- Diane Greene co-founded VMware in the late 90s with her husband, who was a professor at Stanford.
- They decided to take their research to market and started the company with their grad students.
- At the time, the dot-com era was booming, but their idea of multiplexing resources seemed dubious to many.
- They faced difficulty in finding business-side people to join the company.
- They set up their office in a building near a car wash, which was known as the "crack house" due to drug deals happening nearby.
- They initially funded the company through friends and family, and later secured investments from Andy Bechtolsheim and others.
- Diane Greene stayed with the company even after having her baby and brought her child to work.
- They eventually had customers and partners worldwide and Diane would travel with her daughter, staying at high-end hotels with a nanny.
- Diane's biggest mistake was feeling selfish for not wanting to sell the company when her co-founders did, but she is glad she left VMware and had time with her kids.
- They did not have VCs and raised money from Dell and banks to take the company public.
- After leaving VMware, Diane joined the board of Intuit and later Google.

- The speaker joined the boards of Intuit and Google after leaving VMware
- The common factor among successful companies is the focus on people
- Google had three women on its board, including the speaker
- The speaker started Bebop in 2012 to address the need for improved enterprise software
- The speaker convinced friends from VMware to join as co-founders
- The motivation for starting Bebop was the broken state of current enterprise software
- Bebop was eventually sold to Google due to the combination of their technology and expertise
- The speaker initially did not want to join Google, but changed her mind after considering the potential of Bebop and consulting with the team
- The cloud industry is experiencing a revolution and the speaker finds it fascinating
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of security and the advanced technologies available in the cloud.

- The speaker advises first-time founders to be careful about their board of directors
- They suggest having a board that can be trusted and helps rather than one that needs to be managed
- The speaker shares their experience of selecting board members based on their expertise and the specific needs of their company
- They give an example of convincing a high-profile lawyer to join their board
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of trust and finding a unique fit when selecting board members.

- Diane Greene co-founded VMware and faced challenges in finding business-side people to join the company.
- They initially funded the company through friends and family and later secured investments.
- Diane stayed with the company even after having her baby and eventually had customers and partners worldwide.
- Diane's biggest mistake was not wanting to sell the company when her co-founders did.
- After leaving VMware, Diane joined the boards of Intuit and Google.
- Diane started Bebop to improve enterprise software and eventually sold it to Google.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of people in successful companies and the need for a trusted board of directors.
- The speaker advises first-time founders to carefully select board members based on expertise and specific company needs.

Diane Greene is SVP of Google Cloud and she was also the CEO and cofounder of VMware.

Jessica Livingston is cofounder of YC.

Well, we'll just get into this because I have a whole list of questions and we'll see how many we'll get through.

So I'm going to selfishly ask a question because I'm very interested.

When you started VMware, it was in the late 90s, a very exciting time.

How many, were any of you in Silicon Valley in 98?

Okay, we got some hands, we got some hands.

I wanna hear what was Silicon Valley like and sort of how did you get started with VMware?

Yeah, well the way, it was interesting the way I got started.

I co-founded VMware with my husband as a professor at Stanford and he was doing research and he had sent me an email, I was actually the 1 startup I didn't mention I was working on at the time, and he sent me this mail because I was sort of an advisor to that so I never counted, But it actually went public.

But anyhow, he got this email from all these people up at Microsoft about a paper that was supposedly under blind review, and I'm like, oh man, you really gotta get a patent filed here.

And then I'm like, you know, this is just so valuable, your research, we should take it to market.

And then we kind of did it with our grad students.

And we weren't, you know, it turned out it was just, we did this thing and it was right at the beginning of the dot-com era and there was pets.com and webvan.com and, you know, these companies that were raising huge amounts of money.

And I can remember I went to some party and I'm talking to this guy and he's like, what do you do?

And I'm like, well, we're building this software that you can put on your machine, it'll let you run multiple, you know, it'll multiplex all the resources.

And he just looked at me and he goes, this is hopeless.

In fact, I couldn't even get a PR firm to come and work with us.

Because it was all about thinking big and this whole dot com thing.

It was, and it was, it wasn't that hard to get engineers because we were such deep technology, they understood what we did, but getting business side people was pretty much impossible.

