1/8 Thread: The ServiceNow Story

Fred Luddy, founder of $NOW, has an interesting backstory.

Luddy was CTO at Peregrine Systems. After working there for 13 years, he had $35 mn stake at the company.

It was worth zero when Peregrine filed for bankruptcy due to massive fraud.
2/8 Following the scandal in 2003, Peregrine& #39;s CEO, CFO, and Head of Sales went to prison.

Luddy was unscathed, but financially he wasn& #39;t at the best of his footing.

He wanted to start a company, but was mindful of his age.
3/8 At 49 years and 346 days, he founded Glidesoft which later renamed to be ServiceNow.

"I couldn& #39;t wait because there was something psychologically that said I couldn& #39;t start a company at 50"
4/8 In 2005, Luddy raised $2.5 mn from for Series A round. But it wasn& #39;t smooth sailing.

Things started moving along really well after @sequoia& #39;s Series D in 2009.

In 2011, Luddy relinquished CEO role and hired Frank Slootman to focus on growth.

Luddy focused on product.
5/8 Around the same time, $VMW offered to acquire $NOW for $2.5B.

Luddy and some others wanted to sell.

Sequoia disagreed. They thought $NOW is in a winner-take-all market, and can be much bigger.

In fact, Sequoia offered to buy anyone out who wanted to sell at $VMW offer.
6/8 Ultimately, nobody did. Today, $NOW is ~$75B company.

Slootman turbocharged TAM penetration in his six years at the helm.

In 2016, Luddy left his product role, and just remained as Chairman of the board.
7/8 As $NOW was looking for TAM expansion, they hired John Donahoe in 2017 who was CEO of $EBAY at that time.

Last year, Donahoe left to take the CEO role of $NKE.

Bill McDermott, who was CEO of $SAP which is ~2x $NOW in terms of mcap, became the new CEO.
8/8 I find it pretty impressive that $NOW has always been able to attract such top management talent despite being relatively smaller in size.

Here are some other "late bloomers" such as Fred Luddy.

Full disclosure: No position on $NOW
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