Diane Greene's Advice for Founders

Hi everyone! I guess I'm miked up. I can stand right here. Um, I'm just here to introduce our next speaker, who's one of my just favorite people, Diane Green. She is, you all, I'm sure know her, so she needs no introduction. But she's the chief of Google's Cloud businesses, and prior to that, amongst many of the things she did, she was the founder and CEO of VMware. Um, so she's going to come out, say a few words, then I'm going to come out and join her and do some Q and A for her talk. So welcome, Diane!

Hi! I was trying to figure out what to do. CU, I like to read my notes, and the lectrum was too high for my 5 foot one self. Um, so, um, you know, it's just such a total pleasure for me to be here. You know, more than 800 female Founders from all over the world. Some of you just... Pro? Yeah, yeah! So some of you are probably starting your careers, and many of you are in the early stages of developing your companies. I think it's just like incredibly exciting. You know, there's so much possibility sitting in this room, this one Auditorium, and imagine all the interesting challenges that you're going to surmount and all that’s going to be required to navigate.

So, a little bit about myself. I've been a co-founder and CEO of three startups. The first was V Extreme in 1995, where we developed a low bandwidth streaming video technology. We could stream sort of postage-sized videos across the internet, and we sold this to Microsoft in 1997 for 75 million. That became the basis of Microsoft's movie player. My second startup was VMware, and with that, we launched the virtualization Revolution. Um, we founded that in 1998, and we took it public in 2007. The market cap closed that day at $119.1 billion! [Applause] [Music]

So, my last startup to date was BBop, which we founded in 2013, and then we sold it to Google in 2015 for 380 million, and I committed my portion of the proceeds to a nonprofit through a donor-advised fund. Okay, thank you! Um, okay, so before these startups, I don't usually get so much applause. You're a great audience! Um, before these startups, I built inside of larger companies at Cbase, the first tech company I worked at. Before that, I was a naval architect. Um, I developed asynchronous input-output software to make the database run faster, and actually we were able to beat Oracle and Ingress and all the other database companies at the benchmarks. And, and yeah, it was cool!

And then I went to Tandem. They actually fired my boss, who was a woman, and she went to... it was a mistake. She was running engineering, and I went to Tandem with her. Anyhow, there I helped create a hybrid architecture to run an open Unix-based world. Tandem had the best transaction processing system in the world, but it was proprietary. Then at SGI, I developed streaming video solutions, and that was part of the Time Warner Interactive television project, which was actually a precursor to the World Wide Web. A lot of people in that group went out. Netscape was one of the companies. Um, a lot of companies started out of that.

As a tech investor, I've advised and put seed money into a lot of startups, and they include two companies that are now public: Cloud Era and Pure Storage, and also Unity Technologies, which is the gaming developer platform, and several others. Unfortunately, my schedule’s now such that I no longer have the time to provide seed money or advice to startups. Um, but anyhow, I've learned a lot of lessons along the way, and I'm going to now look back and attempt to identify and share them with you.

My first lessons were at a very young age. My mother was the latest in a pretty strong principled Midwestern school teacher lineage, and my father was a brilliant, hard-driving engineer and entrepreneur. I was the second youngest in my family, a little girl in a crowd of very competitive and dominating brothers. We lived on a creek that fed into the Chesapeake Bay, and my father conveyed his love of the water to me. I soon found myself taking off on long sails in my little sailing dinghy. This was formative.

I suddenly, you know, was the mistress of my world, in charge of a boat and on my own, facing and overcoming the challenges that the sea would present to me. Later on, I would race bigger boats and wind surfers. I won the Women's National dinghy sailing championships. I raced to Bermuda and down both of America's coasts, and I windsurfed across open ocean from Maui to Mikai and back. It's actually an amazing story, but I'm not going to go into it. But 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.

To sail successfully, you need to observe with great care. You need to identify what the wind and the water are telling you, and then find a way to execute to reach whatever goal you've set, be it simply making it home, deport, or winning a race. Building a company is so much like racing a sailboat. You need a plan and then the ability to re-evaluate the plan in real time as new information is acquired. Suddenly, the wind changes or a competitor is stronger than you thought they'd be, and each mark in the race is a milestone where you need to look up and evaluate what you're doing, how you're doing.

So, when you campaign a sailboat, you need to be in the moment. You need to let go of yourself, and yet you can't lose the ability to question your decisions. Most of all, when it's time to make a decision and a competitor has come upon you or the wind has shifted, you make it. The race won't wait for you. Finally, 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.

So, what does all this mean in terms of founding or running a company? At V Extreme, I learned that the founders need to be solidly aligned and that a startup maybe has a better chance of success when the number of founders is limited. Too many cooks can spoil the broth. Most of all, I learned that no one is indispensable, and it's essential to get the right mix of people, talents, and personalities. VMware was really the beginning of an industry revolution, and from that, I learned what it takes to induce the market to accept a profound innovation.

It's essential to design and market a major innovation in a way that makes its adoption non-disruptive, that makes it easy to integrate with an established order, an established way of doing things, even if the innovation ultimately supplants that order. So, for example, one of the things that made our sales take off, you know, we had this virtualization layer, but we built a tool that would take a workload running in a physical machine and just magically put it in a virtual machine, and everything just ran the same. That was a phenomenal sales tool for us at VMware!

I also was reminded not to let setbacks make you stop thinking. If a puzzle can't be solved one way, there's always another. It's just a matter of navigation. We were really disappointed when we learned that VMware would not be able to sell through IBM due to IP issues, but then we turned it into an AG where we were able to work with IBM to enlist all of their star resellers to take us to market. Finally, at VMware, I learned how essential it is to create the right corporate culture.

We worked hard to foster a sense of the importance of each and every person and also what their role was in the furtherance of the company's objectives. We created an open culture that would make it easy for people to communicate, collaborate, and share ideas. Indeed, we designed our corporate campus with exactly these goals in mind, if any of you have ever been to VMware. Um, and then BBop also provided an interesting set of lessons. I think it may be my last startup, but you really learn every time.

Uh, my original co-founder didn't stay with the company, and I was at first sort of a bit out of my element. We were attempting to reinvent how Enterprise applications are built so they'd be simple to use and more effective in attaining their objectives. But the basic look and feel, the design of our first attempts was just off. We persevered, and BBop became a powerhouse for design thinking and for tools to build Enterprise applications. Tenaciousness really pays off!

Now, finally, as head of Google Cloud, I'm learning that it's possible to build an Enterprise startup inside a mega company. Once again, the cultures of both the parent and the in-house startup are crucial, and we're a pretty big startup. Yeah, we serve seven apps that have over a billion active users. Anyhow, we're big. But, once again, it is all about having the right people in the right roles. Finally, it's about never taking your eye off creating value for customers and partners.

So, the bottom line when sailing a boat or building a company is that you give it your all. You give it your all not because you're supposed to, not because that's what makes you win, but because you have respect for your goal, and you enjoy the process. As a company founder, enjoy building things. Enjoy creating value, and the commitment that comes from loving what you do is what will nourish you. It will satisfy you and will make you unafraid of failure.

You may lose this race or that one, but sailing ahead with everything you have will still be a pleasure. You may make a fortune, but the fortune will be incidental if your goals are worthy. It's the process that will count, and that understanding will be your greatest source of strength, no matter what the adversity.

So, thank you, and now Jessica's going to come out and ask me questions.