Bloomberg: Workday Billionaire Dave Duffield 'Bored Silly' of Retirement Chases Third IPO

Dave Duffield keeps trying, and failing, to retire.

At 84, the billionaire co-founder of HR software firms PeopleSoft Inc. and Workday Inc. is building another startup after he became “bored silly” each time he stopped working.

“I tried to make model airplanes and failed, rocked away on the back porch, sort of failed at that too,” Duffield said with a laugh from his new company’s office on the shore of Lake Tahoe in Incline Village, Nevada. He also played “hours and hours” of FreeCell, an online version of solitaire.

Duffield doesn’t do anything by half measures. His restless and competitive spirit drove him to start six companies, including two that he took public. He has 10 kids, two foundations and a net worth of $15.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And those FreeCell games? He was one of the top players in the world, said his daughter Amy Zeifang.

“Maybe he played FreeCell, but he played to win it and be the best,” she said.

Now Duffield is aiming for a new milestone: completing a rare IPO hat trick and taking a third (and he claims last) company public. His latest gambit is Ridgeline, a cloud-based platform for the investment-management industry that aims to bring everything from trading to accounting to compliance under one umbrella.

Read article in its entirety on Bloomberg here. 

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