Diane Greene, co-founder and former CEO of VMware, speaks with Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston about VMware's fundraising history.
What-if
Greene: VMware cofounders would have thanked her for not selling to EMC
“My co-founders wanted to sell, and I thought it would be selfish not to, although they would have thanked me had I not”
Prediction Held up
Greene: Enterprise tech will consolidate into four clouds immune to startup disruption
“Everything's going to be in just a few, maybe four clouds or so, you know, there's not going to be that many of them, because like, we spend about ten billion a year in infrastructure, and so it's not going to Get disrupted by a startup, unless they invent qua…”
Insight
Greene: Having three female board members makes a huge difference over two
“And so I'm the third woman to join that board, which is, it makes a huge difference to have three instead of two.”
Disclosure
Greene: Google spends about $10 billion annually on infrastructure
“We spend about ten billion a year in infrastructure”
Disclosure
Greene used written memos instead of slide decks for VMware board meetings
“My board meetings, I never wrote slides, I just wrote a document, and it had a few metrics about how we were doing, if, you know, we were doing well, but the whole rest of it was things I was worried about or trying to figure out.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Greene: VMware easily attracted engineers, but struggled to hire business talent
“It wasn't that hard to get engineers, because we were such deep technology, they understood what we did, but getting business side people was pretty much impossible.”