Workday

The cloud HR company that turned a 7-year head start into a $70 billion business - then watched competitors converge on the same solution anyway.

Founded in 2005 by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, Workday bet the company on a single thesis: enterprise HR would shift to cloud. Not hybrid. Not "cloud-enabled." Pure cloud-native SaaS. While SAP, Oracle, and ADP remained imprisoned by on-premise revenue, Workday built for the future. The company gained a 7-year head start on SAP and went public in 2012. Its stock has returned 400%+ since IPO while legacy competitors spent a decade retrofitting.

Here's what's fascinating: despite completely different origins, Workday and SAP SuccessFactors converged on nearly identical architectures. Cloud infrastructure, continuous updates, subscription pricing, mobile-first, embedded analytics - the environmental pressures (cloud maturation, mobile adoption, regulatory complexity, war for talent) created a single dominant fitness peak. Both companies climbed toward it from different directions. Convergent evolution in real time.

But Workday didn't coast on its HR lead. The company branched into financials, building a multi-product suite that SAP SuccessFactors (pure HCM) couldn't match. The lesson: first-mover advantage buys time, not permanence. In fitness landscapes with single peaks, competitors will converge on your solution. Sustained advantage requires continuous branching into adjacent territory before convergence erases your differentiation.