Who the heck is Giants owner Aneel Bhusri anyway?

One of the richest guys in the ownership group, for one thing

This is the twelfth installment in our series on who exactly owns the Giants. So far, we have covered real estate mogul Scott Seligman, private equity guy Phil Halperin, real estate mogul Jed Walentas, medical technology investor David Schnell, radio station owner/former Yahoo board member Arthur Kern (now no longer listed as an owner), lady of mystery Nancy Olsen, Republican super-donor Charles Johnson, Manila business mogul George Drysdale, charter school supporter Paul Wythes, Jr., Hong Kong real estate guy Philip Morais, and former professional athlete Buster Posey. Let’s look at the big board!

Breathtaking. You can barely even find one I haven’t profiled!

Today, our victim is Aneel Bhusri, a Rich Tech Guy.

No, no, you’re thinking of a Tech Guy who only got rich within the last decade, aren’t you? A Zuckerberg-type, who acts like a common man while also adding emotionlessly adding dead bugs into his Soylent to up the protein a little bit. You’re thinking of Sam Bankman-Fried, styling himself a philosopher while running his bullshit business as a Ponzi scheme. “What even is a few billion dollars?” he might ask.

But no, Aneel Bhusri is not those things. Aneel Bhusri is, at heart an Old Rich Tech Guy, who initially got rich with an HR software program called PeopleSoft, and after a few years, during which Oracle bought PeopleSoft and fired a bunch of people, co-founded Workday. Workday makes HR software for corporations and colleges, as well as software that helps managers understand the financial consequences of their decisions, and if that’s wrong, well, let’s all just do the logical thing and blame Wikipedia.

Anyway, Aneel Bhusri doesn’t sell concepts or big ideas for revolutionizing society. He sells software products. It has worked out well for him. This is the face of the 359th richest man in America (as of 2020):

So who is this guy?

Aneel Bhusri was born on February 14, 1966 in Pittsfield, New York, near Rochester. He attended Brown University, where he got bachelor’s degrees in both economics and electrical engineering. After college, he worked for Morgan Stanley as a Corporate Finance Analyst for about three years, then went to Stanford, where he got his MBA. After that, it was on to PeopleSoft, where he eventually got promoted to Senior Vice President. He left the company as an employee in 1999, stayed on as a member of the Board of Directors, and eventually left after the aforementioned Oracle hostile takeover.

The reason Bhusri gave for leaving PeopleSoft was that he wasn’t qualified to be an executive there after the company expanded so dramatically in the late ‘90s. But what he had liked about the job was “innovation…creating products out of nothing.” After PeopleSoft, in 1999, he worked at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm, so he could do just that. He was a general partner there from 1999 through 2012 (and has been an advisory partner since).

But after a point, he certainly wasn’t at Greylock full time. In 2005, Bhusri co-founded Workday with Dave Duffield, his old CEO from PeopleSoft, and with funding from Greylock Partners, among other sources. Workday launched its initial product in 2006, raised tens of millions of dollars in funding in both 2009 and 2011, and eventually went public in 2012, in an IPO that was wildly successful. From there, Workday has grown and grown, and depending on your source, Bhusri’s net work is somewhere between several hundred million dollars and $3 billion (For what it’s worth, Forbes is currently saying he’s worth $2.1 billion).

On a personal level, Bhusri is married. He and his wife Allison have two children, of whom the only publicly available information is that one of them is a daughter. He is apparently friends with Ronnie Lott. He was described by Indian Eagle as “one of the richest Indian Americans.” In 2020, he donated $1 million to the Give2SF fund for COVID relief, and has signed onto the Giving Pledge, in which the extremely rich pledge to give away the vast majority of their wealth during their lifetimes.

Politically, he is a Democrat. He and his wife have combined to make dozens, if not hundreds, of donations to Democratic candidates and committees, from John Hickenlooper to Kamala Harris. Interestingly, his politics either seem to have shifted sometime between 2008 and 2012, or he’s stopped giving money to both sides for political favors. Prior to 2012, he gave money to John Sununu, John Thune, John Cornyn, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. In 2012, he donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign. Since then, he’s only given to Democrats.

From what I can tell, Bhusri does seem to be as good of a person as a billionaire could be. He mentors younger people on their way up, he’s given away a lot of money, and he makes a point of making Workday a good place to work. The culture there is said to be very positive; I obviously don’t have first-hand experience, but the reviews of the company on Indeed are almost glowing, with the majority of the negative ones being about individual managers instead of systemic issues.

I think Aneel Bhusri tries to be a good person. I think he tries to do good things. His Twitter feed is mostly about sports, which I can relate to. Maybe there’s a smoking gun somewhere; I couldn’t find it. More likely, there are stories of people who were kind of annoyed by him or who didn’t like the way he conducted a deal or something; I couldn’t find them. He did make a couple of tone-deaf comments when he said he wanted employees to come back to the office, but that’s not really that damning.

I dunno. Usually if you can find plenty of information about someone, it’s more negative. Good for you, Aneel Bhusri, for avoiding that. I hope it’s because you’re a good guy and not because I suck at looking for things.