Building Ships, Companies, and the Cloud

Whether as an engineer or an entrepreneur, Diane Greene’s career can be best described as “storied.” She has designed naval ships, run engineering teams, and co-founded multiple startups. Now she leads Google’s cloud business and sits on the boards of Alphabet, Intuit, and MIT. How did she evolve from engineer to serial entrepreneur to global executive?

After receiving degrees in mechanical engineering, naval architecture, and computer science from University of Vermont, MIT, and UC Berkeley, respectively, Greene held engineering and management positions for SGI, Tandem, and Sybase. In 1998 she co-founded and served as CEO of virtualization giant VMware. Over the course of 10 years, she took the company public and to a $2 billion run rate. In 2016 Dell Technologies acquired VMware as part of its $67 billion merger with EMC, the largest technology deal in history.

In her role as SVP of Google Cloud, Greene oversees the growth and strategy of a major business partnering with customers like Snapchat, Disney, and eBay. She took on this role in 2015, after Bebop, the cloud developer platform she co-founded, was acquired by Google for $383 million. As the search giant enters a sector dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, she has set the ambitious goal to lead the cloud computing market by 2022.

Join us as Diane Greene sits down with Exponential Center Executive Director Marguerite Gong Hancock to share her story, discuss how Silicon Valley has changed throughout her career, and talk about what lies ahead for Google’s Cloud business.

This event will be streamed live on our Facebook page: facebook.com/computerhistory.