Diane Greene led VMware from a startup into one of the defining companies of the virtualization era. Her Computer History Museum profile states plainly that “she cofounded and was CEO of VMware from 1998 to 2008, taking the company public in 2007.”
Her path to software was unusual. The museum records that “Greene holds a BS in mechanical engineering and an honorary doctorate from the University of Vermont, an MS in naval architecture from MIT, and an MS in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley,” and notes she was “the 1976 National Women’s Sailing Dinghy Champion.” Before VMware she “cofounded and was CEO of low-bandwidth streaming video company VXtreme” and “held engineering and management positions at SGI, Tandem, and Sybase.”
A Computer History Museum profile of her career describes how she “cofounded VMware in 1998 as CEO, bringing virtualization technology to standard commodity hardware,” and that under her leadership the company grew substantially before going public. She has said that “tenacity” mattered most to her, alongside building strong teams.
After VMware, Greene continued in technology leadership. Her museum profile notes that she is “the former CEO of Google Cloud,” where she ran one of the major cloud platforms. Her career thus spans both the virtualization that made flexible server computing possible and the cloud services built on top of it.