Diane B. Greene

Co-founder and former CEO of VMware, Greene led the company through an IPO and to a $2B run-rate. Born in Rochester, New York, she was raised in Annapolis, Md. She received her Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1976 from the University of Vermont, and earned a Master's degree in Naval Architecture from MIT in 1978. In 1988 she earned a second Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1998, she, along with Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang, and Edouard Bugnion founded VMware. VMware was the leader in virtualization software, which allows servers to run many operating systems and applications at the same time. Greene led the company through an IPO and to a $2B run-rate. In 2004, VMware was acquired by EMC Corporation. She has served as an Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation from 2005 to 2008.

On July 8, 2008, she was dismissed as President and CEO by the VMware Board of Directors and replaced by Paul Maritz, a retired 14-year Microsoft veteran who was running the cloud computing business of VMware parent company EMC. When news of her firing was announced to investors the next morning, VMware's stocks plunged 24%. Also due to her departure, three other executives, including her husband Mendel Rosenblum, left the company.

Prior to VMware, Greene was also the founding CEO of VXtreme, which was sold to Microsoft in 1997 as the basis for their media player. Prior to that, she held engineering management and development positions at SGI, Tandem, and Sybase. She joined the Board of Directors of Intuit, Inc. in August 2006. William Campbell, Chairman of Intuit, is quoted as saying, "Diane Greene is a stand-out technologist with an outstanding business track record. Her abilities and insights will be of great value to our board. Her pragmatic, hands-on executive style combined with her entrepreneurial approach to development will help Intuit stay at the forefront of its customer-driven focus on innovation. In addition, her deep technical skills, her attention to strategy and her intense focus on partnerships will help Intuit as it continues to broaden its business strategy."

On January 12, 2012, she joined Google's Board of Directors. Filling the 10th seat on the Board—a seat which was last filled in October 2009 by Arthur D. Levinson—Greene was chosen because of her vast experience as an entrepreneur, technological innovator, and corporate executive with more than three decades of experience. In October 2013, she was one of the speakers at Paul Graham's Startup School, where she shared details of the early days of VMware.

She met her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, while at Berkeley; they have two children. In 2011, she, along with her husband, gave $3 million to create the Marvin Rosenblum Professorship in Mathematics in the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences in honor of Mendel's father, Marvin Rosenblum, who taught at the university for 45 years. That same year, Greene was an IEEE Computer Society Computer Entrepreneur Award Recipient "For creating a virtualization platform that profoundly revolutionized modern computing."

She has served on the Board of the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST). She has also worked actively with several private technology companies and has served on the Stanford School of Engineering Advisory Board.