Diane Greene's Advice for Founders

Greene traces her independence to growing up sailing and learning to read the wind and water while steering toward a goal. She compares building a company to racing a sailboat: make a plan, reassess it as conditions change, and make decisions promptly.

Greene says a startup needs aligned founders and may benefit from having fewer of them. At VMware, she learned that no one is indispensable and that success depends on putting the right mix of people, skills, and personalities in the right roles.

VMware’s virtualization technology took off in part because the company made it easy to move an existing physical-machine workload into a virtual machine without changing how it ran. When intellectual property issues blocked sales through IBM, VMware found another route by working with IBM’s star resellers.

At VMware, Greene worked to create an open culture where people could communicate, collaborate, and see how their roles supported the company’s goals. At Bebop, the first product design missed the mark and her original co-founder left, but the team persisted and developed a focus on design thinking and enterprise application tools.

Greene says Google Cloud showed her that an enterprise startup can operate inside a large company, with culture and role fit still central. She urges founders to focus on creating value for customers and partners, and to commit to building because they respect the goal and enjoy the process.