Diane Greene

Diane Greene draws on sailing and her experience founding companies to share lessons for founders. She recommends keeping founders aligned, choosing people whose skills and personalities work well together, and adapting plans as new information arrives. She says major innovations are easier to adopt when they fit into existing ways of working, and that setbacks can reveal other paths to market. She also emphasizes open company cultures, persistence, and staying focused on creating value for customers and partners.

Diane Greene describes cofounding VMware with her husband and graduate students, building a deep technology company during the dot-com boom, and raising money from investors who understood the business. She reflects on balancing startup life with raising children, the importance of founder control, and choosing a board that offers trusted advice and specific expertise. She also explains the vision behind Bebop’s enterprise software and why she sold it to Google, where its work could combine with Google’s cloud and machine learning capabilities. Her advice to founders is to build a board that helps them work through hard problems rather than one they need to manage or impress.