I'm hard-pressed to think of companies that don't need venture capital that are going after big opportunities. I think, in almost all cases, if they're going after big opportunities, they are going to need to raise quite a bit of money.
Aneel Bhusri
I hired a guy named David Sze to do consumer investing at Greylock. And he went on to invest in Facebook and LinkedIn. So I guess I did something right.
Success begets success in terms of customer deployments and having truly happy customers.
There's talent everywhere; we just have to make technology accessible to them.
I would have loved to invest in Salesforce when I was active in venture. I didn't know the founder, Marc Benioff, well enough, and he didn't really rely on venture capital, but I remember the first time I met him and got to talk about Salesforce when they were still private. I thought, 'Damn, that is going to be a huge company.'
When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.
Small companies tend to go out of business. Large ones don't.
When we started Workday, we were originally very focused on the core HR system. Then we added payroll, and then we got into performance management.
Workday is constantly looking into the future and, you know, building applications that stay modern and relevant.
You don't see a lot of great companies built on easy problems to solve.
We work as a team, and that is a huge part of why we have been successful; we run fast as a team.
I liked business. I found it fascinating.
Every employee at Workday thinks about how they are going to help customers be successful. It is a simple formula, but a lot of companies go out, and they don't listen to their customers; they don't try to solve hard problems, making it tougher for themselves to create a great business.
Because everybody else was investing in the consumer Internet, I did, too.
All you can worry about as CEO is making sure your company continues to build great products, deliver the revenue, and keep your customers happy.
We spend a lot of time looking at the things we like: Amazon, Google, Facebook.
In a slower economy, companies look for more value. The cloud provides this. So does Big Data.
Candidly, when you go back to '07 or '08, it was hard to sell cloud. We started out by focusing on large enterprises on day one. Everybody thought cloud was for SMBs (small and mid-size businesses), but we made the leap that it was going to be for large enterprises, that they were going to replace their core systems.
There's no question: the finance market is moving into the cloud.
The iPad is an amazing phenomenon. It is disrupting the enterprise. If you are an average employee, you can do anything for HR and Finance on the iPad.
The goal isn't just to make transactions: it's to make better decisions in the way you run your business. If that's not at the top of every executive's priorities, then they shouldn't be an executive.
To really disrupt a big market, you have to look at the marketplace from a long-term perspective. You have to move very fast but knowing that disruptive solutions just take time to build.
I started to invest in very-early-stage companies where, even though I wasn't the founder, I could help shape the early strategy and culture.
Happy employees build great products, and they take care of customers.
What I hope is, over time, users should not have to read a training manual. They should say, 'I totally get the Workday iPad app, because it runs the way my consumer apps run.'
What's great about the iPad and iPhone is that they are easy-on, easy-off.
The enterprise cloud is a very secure cloud at this point.
People like me, when we're interviewing, we're not going back to our desktop to fill out a recruiting form. If I can quickly submit my evaluation through an iPhone or an iPad, that makes me a lot more productive.
Tablets are more intuitive than a PC or laptop. They also have more real estate than a smartphone.
If I could get Office on a tablet, I'd throw my laptop away.
San Francisco is a wonderful city, but you do have housing issues. If tech companies don't do the right thing, they can dislocate a lot of what makes San Francisco special. At Workday, we want to be on the right side of that.
If you've got five or six cloud apps, do you want a different user ID and password for each one? No.
The debate between the cloud and on-premise is largely dead. The cloud has become mainstream.
You can't replace luck and timing. With Workday, our timing was perfect. We started in 2005 right as cloud computing was beginning to take off.
I found a great mentor early on in my career, Dave Duffield - a legendary software innovator, great individual, and a wonderful leader and human being.
Oracle is not known for its high levels of customer satisfaction.
NetSuite was a really good company.
We invest very heavily in the employees. We get the return, and the employee gets the return if they stay with us for a while. So, we focus on people that will commit to us for the long run.
The best way to avoid bureaucracy is to have small teams who are empowered to make decisions and get their work done.
Every time you see a new paradigm emerge, it's always new vendors that lead it. I can't think of one case where an incumbent led a paradigm shift.
I'm not a stock expert by any means. Stocks go up; they go down.
There's nothing slowing down about the shift to the cloud. I don't see anything on the horizon that is changing that.
I would be amazed if Oracle does not buy NetSuite.
I have long been fond of comparing Workday strategy to the process of sending a rocket to the moon.
If you stay very focused on customers and customer success, people pay attention to that - and in turn, they also want that same type of success.
I think the bring-your-own-device is the best thing that ever happened to CIOs. Now employees are paying for their own devices.
I sit on the board of Cloudera, a big vantage point of big data.
I don't think anyone is better than Amazon, and all the new generation of enterprise companies are basically copying them.
I think, in general, data protection really matters.
