Words matter. These are the best Diane Greene Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Building a company is so much like racing a sailboat.
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.
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.
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.
Now we’re in an environment where women are increasingly having a huge impact and adding a lot of value to our industry. And women are celebrated if they raise their hand and say, ‘Hey, you’re missing my value. You’re not recognizing what I’m doing.’
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.
One of the happiest times of my life, I lived in a tent on a porch on Hawaii.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a good thing to remember that hiring will get easier as you scale – but you should also never drop your standards.
I have pretty set rules that I go home for dinner every night unless I am traveling.
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.
At VMware, we did the virtualization, which is now used extensively across the cloud. Virtualization layers – and containers – are what facilitated the cloud originally.
Every customer wants to run on all the clouds.
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.
There’s a lot that machine learning can’t do that humans can do very, very well.
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 that simply making it home or winning a race.
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.
