Tech's Ultimate Second Act

Facing 50, Fred Luddy Lost His Job And His Fortune. But In Applying The Lessons Of His Failures, He Made Servicenow The Most Innovative Company In America—and Himself A Late-career Billionaire.

- Kathleen Chaykowski And Mark Coatney

Vegas being Vegas, fans have crammed the Venetian Hotel for selfies with a graying celebrity working his way through the scrum: Fred Luddy, the 63-year-old founder of ServiceNow, America’s hottest IT services company. Neither Wayne Newton nor Celine Dion, Siegfried nor Roy, has anything on Luddy in Sin City this day, at least among the 18,000 customers, vendors and employees in town for Knowledge, ServiceNow’s annual developers conference.

“When all of these people are happy to see you, honestly you feel like a rock star,” says the sparkly-eyed Luddy, having booked extra time between appearances to grip-and-grin with the adoring hordes. “It’s kind of an undeserved feeling, because they were the inspiration. You folks had all of the ideas. I just wrote them down and thought about them.”

 

Forgive Luddy such indulgences. Fourteen years ago, he was pretty much broke, having seen a $35 million personal fortune vanish overnight in the midst of accounting fraud at his previous company. Thirteen years ago he was a one-man shop, tinkering with ServiceNow’s core product from his home. Even after the vindication of an IPO six years ago, the company was worth a modest $2 billion.

These days ServiceNow, based in Santa Clara, California, maintains a $30 billion market cap—and the No. 1 ranking on the 2018 Forbes Most Innovative Companies list. The 6,000-person-plus company has more than 4,000 customers, including 850 on the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world’s biggest public firms. Last year it had revenues of $1.93 billion, and growth is expected to be more than 30% this year. More than 500 companies spend at least $1 million annually on Service Now’s products.