David Arthur Duffield (born 21 September 1940) is an American billionaire businessman in the software industry. He is the co-founder and former chairman of PeopleSoft, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Workday, Inc., and current founder and CEO of Ridgeline, Inc. He has been on the Forbes World's Richest People list for many years. David Duffield cofounded two publicly traded enterprise software companies after age 40: PeopleSoft and Workday. He has given $345 million to Maddie’s Fund and another $400 million to, among others, his alma mater Cornell, as of June 2019. His current philanthropy interests are managed by the Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation. Their capstone project is Liberty Dogs, a service dog training campus in Reno, Nevada, that will match and train service veterans and canine companions. This facility is planned to open in 2026. Early life Duffield attended Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He graduated with the class of 1958 and was co-captain of the Ridgewood High School baseball team. Duffield received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from Cornell University, and is the benefactor behind Duffield Hall, a nanoscale science (or nanotechnology) and engineering facility at Cornell. While at Cornell, Duffield was a member of Beta Theta Pi. Career In 1964, Duffield began his career as a marketing representative and systems engineer at IBM. He left IBM to found Information Associates, which developed university exam scheduling software. In 1972, he left to start Integral Systems, which eventually became the top higher education Human Resource Management System vendor. In 1979, he moved on to start Business Software Corporation, which provided real-time human resources and payroll applications for commercial enterprises. PeopleSoft Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and served as the company's CEO and board chairman. PeopleSoft grew to be the world's second-largest application software company before being acquired by Oracle in January 2005 for $10.7 billion cash. Workday In March 2005, Duffield and former PeopleSoft vice chair and head of product strategy Aneel Bhusri started Workday, Inc., a company that provides financial management, human capital management, and planning software delivered in the form of a software as a service (SaaS) model. The company is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, and employed 15,200 people at the start of 2022. Duffield was known as the company's chief customer and employee advocate. He relinquished the co-CEO role in May 2014 and became chairman of the board. He resigned