Diane Greene's Advice for Founders

Speaker Profile & Career Trajectory

• Diane Greene serves as the Chief of Google's cloud businesses.
• Prior roles include founding and CEO of VMware, and CEO of Bebop.
• Previous professional background includes work as a naval architect and building software at Sybase, Tandem, and SGI.
• Early startup history: Co-founded "The Extreme" (1995), a low-bandwidth video streaming company sold to Microsoft for $75 million in 1997.
• Virtualization leadership: Founded VMware in 1998; company went public in 2007 with a closing market cap of $19.1 billion.
• Enterprise software focus: Founded Bebop in 2013; sold to Google in 2015 for $380 million, with proceeds committed to nonprofit donor-advised funds.
• Current status: No longer has capacity to provide seed money or direct advice to new startups due to her role at Google.
• Investment history: Previously advised or invested in seed rounds for Cloudera, Pure Storage, Unity Technologies, and others.

Key Lessons from Entrepreneurial Experience

• Founder Dynamics: Successful startups often benefit from a limited number of founders to ensure solid alignment; "too many cooks can spoil the broth."
• Market Innovation Strategy: To induce market acceptance of profound innovation, the adoption path must be designed as non-disruptive and easy to integrate with established systems.
• VMware Case Study: A tool was developed to seamlessly migrate workloads from physical to virtual machines, which served as a critical sales driver.
• Adaptability: When VMware was initially blocked from selling through IBM due to IP issues, the company pivoted to leverage IBM's star resellers, turning a setback into a market advantage.
• Corporate Culture: Creating an open culture for communication, collaboration, and shared ideas is essential; VMware's physical campus was designed specifically to foster these behaviors.
• Design Tenacity: Bebop faced initial design misalignment but persisted, eventually becoming a powerhouse in design thinking and enterprise application tools.
• Corporate Intrapreneurship: It is possible to build an enterprise-scale startup within a large parent organization, provided the cultures of both entities are aligned and the right people are in the right roles.
• Customer Focus: Success relies on an unwavering commitment to creating value for customers and partners.

Personal Philosophy & Metaphors

• Greene cites sailing as a primary formative experience, including winning Women's National Dinghy Sailing Championships and crossing from Maui to Molokai.
• Strategic Parallels: Building a company is likened to racing a sailboat, requiring a plan, real-time reevaluation based on new information (wind shifts/competitors), and strict adherence to milestones.
• Crew Selection: The selection of crew members is paramount; an effective leader cannot succeed without people working harmoniously in appropriate roles.
• Mindset: Leaders must balance immediate execution with the ability to question decisions and overcome self-doubt.
• Process Over Outcome: Founders should enjoy the process of building and creating value; financial success is incidental to worthy goals.
• Resilience: Genuine commitment to the work makes a founder unafraid of failure, as the intrinsic satisfaction of the process provides strength against adversity.

Contextual Details

• Event audience: Over 800 female founders globally.
• Google Cloud metrics: Serves seven applications with over one billion active users.
• Future format: Following her address, Jessica (likely Jessica Matthews or similar host) will join Greene for a Q&A session.