Workday said on Tuesday that co-CEO Chano Fernandez is leaving the company and being replaced by Sequoia Capital’s Carl Eschenbach, a former VMware executive and member of Workday’s board.
Eschenbach will serve alongside Aneel Bhusri, who co-founded the company in 2005. Workday said Eschenbach is expected to become the company’s sole CEO after January 2024, when Bhusri will move to the role of executive chair.
Workday shares fell 2% in extended trading after the announcement. The stock is down 37% this year.
Bhusri started Workday, which sells cloud-based human resources and financial software, with Dave Duffield and has since run the company with different co-CEOs for multiple periods. Bhusri and Duffield shared CEO responsibilities from 2009 to 2014, when Duffield stepped down. Bhusri became a co-CEO again in 2020 with the appointment of Fernandez, a former SAP executive who joined Workday in 2014.
Before Workday, Bhusri held leadership roles at PeopleSoft, which Oracle acquired in 2005 for $11.1 billion.
Eschenbach has spent close to seven years at Sequoia, sitting on the boards of cloud software companies Zoom, Snowflake and UiPath, which were all in the firm’s portfolio. He was previously president and operating chief of VMware.
