JOHANNA WRIGHT: So now I'm so excited to
introduce Diane Greene.
Diane Greene is the latest member of
Google's Board of Directors.
She's also a board member for Intuit and MIT.
Diane is probably most well known for founding VMware.
VMware went on to define the visualization industry.
Diane was the CEO of VMware from 1998 to 2008.
She took the company to $2 billion in revenue, and she
took the company public.
When I heard that I got to be on the same panel as Diane
Greene, I was flabbergasted, and so excited.
Despite how intimidating her resume sounds, Diane Greene is
actually quite approachable.
I heard her speak last year at a Google event and I went up
and introduced myself afterwards, and she was very
friendly and nice.
So if you get the opportunity afterwards, I would encourage
you to shake her hand.
Diane is also a national champion sailor.
And with that, Diane.
[APPLAUSE]
DIANE GREENE: Thank you for that introduction.
She went further than I suggested she go.
So how did I manage to do these things?
What I thought I would do is take you on a whirlwind tour
of my life and try and highlight where I thought I
learned valuable things.
And I grew up sailing, racing sailboats.
And when you race a boat, first you have to build a
team, and you have to get your team all aligned on a single
goal, which is to win the race.
And then you need your strategy to win the race.
You have to understand what the wind's doing, understand
what the currents are doing, and pay attention to your
competitors.
And if your competitors surprise you or you get a wind
shift, you have to immediately react and handle that and
continue winning the race.
And the last thing is the engineering around sailing.
You have to prepare your boat.
It has to be ready to go fast.
Then you have to tune it while on the race course to keep
going fast.
And I think that's what led me to train.
I trained as a mechanical engineer and
then a naval architect.
I came out to the Bay Area to San Francisco
for my first job.
And the first thing I was given to do was analyze some
mooring, a mooring for an offshore oil platform that was
used for firefighting.
And there was a big Fortran program that looked like it
was the way to model this.
And so that's when I learned how to program.
And it was just this incredibly
powerful tool, software.
You could do anything with it.
Got pretty excited about it.
Was not very excited about sitting inside behind a desk.
I really came to the Bay Area for the windsurfing.
And so I quit that job and I moved to Hawaii where I think
I've had perhaps one of my favorite periods of my life.
I lived sort of in a commune where we were exploring.
Windsurfing was sort of an early
microcosm of the tech industry.
We were just inventing all kinds of things--
new sails, high aspect sails, new shapes
of boards, new materials.
And all we did was build and test this equipment every day.
It was really tremendous.
And from there, I went and ran engineering for Windsurfing
International.
That was the company that had the patent on the windsurfer,
which also taught me how abused patents can be, because
they tried to control a very rapidly expanding industry
with their patents.
I left that.
Well, all this time, I continued to study software.
I went back up to the Bay Area and enrolled in a graduate
program in computer science at UC Berkeley.
Berkeley was a pretty happening place at that point.
The grad students had a lab full of brand new Sun
workstations that were based on this Unix, a relatively new
open operating system.
Richard Stallman, who wrote the GPL license,
was hanging out there.
I got to see the first graphical user interface, and
it was just very exciting.
And I knew it's what I wanted to keep doing.
I did still yearn for adventure.
I've always really loved adventure, so I took a brief
interlude and used my computer skills to be the computer
expert on a marine archaeology expedition in Sipan where we
excavated a Spanish galleon and found gold.
And then I came back to the Bay Area and went to work at a
succession of companies in the tech industry.
The first one was Sybase, where I really got hit over
the head with the value of having engineers across
companies work together.
I made friends with an engineer at Sun, it turned out
he was a windsurfer, and we spend a few months windsurfing
and writing software and were able to get sort of an order
of magnitude performance increase in the Sybase system
running on Sun.
And I really used that when I built VMware.
All three companies were quite an education in how important
it is to embrace change and always go forward, invest in
the future.
Sybase didn't want to rework their system to support
symmetric multiprocessing processing, and that's sort of
why Oracle eclipsed them.
I went to work at Tandem that had the world's best database
management system, but it ran on proprietary hardware and
proprietary operating system.
And it was too hard to see the business model for moving to
commodity open systems, and they sort of sailed into
oblivion, getting bought by Compaq and then by HP.
And then I went to work for SGI, which was a pretty
aggressive tech company at that point in time and worked
on interactive television, which was a
really exciting project.
But again, the internet was happening and it
was starting at SGI.
But instead, the founder of SGI, Jim Clark, left and
founded Netscape, and a number of us
left and started companies.
And that's when I finally just decided
to stick with startups.
And so I did two successive smaller startups.
They both had great visions.
I would say they maybe executed too early.
Nice financial outcomes.
The first one was streaming video over the internet, low
bandwidth, because there wasn't much bandwidth.
And the second was internet ad serving, interestingly enough.
At that point I took a little time off and decided to found
VMware, which was based on some work my husband was doing
at Stanford around virtualization.
And there's a few things I can kind of relate to what we did
at VMware to what I had already learned.
For instance, Sun Microsystems introduced these workstations.
People loved these workstations, and then brought
their servers into the companies.
And at VMware we used the same strategy.
We had a workstation software.
People loved our workstation software, and then when we
came out with the server product, were pretty
quick to adopt it.
We did amazing.
Our engineers worked with the hardware vendors.
They worked with the chip vendors.
They worked with the storage vendors.
And then we worked with all of those vendors
to take it to market.
And I'm just a huge believer in
collaboration in the industry.
And it was really effective for VMware, but it was always
hard to convince other companies to trust us and
partner with us.
But I think we always won, jointly, together.
And then the last thing was just sort of how to adapt, how
to embrace change.
My job changed considerably from zero to sort of 6,000,
7,000 people the company was when I left.
And it's just sort of recognizing, OK, this isn't
working and constantly sectioning out parts of my job
that I just didn't have time for anymore and hiring someone
to do those things.
VMware was just a totally fun adventure, building it with
all those people and seeing the impact that it had.
And what I would say is, it's not so important how.
There's just sort of an infinite number
of ways to do things.
But when you see something that you're very interested
in, that you think it can have some real impact, the thing
that's important is to codify that vision, see that vision,
enjoy the adventure of building that vision.
And if you do enjoy it, it makes it fairly easy to be
fearless about it.