Diane Greene

Diane Greene is a native of Annapolis, Maryland. She received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont in 1976, the year she won the U.S. women’s national dinghy sailing championship; an S.M. in naval architecture from MIT in 1978; and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, in 1988.⁠[1]

She began as a naval architect designing ships, large ocean structures and windsurfers, and later held technical leadership roles at Silicon Graphics, Tandem Computers and Sybase. She also co-founded the video streaming software company VXtreme and served as its CEO; the company was later acquired by MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

In 1998 Greene co-founded the cloud computing and virtualization company VMware, serving as president and CEO from 1998 to 2008. After EMC acquired VMware in 2004 she remained CEO, was also an executive vice president of EMC from 2005 to 2008, and led VMware’s initial public offering in 2007; she sat on VMware’s board from 2007 to 2008.⁠[1][2]

In July 2008 Greene departed VMware, and former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz took charge of the company.⁠[3]

Greene has served on Intuit’s board since August 2006. On January 12, 2012, Google announced her appointment to its board, effective that day, and to its Audit Committee; she said, “It is incredibly exciting to have the opportunity to support this as a board member.”⁠[2]

As of 2020 her corporate board roles included Intuit, Stripe, AP Moller/Maersk Holding, Wix, SAP and Alphabet; she was also director emerita of Khan Academy, a board member of the California Academy of Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.⁠[1]

In 2012 Greene co-founded and led Bebop Technologies, a software development platform company that AlphabetAlphabetAlphabet is an American technology holding company formed in 2015 through a restructuring of Google, whose businesses include Google as well as companies in autonomous driving, life sciences, and early-stage technology investment. The group reports its businesses as Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets.Open the full entry acquired in 2015.⁠[1]

On March 20, 2015, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry (a16z) published the podcast episode “a16z Podcast: The Truth about Serving on Boards” on its website, featuring a conversation about serving on corporate boards between a16z’s Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and Greene, the co-founder and former CEO of VMware. The talk was part of a corporate governance training program that a16z organized with the Directors’ College at StanfordStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry on March 5, 2015. The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019.⁠[4][5]

At the time Greene served on the boards of Google and Intuit. Discussing a director’s role, she said, “That's not your job. Your job as a director is to ask questions.” She also said, “I've almost never seen a problem that couldn't be solved by better communication and consistency.”⁠[4]

In 2015 Greene became senior vice president of Google’s cloud businesses and later CEO of Google Cloud; she joined Google full-time to run Cloud in December 2015.⁠[1][6]

On November 17, 2018, Greene announced that Thomas KurianThomas KurianThomas Kurian is the chief executive officer of Google Cloud, Google’s cloud computing division. He previously led product development at Oracle for many years, and in 2018 moved to Google, succeeding Diane Greene as head of Google Cloud; during his tenure he has led several large acquisitions and steered the division toward enterprise products built around Gemini models and AI agents.Open the full entry would join Google Cloud on November 26 and take over its leadership in early 2019; she continued as CEO through January 2019 and remained an Alphabet director, turning to mentoring and education, including investing in and helping female founder CEOs with engineering or science backgrounds. She wrote that during her tenure Google Cloud had grown from “only two significant customers and a collection of startups” to serving major Fortune 1000 enterprises, and had acquired Apigee, KaggleKaggleKaggle is an online community and competition platform for data scientists and machine learning practitioners, where users can enter machine learning competitions, find and publish datasets, and write and share analysis code. It was founded in 2010 by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, acquired by Google in 2017, and is now part of Google.Open the full entry and qwiklabs.⁠[6]

On August 7, 2020, MIT announced that Greene had been elected chair of the MIT Corporation effective October 2, 2020, succeeding Robert B. Millard, who had served since 2014, and becoming the first woman to hold the post. She had joined the Corporation as a term member in 2008 and became a life member in 2013. She said, “It is a great honor to be elected to lead the accomplished members of the Corporation.”⁠[1]