Aneel Bhusri
Aneel Bhusri | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 14, 1966 Pittsford, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Business executive, venture capitalist |
| Years active | 1993–present |
| Known for | Executive chairman of Workday; partner at Greylock Partners; former Intel board member |
Aneel Bhusri (born February 14, 1966) is a prominent American business leader currently serving as the executive chairman of Workday. He holds a partnership at Greylock Partners and was a member of Intel's board of directors between 2014 and 2019. Bhusri achieved billionaire status in 2014, with his net worth valued at approximately $3.1 billion as of 2021.
Early life
Raised in a family of Punjabi heritage within the Indian-American community in Pittsford, New York, Bhusri earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and later obtained an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His professional journey began as a corporate finance analyst at Morgan Stanley.
Career
Bhusri joined PeopleSoft in 1993 as director of planning when the company was mainly focused on human resources software. Collaborating closely with founder David Duffield, he eventually took charge of product strategy and marketing efforts. He held the position of vice chairman until the company was acquired by Oracle in 2004. By that time, PeopleSoft had broadened its offerings to include ERP, CRM, and additional enterprise software solutions.
Since 1999, Bhusri has been a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, which has invested in notable companies such as Facebook, Groupon, Dropbox, Tumblr, and Airbnb. His investment focus includes cloud computing applications, data center infrastructure, and middleware technologies. At Greylock, he serves on the boards of several portfolio companies including Cloudera and Pure Storage.
Workday
In 2003, Oracle initiated a hostile takeover attempt for PeopleSoft, which was initially rejected by PeopleSoft’s board. Despite ensuing legal disputes over anti-trust issues, Oracle successfully completed the acquisition in 2004 for roughly $10.3 billion.
Following this, in 2005 Bhusri partnered with Duffield to establish Workday, Inc., supported by funding from Greylock. Workday specializes in delivering enterprise software and services through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
Bhusri has served as CEO and remains on Workday’s board; he held the chairman role from 2012 until 2014.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, Bhusri contributed $1 million to the Give2SF fund aimed at aiding San Francisco residents and businesses impacted by the crisis.
That same year, Forbes placed him at number 359 on its ranking of the wealthiest Americans.
In January 2024, Bhusri is scheduled to step down from his CEO position, with Carl Eschenbach set to take over. Currently sharing CEO responsibilities, Bhusri will transition to full-time executive chair and board chair roles throughout 2024.
Media appearances
Bhusri appeared on Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast where he discussed how personally interviewing his first 500 hires at Workday influenced the company’s acclaimed organizational culture.
Awards
- Recipient of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2013
- Honored with the Great Place to Work CEO For All Leadership Award in 2020
External links
- Pages with script errors
- Articles with short description
- Articles with hCards
- No local image but image on Wikidata
- 1966 births
- Living people
- American technology chief executives
- American company founders
- American computer programmers
- Businesspeople from New York (state)
- Brown University alumni
- Brown University School of Engineering alumni
- American people of Punjabi descent
- American people of Indian descent
- Henry Crown Fellows
- American billionaires
- 21st-century American philanthropists
- Stanford University alumni
- Stanford University trustees