2013 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award Recipient
Aneel Bhusri was born in Pittsford, New York in 1966. He was educated at Brown University, receiving Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He has a masters of Business administration from Stanford University. His first job, following college, was as a corporate Finance analyst at Morgan Stanley.
In 1993, Bhusri became Director of planning at PeopleSoft, then primarily a human resources software company. Later, working for David Duffield, with whom he went on to co-found Workday, he became responsible for product strategy and marketing. In 1999, he became Vice Chairman of the company, serving in that role until the takeover by Oracle in 2004. In the meantime, PeopleSoft had developed ERP, CRM, and other offerings, in addition to Human Resource Management.
Also from 1999, Bhusri has been a partner at Greylock, a software investment fund which has backed companies including Facebook, Groupon, Dropbox, Tumblr and Airbnb. At Greylock he has been an investor in cloud technologies, with an emphasis on applications, data center infrastructure and middleware, and serves on the boards of a number of companies in which Greylock has invested, including Cloudera and Pure Storage.
In 2003, Oracle made a $13 billion bid in a hostile corporate takeover attempt of PeopleSoft. This and later offers were rejected by PeopleSoft's board of Directors. Despite a U.S. Department of Justice suit to block the takeover, on the grounds of anti-trust infringement, in December 2004, Oracle announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire PeopleSoft for approximately $10.3 billion. In 2005, Workday was co-founded by David Duffield and Bhusri with funding from Greylock Partners. Workday sells software and services using the SaaS model.
Reportedly a Billionaire through his share-holding in the company, Bhusri serves as chief executive officer at Workday. He is also a member of the company's board of Directors, and served as chairman of the board from 2012 until May 2014.
