Quotes from Aneel Bhusri

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.

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.

The enterprise cloud is a very secure cloud at this point.

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.

If I could get Office on a tablet, I'd throw my laptop away.

Tablets are more intuitive than a PC or laptop. They also have more real estate than a smartphone.

Happy employees build great products, and they take care of customers.

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.'

The debate between the cloud and on-premise is largely dead. The cloud has become mainstream.

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.

Success begets success in terms of customer deployments and having truly happy customers.

The best way to avoid bureaucracy is to have small teams who are empowered to make decisions and get their work done.

There's talent everywhere; we just have to make technology accessible to them.

I think, in general, data protection really matters.

I liked business. I found it fascinating.

When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.

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.

NetSuite was a really good company.

We spend a lot of time looking at the things we like: Amazon, Google, Facebook.

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 have long been fond of comparing Workday strategy to the process of sending a rocket to the moon.

There's nothing slowing down about the shift to the cloud. I don't see anything on the horizon that is changing that.

We work as a team, and that is a huge part of why we have been successful; we run fast as a team.