he served as a partner at Sequoia Capital. And every day, he thought — and to his wife’s chagrin, talked — about going back: “It was always on the back of my mind,” he says. After the kids were out of the house, in late 2022, he jumped back into operating and became co-CEO of Workday. “It’s what I love to do,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been called to do it.” In this episode, Carl and Joubin discuss jumping rope, Mike Clayville, the Flowbee, focusing on the family, wrestling, commuting cross-country, servant leadership, Sequoia Capital, Aneel Bhusri, co-CEOs, and Palo Alto Networks. In this episode, we cover: Working on Sand Hill Road (00:55) Carl’s workout routine (03:15) Staying humble and grounded (08:04) Carl’s family and dinner table conversation (11:41) Drive and ambition (16:08) College vs. trade school (19:53) 3Com, Inktomi, and EMC (24:33) Deciding to join VMware (28:02) Virtualizing the data center (31:48) The pressure of an incredible ride (35:54) The infamous CFO story (40:14) Eyeing the CEO job (46:00) Carl’s one “big regret” (47:40) Refocusing after a tragedy (52:05) A left turn into venture (55:37) The “itch” to go back to operating (01:00:17) Joining the Workday board (01:04:37) Building an enduring business (01:07:15) “End[ing] my career in an operating role” (01:09:09) Transitioning out of venture (01:15:56) Who Workday is hiring and what “grit” means to Carl (01:18:01) Links: Connect with CarlLinkedIn Connect with JoubinTwitter LinkedIn Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Carl Eschenbach

Partner

Sequoia CapitalWorkday

Everyone loves a unicorn, but how do you keep innovation alive past the start-up phase? Pushing past the awkward "teen years" and igniting the next wave of growth means rethinking your culture, organizational structure, and innovation investments. Join Workday's EVP of Product Pete Schlampp as he shares how he's accelerating product innovation on the hunt to $10B. Video + show notes: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-469-and-video-fueling-product-innovation-on-the-path-to-10-billion-with-workday/

Pete Schlampp

EVP of Product

Workday

Your first hires are your cultural cofounders. And it’s worth your time to get every one right. That's why Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri personally interviewed his first 500 employees. Today, with 12,500 employees and over $4b in annual revenue, Workday is consistently rated one of the best places to work. Learn the interview questions that can help you find the right employees to build your culture. With cameo appearances by Danny Meyer (founder, Shake Shack), Arianna Huffington (founder, Thrive Global), Michael Bush (CEO, Great Place to Work) and Joyce Nethry (founder of Jeptha Creed Distillery). Read a transcript of this episode at: https://mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter at https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aneel Bhusri

CEO

Workday

👨🏻‍💻Our guest on this episode of Gradient Dissent is Peter Skomoroch! Peter is the former head of data products at Workday and LinkedIn. Previously, he was the cofounder and CEO of venture-backed deep learning startup SkipFlag, which was acquired by Workday, and a principal data scientist at LinkedIn. Check out his recent publication: What you need to know about product management for AI https://www.oreilly.com/radar/what-you-need-to-know-about-product-management-for-ai/ Follow Peter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/peteskomoroch And read some of his other work: Pangloss: Fast Entity Linking in Noisy Text Environments Large-Scale Hierarchical Topic Models Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes! www.wandb.com/podcast 🔊 Get our podcast on Soundcloud, Apple, and Spotify! YouTube: https://bit.ly/32NzZvI Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it! 👩🏼‍🚀Weights and Biases: We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions. - Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles - Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery - Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum 🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k 👩🏼‍💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai 📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Peter Skomoroch

Former Head of Data Products

Workday

Tom Bogan, CEO of Adaptive Insights, a Workday company, will review the key principles to building a successful SaaS company. From team to vision to metrics to funding and more, these principles provide the framework for high-growth, high performing SaaS companies. How can you develop a winning culture? How can you set aggressive but realistic goals? What's needed to build the right team in SaaS today? Missed the session? Here's what Tom talks about: The important maxims about team building Insights on fundraising and why you might not want to always raise at the highest valuation Personal stories from his time building Adaptive Insights If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin SaaStr

