Workday began as a comeback. Dave Duffield had built PeopleSoft into a giant of business software, and Oracle took it from him in a hostile takeover in 2005. Within months he and Aneel Bhusri started over. Their new company ran human-resources software over the internet, so customers never had to install it. When Workday went public in October 2012, it was the largest tech IPO since Facebook that spring.

Starting Over From Scratch

Duffield and Bhusri founded Workday in 2005 in Pleasanton, California, close to the old PeopleSoft campus. They brought many former PeopleSoft people with them. The bet was that large employers would trust their most sensitive data, such as salaries and staff records, to software that lived in the cloud. Workday wrote every line new. It sold one version to every customer and updated it for all of them at once. Finance and accounting software came next.

Seventy-Four Percent in a Day

Workday priced its shares at $28 on October 11, 2012, above its target range, and raised $637 million. The next day the stock closed at $48.69 on the New York Stock Exchange, a gain of about 74 percent. In 2017 the company moved its listing to Nasdaq and kept the ticker WDAY. Today Workday runs payroll and HR systems for many of the world's largest employers. It trades on Nasdaq under WDAY.

Cover: Dawn (The Cock's Crow), Charles François Daubigny. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a rooster at dawn (the start of the work day).