Sequoia’s Carl Eschenbach, who led offers for Zoom and Snowflake, to run Workday as co-CEO • TechCrunch

Carl Eschenbach, a longtime enterprise software program government who joined Sequoia Capital in 2016 and went on to steer various profitable offers for the enterprise agency, goes again to an working position.

As the brand new co-CEO of Workday, Eschenbach will co-lead the enterprise cloud functions big with its co-CEO, cofounder and firm chair Aneel Bhusri, till 2024, at which level Eschenbach will take over as sole CEO.

Chano Fernandez, a former SAP government who joined Workday in 2014 and has served as its co-CEO since 2020, has “stepped down” as co-CEO and relinquished his seat on the corporate’s board, “efficient instantly,” says Workday.

Earlier than becoming a member of Sequoia, Eschenbach spent his profession with quite a lot of software program firms. Most notably, earlier than diving into VC, he was the president and COO of VMware, the cloud computing and virtualization expertise firm, the place he spent greater than 14 years. Earlier than becoming a member of VMware, he served as a VP at Inktomi, a dot-com period firm that was acquired in 2002 by Yahoo.

Eschenbach will stay a enterprise associate at Sequoia Capital, however he isn’t anticipated to steer new offers. Whereas at Sequoia, he struck various offers that finally produced large returns for the agency, together with persuading Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan to simply accept $100 million in Collection D funding completely from Sequoia in 2017.

The enterprise agency owned 11.4% of Zoom on the time of its 2019 IPO; Zoom’s shares skyrocketed afterward as COVID-19 gained traction the next yr, shutting down a lot of the world, which turned largely to Zoom’s video communication’s platform.

Thanks largely to Eschenbach, Sequoia additionally owned an 8.4% stake in Snowflake heading into its 2020 IPO (it was the largest software program IPO ever) and Sequoia turned the biggest proprietor of gaming firm Unity, with a 24% stake heading into the gaming firm’s 2020 IPO (it hit the market sooner or later after Snowflake in September of that yr).

Eschenbach joined the board of Workday in 2018. It isn’t a Sequoia portfolio firm, however Sequoia’s companions are sometimes requested to take exterior board seats and on uncommon events, the agency green-lights these strikes. (Longtime associate Jim Goetz — who persuaded Eschenbach to affix Sequoia — is on the board of Intel, as one other instance.)

The co-CEO position could be controversial. Oracle appeared to drag off such a pairing efficiently with high executives Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, till his loss of life final yr. SAP, in the meantime, tried a co-CEO setup and deserted it fairly quickly.

Salesforce’s experiments with co-CEOs have additionally not been profitable. Earlier this month, virtually a yr to the day after changing into co-CEO of the CRM big, Bret Taylor stepped down in a surprising announcement that appeared to return out of the blue.

Taylor wasn’t the primary co-CEO of Salesforce to throw within the towel for one cause or one other. In 2018, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff named Keith Block co-CEO. Block lasted within the place barely longer than Taylor, stepping down in 2020.