Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& An Interview with Diane Greene Founder, VMware Date: January 31, 2011 Interview with Diane Greene [introduction music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders the CEO of the National Center for Women in Information Technology or NCWIT. With me is Leigh Kennedy, one of our fine board members as well as a serial entrepreneur herself. Hi Leigh. Leigh Kennedy: Hi Lucy, thanks for having me today. Lucy: Also Larry Nelson from W3W3. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson. I'm so happy to be here. This is a wonderful series and what we really like about it, it really helps other people. Lucy: Absolutely, we have great interviews in this series with wonderful entrepreneurs. We are now over 50 interviews in our series and I felt very excited about that. Leigh: Wow. Lucy: Today we are interviewing a person who I consider to be one of the top entrepreneurs I know, co-founder and founding CEO of VMWare, Diane Greene. VMWare is one of those companies I know many of our listeners have heard about because it introduced something really, really innovative, which was a virtualization layer between hardware and software that allows different operating systems to run on the same machine. That was pretty cool and that was one of VMWare's really innovative leads into the market, truly revolutionary. When the company went public in 2007, it was Silicon Valley's biggest IPO since Google, no small accomplishment. So we can't wait to talk to Diane. She left VMWare in 2008, but she continues to invest in companies and to advise entrepreneurs and she serves on very impressive boards, such as Intuit, MIT Corporation and more. Diane, welcome. Diane Greene: Well, thanks very much. It's always good to participate in the entrepreneurial community in any way I can. Lucy: So let's get right to the questions, Diane. We're really interested in understanding how you first got into technology. As you look at the technologies out there today, which ones do you think are especially cool? Diane: Well I've always had an orientation around science and engineering. In high school I built a model bridge with movable trusses and instrumented one of them with a strange gauge. That really launched me into what I found out was called engineering. I was also really active racing sailboats, which meant maintaining them and tuning them which was a lot of technology to keep the boat going fast in addition to racing it. So I would say I started doing things in technology in high school. Nothing like what the kids are doing today with their computers, but certainly technology. In terms of what is out there today that's really exciting, like everybody else, it's mobile connectivity, the social networking, the sensors, particularly around imaging. All these things contributing to our ability to have a digitally enhanced world is tremendously exciting. Larry: Boy, I'll say. I have a feeling that if I was going to try to recruit a relationship with you that if my company started with the letter V, like in Vermont, I would get a little bit further. Lucy: [laughs] Leigh: I didn't understand it, either. Lucy: I didn't understand it, either, that's OK. Diane: It's possible, because I'm puzzled about what you're talking about. Larry: I was just looking at VMWare, VXtreme. Diane: Oh, V, I thought you said Z. That's right, VMWare, VXtreme, completely coincidental. VMware, we were looking for a name and at the time, during the dot com bubble, every URL was taken. So we said "Let's do a placeholder." I thought "Let's just do something really descriptive as a placeholder, virtual machine software, call it VMware." So the name stuck. Lucy: Well, that's an interesting story. Larry: Yeah. Leigh: Yeah it is. Lucy: Diane, I'm going to jump into the next question. Diane: Our PR person didn't want to talk to us because they thought "What a boring name." [Leigh and Larr