#23 - VMware Cofounder Diane Greene with Jessica Livingston at the Female Founders Conference

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's episode is with Diane Greene and Jessica Livingston. Diane's the SVP of Google Cloud, and she was also the CEO and co-founder of VMware, and Jessica's a co-founder of YC. This interview was recorded at our fourth annual Female Founders Conference, which took place here in San Francisco this June.
All right, here we go.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:23)
I'm gonna sit here.

**Diane Greene** (0:26)
Come over here.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:27)
All right, well, we'll just get into this because I have a whole list of questions, and we'll see how many we'll get through. So I'm gonna selfishly ask a question because I'm very interested.
When you started VMware, it was in the late 90s, but a very exciting time. How many, were any of you in Silicon Valley in 98? Raise your hand. Okay, we got some hands. We got some hands.
I wanna hear more about it. I wanna hear what was Silicon Valley like, and sort of how did you get started with VMware?

**Diane Greene** (0:57)
Yeah, well, the way, it was interesting, the way I got started. I was, I co-founded VMware with my husband as a professor at Stanford, and he was doing research, and he had sent me, and I was actually the one startup I didn't mention, I was working on at the time, and he sent me this mail, because I was a sort of a advisor to that, so I never count it, but it actually went public.
But anyhow, he got this email from all these people up at Microsoft about a paper that was supposedly under blind review, and I'm like, oh man, you really gotta get a patent filed here.
And then I'm like, you know, this is just so valuable, your research, we should take it to market, and then we kind of did it with our grad students. And we weren't, you know, it turned out it was just, we did this thing, and it was right at the beginning of the.com era. And there was pets.com and webband.com, and you know, these companies that were raising huge amounts of money. And I can remember, I went to some party, and I'm talking to this guy, and he's like, what do you do? And I'm like, well, we're building this software that you can put on your machine, and it'll let you run multiple, you know, it'll multiplex all the resources, and he just looked at me, and he goes, this is hopeless. You know, and like, you really gotta.

**Jessica Livingston** (2:29)
It seemed like a dubious idea.

**Diane Greene** (2:30)
In fact, I couldn't even get a PR firm to come and work with us.
Because it was all about thinking big and this whole.com thing. It was, and it was, 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.

**Jessica Livingston** (2:53)
And so companies were just sort of getting slapped together and going public.

**Diane Greene** (2:58)
Well, I don't know if they were slapped together, but they were going public right and left. That's for sure.
In fact, the company that I advised that went public, I was stunned.

**Jessica Livingston** (3:08)
Did you have any equity?

**Diane Greene** (3:10)
I did, I booked, that was bizarre.

**Jessica Livingston** (3:15)
So then, did your husband, how did, tell me how you got started specifically with VMware. Did he say, okay, come on board now? It's like we're making, Well, it was me.

**Diane Greene** (3:25)
I was like, I think you should do a company. And I said, I'll help you.
And, and.

**Jessica Livingston** (3:33)
Famous last words.

**Diane Greene** (3:34)
And then I found out I was pregnant.
And I said, look, I really, I'll get it going. But then I, you know, I was about to have our second kid. And I was like, can't do a startup. And, and, and I, and then we had his two grad students that were going to join us.
And, and so I said, I better tell them I'm going to have a baby. And I did. And they were like, so. And, and so I'm like, okay, so we did it. And then six months into it, I had my baby and it was kind of cool because we didn't have any customers. And we were in this little building that you could open the windows. And so I just brought my baby to work and hung out with her.

**Jessica Livingston** (4:16)
And like a little bassinet or something. Where was the, was the office in, down?