Aneel Bhusri was born in Pittsford, New York in 1966. He was educated at Brown University, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. He has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. His first job after college was as a corporate finance analyst at Morgan Stanley.

In 1993, Bhusri became the 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 since 1999, Bhusri has been a partner at Greylock Partners, 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.

In April 2020, Bhusri donated $1 million to the Give2SF fund, a donation drive to help residents and businesses in San Francisco affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2020, he was ranked No. 359 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.

2020 Great Place to Work CEO For All Leadership Award