introduce Diane Greene.

Diane Greene is the latest member of

Google's Board of Directors.

She's also a board member for Intuit and MIT.

Diane is probably most well known for founding VMware.

VMware went on to define the visualization industry.

Diane was the CEO of VMware from 1998 to 2008.

She took the company to $2 billion in revenue, and she

took the company public.

When I heard that I got to be on the same panel as Diane

Greene, I was flabbergasted, and so excited.

Despite how intimidating her resume sounds, Diane Greene is

actually quite approachable.

I heard her speak last year at a Google event and I went up

and introduced myself afterwards, and she was very

friendly and nice.

So if you get the opportunity afterwards, I would encourage

you to shake her hand.

Diane is also a national champion sailor.

And with that, Diane.

[APPLAUSE]

DIANE GREENE: Thank you for that introduction.

She went further than I suggested she go.

So how did I manage to do these things?

What I thought I would do is take you on a whirlwind tour

of my life and try and highlight where I thought I

learned valuable things.

And I grew up sailing, racing sailboats.

And when you race a boat, first you have to build a

team, and you have to get your team all aligned on a single

goal, which is to win the race.

And then you need your strategy to win the race.

You have to understand what the wind's doing, understand

what the currents are doing, and pay attention to your

competitors.

And if your competitors surprise you or you get a wind

shift, you have to immediately react and handle that and

continue winning the race.

And the last thing is the engineering around sailing.

You have to prepare your boat.

It has to be ready to go fast.

Then you have to tune it while on the race course to keep

going fast.

And I think that's what led me to train.

I trained as a mechanical engineer and

then a naval architect.

I came out to the Bay Area to San Francisco

for my first job.

And the first thing I was given to do was analyze some

mooring, a mooring for an offshore oil platform that was

used for firefighting.

And there was a big Fortran program that looked like it

was the way to model this.

And so that's when I learned how to program.

And it was just this incredibly

powerful tool, software.

You could do anything with it.

Got pretty excited about it.

Was not very excited about sitting inside behind a desk.

I really came to the Bay Area for the windsurfing.

And so I quit that job and I moved to Hawaii where I think

I've had perhaps one of my favorite periods of my life.

I lived sort of in a commune where we were exploring.

Windsurfing was sort of an early

microcosm of the tech industry.

We were just inventing all kinds of things--

new sails, high aspect sails, new shapes

of boards, new materials.

And all we did was build and test this equipment every day.

It was really tremendous.

And from there, I went and ran engineering for Windsurfing

International.

That was the company that had the patent on the windsurfer,

which also taught me how abused patents can be, because

they tried to control a very rapidly expanding industry

with their patents.

I left that.

Well, all this time, I continued to study software.

I went back up to the Bay Area and enrolled in a graduate

program in computer science at UC Berkeley.

Berkeley was a pretty happening place at that point.

The grad students had a lab full of brand new Sun

workstations that were based on this Unix, a relatively new

open operating system.

Richard Stallman, who wrote the GPL license,

was hanging out there.

I got to see the first graphical user interface, and

it was just very exciting.

And I knew it's what I wanted to keep doing.

I did still yearn for adventure.

I've always really loved adventure, so I took a brief

interlude and used my computer skills to be the computer

expert on a marine archaeology expedition in Sipan where we

excavated a Spanish galleon and found gold.

And then I came back to the Bay Area and went to work at a

succession of companies in the tech industry.

The first one was Sybase, where I really got hit over

the head with the value of having engineers across

companies work together.

I made friends with an engineer at Sun, it turned out

he was a windsurfer, and we spend a few months windsurfing

and writing software and were able to get sort of an order

of magnitude performance increase in the Sybase system

running on Sun.

And I really used that when I built VMware.

All three companies were quite an education in how important

it is to embrace change and always go forward, invest in

the future.

Sybase didn't want to rework their system to support

symmetric multiprocessing processing, and that's sort of

why Oracle eclipsed them.

I went to work at Tandem that had the world's best database

management system, but it ran on proprietary hardware and

proprietary operating system.

And it was too hard to see the business model for moving to

commodity open systems, and they sort of sailed into

oblivion, getting bought by Compaq and then by HP.

And then I went to work for SGI, which was a pretty

aggressive tech company at that point in time and worked

on interactive television, which was a

really exciting project.

But again, the internet was happening and it

was starting at SGI.

But instead, the founder of SGI, Jim Clark, left and

founded Netscape, and a number of us

left and started companies.

And that's when I finally just decided

to stick with startups.

And so I did two successive smaller startups.

They both had great visions.

I would say they maybe executed too early.

Nice financial outcomes.

The first one was streaming video over the internet, low

bandwidth, because there wasn't much bandwidth.

And the second was internet ad serving, interestingly enough.

At that point I took a little time off and decided to found

VMware, which was based on some work my husband was doing

at Stanford around virtualization.

And there's a few things I can kind of relate to what we did

at VMware to what I had already learned.

For instance, Sun Microsystems introduced these workstations.

People loved these workstations, and then brought

their servers into the companies.

And at VMware we used the same strategy.

We had a workstation software.

People loved our workstation software, and then when we

came out with the server product, were pretty

quick to adopt it.

We did amazing.

Our engineers worked with the hardware vendors.

They worked with the chip vendors.

They worked with the storage vendors.

And then we worked with all of those vendors

to take it to market.

And I'm just a huge believer in

collaboration in the industry.

And it was really effective for VMware, but it was always

hard to convince other companies to trust us and

partner with us.

But I think we always won, jointly, together.

And then the last thing was just sort of how to adapt, how

to embrace change.

My job changed considerably from zero to sort of 6,000,

7,000 people the company was when I left.

And it's just sort of recognizing, OK, this isn't

working and constantly sectioning out parts of my job

that I just didn't have time for anymore and hiring someone

to do those things.

VMware was just a totally fun adventure, building it with

all those people and seeing the impact that it had.

And what I would say is, it's not so important how.

There's just sort of an infinite number

of ways to do things.

But when you see something that you're very interested

in, that you think it can have some real impact, the thing

that's important is to codify that vision, see that vision,

enjoy the adventure of building that vision.

And if you do enjoy it, it makes it fairly easy to be

fearless about it.