Diane Greene Quotes

When we were small, the idea of VMware wasn’t well defined, and convincing people to join was difficult. Each person we hired at that time was a big deal.

If I had to have my druthers – the best technology, the best cloud… if I had to choose between that and building out a sales force and building out customer support… I would pick the latter.

I have pretty set rules that I go home for dinner every night unless I am traveling.

Building a company is so much like racing a sailboat.

Kids are curious, and if you don’t lose that, then everything is an adventure.

I’m pretty transparent and clear about things. The things I do and the way I act are no different than I would expect of others. Mostly it’s about being very clear about what we are trying to do and communicating a lot and showing absolute consistency and integrity about what I say and do.

When you race a sailboat, the selection of your crew is just completely paramount. It’s impossible to be an effective skipper if you don’t have the right people working harmoniously in the right roles.

One of the happiest times of my life, I lived in a tent on a porch on Hawaii.

More than anything, I think my connection to the sea has really helped me develop my independence and a sense of the importance and value of my own vision.

Google is committed to open source and open APIs, and part of that is creating a partner-friendly place.

It’s a good thing to remember that hiring will get easier as you scale – but you should also never drop your standards.

Everything is changing now that we are in the cloud in terms of sharing our data, understanding our data using new techniques like machine learning.

Paul Otellini, the former CEO of Intel, I worked with while I was still with VMware. I knew Ram Shriram through the tech industry.

At VMware, the engineers worked very closely with our customers, closely with the field, and it was exciting for everyone. So, one of things I did here at Google when I arrived was to combine sales, marketing, engineering, and product.

At VMware, we did the virtualization, which is now used extensively across the cloud. Virtualization layers – and containers – are what facilitated the cloud originally.

When I first started VMware, I was very shy and self-conscious about speaking. I grew out of this by giving talks each week in front of the whole company; gradually, as we scaled, I had talked to more and more people, and this is how I conquered my fear of talking to people.

I have a lot of help to do chores so I can be with my family, and I never have any help over the weekends.

Google went in a consumer direction, and VMware was system infrastructure. But there are a lot of parallels and similarities.

If you had a hobby, family, or wanted to do things besides work – you should join VMware. We didn’t have nearly as long hours as Google given our customers worked normal business hours.

There’s a lot that machine learning can’t do that humans can do very, very well.

If I could inexpensively pick up a killer sales force without a lot of the other things that I don’t necessarily need, yeah, I’d be all there.

Almost every customer that I talk to is talking about how they’re using APIs, and what a step function they are for their business.