And so companies were just sort of getting slapped together and going public.

were going public right and left, that's for sure.

In fact, the company that I advised that went public, I was stunned.

So then, did your husband, tell me how you got started specifically with VMware, did he say, okay, come on board now, as like we're making this real.

Well, it was me, I was like, I think you should do a company, and I said, I'll help you.

And I said, look, I really, I'll get it going, But then, you know, I was about to have our second kid.

And then we had his 2 grad students that were gonna join us.

And so I said, I better tell them I'm gonna have a baby and I did and they were like so.

And so I'm like okay, so we did it and then 6 months into it I had my baby And it was kind of cool because we didn't have any customers and we were in this little building that you could open the windows.

And so I just brought my baby to work and hung out with her.

It was, you know, yeah, you know near town and country there's a car wash?

So it's right behind there, and Healthy Out had been there before, and they moved out and they called it the crack house because people were doing drug deals in front

But it was, the building is not there any longer.

So did you then, did you fundraise for VMware early on or how did that work?

Because I'm interested in what fundraising was like back in...

Well you know, so I'd made money from V Extreme, the streaming video company from Microsoft, and I always delighted in telling Steve Ballmer and whatnot that they paid for V Extreme.

Because it wasn't really a great company for them.

Because we got in between Intel and Microsoft in the stack.

So we disintermediated them a little bit.

So what we did was we did our friends and family, and we only allowed friends and immediate family to do a seed fund.

And then, and I held back on how much I put in to kind of be fair to all the founders and then we said okay let's do an outside just to get some credibility And this is sort of advice I've always given people is you wanna find investors that really deeply understand what you're doing.

And you wanna get rich people that deeply understand what you're doing.

We got Andy Bechtolsheim and a few other people, John Hennessy.

We were a bunch of, you know, pretty deep engineers.

And you know we were kind of knew the engineers.

And David, his partner, David Sheridan, was a professor at Stanford that I windsurfed with.

And so we just called them up and we told them what we were doing.

And yeah, they were seed investors in Google too.

So was it kind of like that famous Google story where Andy wrote the $100,000 check and said, here you go?

He said, you know, I got the checkbooks at my house, and he's like, I'm gonna leave it, you know, like in my driveway, you know, and I got his address, and I'm like, is this his house?

And it was like newspapers all over the driveway, like

I'm like, is this really the right, and there was the envelope.

Oh my God, amongst the, sorry, I live for this stuff.

All these random little details make things so colorful.

Yeah, it was working so well and I was having fun and I convinced my mother to come live with me.

help with my daughter and I brought her with me as long as, in fact she was raised, she's like the same age as VMware, really interesting and

So I can always remember how old VMware is.

Like when we got more advanced and started having customers and partners all over the world, you know, selling all over the world, she went all over the world with me.

And then I would just stay at a really high-end hotel and have them hire a really high-end nanny to take care of her and take her around.

Looking back on VMware, were there any mistakes that you made there that you said, gosh, for my next startup, I'm gonna be sure not to do this.

Well, I think the biggest mistake I made was getting, you know, feeling like it was selfish of me to not sell, you know, because everybody else wanted to, and I was like, thought it

wanted to sell and I thought it would be selfish not to, although they would have thanked me had I not.

But in hindsight, I'm actually really glad that I ended up leaving VMware cuz I probably wouldn't have left and I had several years with my kids just home with them that I really valued But which I might not have got

Did your investors want you to sell were you the only 1 that well,

we didn't have VCS So, you know, we didn't have VCs.

So I took money after, after we took the money from Andy and David and John, we, we raised money from Dell and, and from Dell and, and a few banks that were wanting to take us public.

Okay so you were really in control of things,

You had some time with your kids and then you joined the board of Google?

Yeah, right after I left VMware I joined the board of Intuit and then a few years later I joined the board of Google, yeah.

Okay, so I'm curious, being on these boards of these super successful companies, in addition to running your own super successful company, what kind of things did they have in common, or not in common, that make them?

I wouldn't say too many companies have much in common with Google.

Anyhow, but people, it's about the people.

Certainly in Silicon Valley everybody focuses on the people and so maybe it's just across all of Silicon Valley.

