At sixteen, Fred Luddy took his parents' station wagon and drove to California. A profile of his life reports he had no plan. He camped along the way, picked strawberries and washed cars for cash.
He grew up in New Castle, Indiana, the son of an accountant and a Catholic schoolteacher. He got his GED, then, as a teenager, took a job at a folding-door factory in town and taught himself Fortran overnight. In 1973 he wrote programs for the economics dean at Indiana University for $3.50 an hour, often working fifty or sixty hours a week. He dropped out after his freshman year and did not go back.
He grew up in New Castle, Indiana, the son of an accountant and a Catholic schoolteacher.
What he built next was a career in other people's companies. Peregrine Systems hired him as chief technology officer in 1990. He stayed thirteen years, helped build its AssetCenter product and watched the company buy Remedy in a deal worth about $1 billion in stock. His own stake peaked near $35 million.
Then Peregrine's executives were found to have inflated revenue and invented deals. The company collapsed in 2002, and Luddy, then 49, was in effect broke. He had sworn, the profile says, never to touch IT service management again. The promise lasted about nine months.
Two weeks before his fiftieth birthday he incorporated Glidesoft in California. He has said he felt he could not wait any longer. For a long time he was the only person on the payroll, and at first he gave the software away to gather feedback. In mid-2005 JMI Equity put in $2.5 million, enough to hire five people. In 2006 it became Service-now.com. By 2007 it reported about $13 million in revenue and said it was cash-flow positive.
The handoff came in 2011, when Frank Slootman took over as CEO. Luddy has said he did not have the skills to be CEO. Late that year VMware offered $2.5 billion. Luddy, by his own later account, was inclined to take it, because it was a chance to not be bankrupt. The board, pushed by investor Doug Leone, said no. The company listed in June 2012 with a $210 million IPO.
In 2025 ServiceNow reported $13.28 billion in revenue and $1.748 billion in net income, and its market value was $106.24 billion on 5 November 2026. Luddy later gave $60 million to Indiana University, the school he left after a year. It now carries his name.
A man who once ran away to California in a borrowed car, and went broke at forty-nine, ended up with his name on the building of the school he quit.