Tom Bogan

EVP of the Planning Business Unit

WorkdayAdaptive Insights

Your first hires are your cultural cofounders. And it’s worth your time to get every one right. That's why Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri personally interviewed his first 500 employees. Today, with 8,000+ employees and $2b in annual revenue, Workday is consistently rated one of the best places to work. Learn the interview questions that can help you find the right employees to build your culture. With cameo appearances by Danny Meyer (founder, Shake Shack), Arianna Huffington (founder, Thrive Global), Michael Bush (CEO, Great Place to Work) and Joyce Nethry (founder of Jeptha Creed Distillery). Read a transcript of this interview at: https://mastersofscale.com/aneel-bhusri-the-elusive-formula-for-great-hiring/ Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aneel Bhusri

CEO

Workday

Tom Bogan is the CEO of Adaptive Insights, the company that proves a new generation of business planning software for finance and beyond. Prior to their reported $1.55Bn acquisition to WorkDay, Adaptive Insights raised over $175m in VC funding from the likes of Bessemer, Salesforce Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and many more incredible investors. Prior to Adaptive Insights, Tom was a partner at Greylock Partners where he focused on enterprise software investments. He was also president and COO at Rational Software until its acquisition by IBM. Before Rational, Tom served as CEO at Avatar Technologies and Pacific Data. He began his career as a financial officer in both public and private companies, serving as CFO at SQA and Orange Nassau, Inc., as well as vice president of finance at SCA Services. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: How Tom made his way into the world of SaaS, came to be a Partner with Greylock and then made the move back into operations with Adaptive Insights? Elad Gil has previously said the role of CEO is to "find product market fit, ensure the company does not run out of money and ensure the team does not implode", how does Tom define his role as CEO of a $100m+ SaaS company? How does the role of CEo fundamentally change over time? What aspect of the role does Tom find most challenging? What core role of CEO is constant throughout the lifecycle of the company? From seeing many of the world's best SaaS CEOs, what are the commonalities in how the very best CEOs hire the very best execs? How does Tom think about the debate of hiring externally or promoting from within? How does Tom look to reduce internal discontent when hiring externally rather than promoting? At $100m Jyoti Bansal said on the show, this stage is about "creating and sustaining operational efficiency". What have been Tom's biggest learnings on the creation and maintenance of operational efficiency? What has worked? What has not worked? How does Tom think about internal asset allocation? Why does Tom believe that ultimately, ARR growth is the metric to rule them all? How does Tom think about and prioritise the metric stack in SaaS? How does he approach payback period vs CAC/LTV? In terms of services components of businesses, does Tom believe these should be baked into the CAC? What should the financial targets be for these services businesses? Tom's 60 Second SaaStr What does Tom know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Tom's favourite business reading material and why? What would Tom most like to change in the world of SaaS today? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

Tom Bogan

EVP of the Planning Business Unit

WorkdayAdaptive Insights

Carl Eschenbach is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading funds with investments in the likes of Google, Apple, Whatsapp, Paypal and Stripe just to name a few. As for Carl, prior to Sequoia, Carl was President and CEO @ VMWare where he grew the team from 200 to 20,000 people. If that was not enough Carl has also stepped in as CFO at a $5Bn company and transitioned 3 CEOs. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Carl made the move from President and CEO @ 20,000 person company, VMWare to Partner @ Sequoia? 2.) Question from Alfred Lin, Partner @ Sequoia: How did Carl look to build a culture of performance at VMWare? 3.) Question from Pat Grady, Partner @ Sequoia: What were Carl's biggest learnings with regards to high performance teams? What are the common mistakes in scaling a go to market strategy? 4.) How does Carl view the internal workings at Sequoia to the external perception? Was the move to Sequoia everything he expected? What was different or challenging? 5.) What does Carl believe are the core components that make a great board member? How has Carl's time in operations affected his view of boards and their working? Items Mentioned In Today's Show: Carl's Fave Book: Half Time Carl's Most Recent Investment: Zoom As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Carl on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc amy@x.ai beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must! Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.

Carl Eschenbach

Partner

Sequoia CapitalWorkday