But those are, you know, Intuit and Google, you know, it's funny, they had Bill Campbell in common, kind of, but they were so different, the board meetings and everything.

No, Google, when I joined, had, and still does, Shirley Tillman,

president of, not anymore, but she was president of Princeton, and then Anne Mather who was, who still is chair of the Audit Committee, phenomenal board member, and so I'm the third woman to join that board, which is, it makes a huge difference to have 3 instead of 2.

We actually, you know, have conversations in the bathroom.

Okay, so in 2012 you started Bebop, and you were very much in stealth mode, right?

If I remember, I was saying, what are you working on?

Yeah, well because it was such a big, ambitious, open, you know, sort of investigation, I saw no reason, and there was too much interest.

Everyone wanted to know what Diane Greene was working on.

So what made you, how'd you come up with the idea, what made you want to work on this and sort of how did that 1?

Well I had actually been trying to convince anybody that would listen that they should go start a company to do what Peapod did.

Sounds very familiar, my husband is like that.

Yeah, I just, like I really thought, you know, this layer of the stack where you build the applications for the enterprise, you know, because it's so much more complicated where you have multiple users and access controls and it's really hard to do it well and I was like it really needs some attention and I kept that was sort of the vision.

So you were bugging other people like this is great You really should focus on this, there's a need, so you saw this need.

And did you finally say, well, if no 1 else is, I'm...

Well, then the co-founder I found, a professor at Stanford, he was like, yeah, let's just do it.

And I'm like, well, okay, if you'll do it, I guess I'll do it.

in after I'd been kind of working on it for a while, a couple

Well, then I convinced some of my friends from VMware to come in and I said, oh, why don't we'll just call you a founder.

were great people and they're still there.

So what was it that made you think this is an important thing that needs to be working?

Why, there weren't good solutions out there.

Well, like, have you ever used some of the...

Has anybody ever used enterprise software?

It's layers and layers of clicking through these screens, you know, where really, like, maybe you just talk to Slack.

I mean, do you really have to, you know, it's just so convoluted and complex, and for power users, you have to have all this rich functionality, but it doesn't have to be this layer of screens that, you know, like you can use machine learning and things and know what the person's trying to do and help them do it and you can automatically fill in everything.

And you can just make it like when you're using it, you're just going, how did it know that's what I was about to do?

And that's what you, it's just incredible what you can do today that is radically different from what back when we, certainly when we founded it, I think people are doing that now.

But, you know, everybody's doing it more and more now.

And especially the phone drove a lot of it because if you didn't do it on the phone, nobody was gonna use it.

So then what made you decide you're working on this super ambitious plan that you know is broken and you're gonna do this?

Well, so 1 thing was, there were a few things going on.

1 was that in terms of being on the Alphabet board by then, no it was still Google, it was just become, no it was still the Google board.

Anyhow, as part of my work on the Google board, I got involved in Google's cloud efforts, just

They said, hey Diane, can we ask you a few questions about that?

And so I really made very good friends with Urs Hussle, who is the guy that really, he's employee number 8 at Google.

He built all their, he's an amazing person.

And really enjoy, and I mean, I tell this, he lives near me.

We started walking our dogs every Saturday, we became very good friends and talked about it, it was just fascinating.

And then I was getting to learn all about Google's technology and the AI and the machine learning and, you know, just everything that Google has, the maps and the knowledge graphs and so forth.

And I realized that if you combine that with what Bebop was doing, it would be pretty special.

So they were, So and I was busy kind of helping them find someone to come in and run Google Cloud.

No, I gave them so many names, I'm like, this is the person, you know, because I really wasn't interested at all.

And, and, and then I just started, well it was a combination of Bebop, both things kind of came, But anyhow, the last person I thought they were gonna hire, I thought the person was great, they decided not to.

I thought maybe they weren't Google-y enough or something.

So at that point I just said okay if we can make this work for Bebop and I talked to everybody at Bebop you know to make sure they would be okay with it and yeah we had just raised a lot of money from A16Z, and Mark had joined my board.

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VMware Cofounder Diane Greene with Jessica Livingston at the Female Founders Conference