YouSaid · the spoken record

Diane Greene

lines on the record: 36
first: 2017-11-10
most recent: 2017-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Masters of Scale is a weight what original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Dan Kedmy, Chris McLeod, Jenny Cataldo, and Ben Manila. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Original music and sound design is by the holiday brothers, mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh, special thanks to Chris Yea, Saeeda Sepieva, Elisa Schreiber, David Sanford, and Stephanie Kent. It masters scale.com to find the transcript for this episode.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to make a prediction here. Diane will actually write up that plan, and then her most scalable ideas? They'll come at her sideways. I'm Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Next week on Masters of Scale, Slack CO and co-founder Stuart Butterfield shares the human side of a daring pivot.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking back at the arc of her career, there's only one thing Diane might do differently, a slightly more defined plan would be nice.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once again, Dan is incredibly bullish on Google's market opportunity. She argues that Google has hardly even begun to tackle this market. Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive, that's only the beginning. Once you draw whole organizations into the cloud, it opens up unfathomable opportunities. Once again, she has a Swiss army knife in the making.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That discussion led Diane to her newest position, senior vice president of Google's Cloud Division. She agreed to lead Google's charge into the cloud on one condition.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing about Diane She doesn't let a big idea languish. To this day, she's pivoting toward that big opportunity. The idea came at her as you might expect sideways.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in layman's terms, the opportunity she's describing here is this Look, we got customers to move their information to these virtualized machines. We could have convinced developers to write apps directly to those machines. That means we don't have to worry about software. We don't have to worry about devices. We don't have to worry about end users installing updates. All of the computing moves to the cloud. She even had the language right, elastic sky. It was quite an opportunity. I've heard investors and entrepreneurs talk like this before. They'll say things like, I had all the right ideas for breakthrough technology X. I was just a little early before the technology, but I had the idea, and sometimes that's true. In Dian's case, I think it's absolutely true. You could reasonably argue that the cloud exists because of Diane. She built the bridge and got everyone into the ether.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In two thousand three, from this position of strength, Diana and her partner sold VMware to EMC for six hundred twenty five million dollars. Five years later, Diane stepped down as CEO. In twenty twelve, she joined Google's board of directors. But every once in a while she had this nagging thought. As massively as VMware scaled, she was convinced it could have been bigger. She was still looking sideways, to the market they had left behind. That market eventually became known as the Cloud”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a time tested path to scale, set aside for the moment your fantasies about what your product might become and sidle up to the users who need part of it right now. The more indispensable you are to these users, the more receptive they will be to your larger pitch. And before long, you too can sell the whole Swiss army knife.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, these little known VMware raves are still raging. YouTube the words VMworld and you'll get a glimpse of their customer appreciation parties. The champagne is flowing. There are no mosh pits as far as I can tell, but who knows what the sysadmins are up to when they're beneath the trees where nobody sees. So in one sense Diane was lucky to find her way from college professors to bankrupt companies to Linux developers to the whole sysadmin community and their secret all-night raids. But there's a hidden logic to her sideways journey. It comes from a question that Diane posed earlier. It's a fantastic question to ask about your users.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these people have a ton of clout. They can channel a corporate's IT budget to whatever solution makes their lives easier. Diane learned that when you make a sysadmin happy, even with a functional equivalent of a pair of tweezers, they'll start eyeing the whole Swiss Army knife.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Notice the term she used here. She targeted adventurous users. Now some products don't require adventurous users. One tweak makes it instantly appealing to any and all users. It takes off overnight and then the market is in full view waiting to be captured. Should that happen to you? Congratulations. You're awfully lucky. Most entrepreneurs start off to the side of the market of their dreams, serving a teeny cohort of users. They're a passionate bunch. You may even have an affectionate pet name for them. At PayPal, we called our first die hard fans the power sellers. They peddled huge volumes of merchandise on eBay. At LinkedIn, we had the lions, which stood for LinkedIn open networkers. They were always asking us to make every member of LinkedIn, including busy COs reachable via email. Not the best idea, but we appreciated their enthusiasm. And for Diane, her adventurous users were the sysadmins.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have to know a thing about Linux developers to appreciate this twist of the story. Turns out that Diane Green had marketed a tool to one of the fastest growing professional groups in Silicon Valley. Linux developers were all the rage. They took off like a grassroots geek movement.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was clear that companies weren't going to thrust their core business into a new untested product. Rather than sell the whole Swiss Army knife, she focused on the most pressing use case. It was as if she said forget the blade, the scissors and the screw, let's just sell the tweezers. In her case, she picked a teeny group of potential users, Linux developers. There was a teeny group of developers who just loved the Linux operating system, but they hated the way Linux wouldn't play nice with the dominant operating system Windows. Diane felt their pain.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one thing to sell the idea of savings to crash trap professors and companies. What about the rest of the Swiss Army knife? Here, Diane faced another hurdle. Customers willing to dip a toe into a wild world of virtual machines. But it was a new fangled technology. What's a virtual machine anyway? It sounds like something that could wipe out all of your company's data in a virtual nightmare. Diane recognized the problem.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“College Science professors, not exactly a scalable market, but sometimes discovering your customer base can be as random and unexpected as discovering the product itself. Luckily for Diane, an unlucky for everyone else, the dot-com bubble burst. Suddenly, struggling companies showed up at her door in search of savings.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On her first attempt, Diane reached out to IT teams and promised huge savings on servers. The response from customers, total disinterest. It was the nineties, the first dot com boom. Who needed savings?”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A power to balancing this sort of exuberance against short term realism. It's not easy to inspire your team, absent a clear path. Believing in this vision and selling it is an essential part of the entrepreneurial crab walk. Because if you really sell it, your team will stick around even as you push them all to drop what they're doing and move sideways. And you have a lot of sidestepping ahead of you. As you embark on the most critical journey for a young company, to search for your first users and establish your first market. How did you start building your go-to-market?”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, mind you, there's a lot of revisionist history in the business world. I know entrepreneurs who realize the scope of their vision only after their company scaled. They recall feeling surefooted. They insist that a long-term vision was always in the back of their minds. But the truth was a lot foggier. Diane is one of those rare entrepreneurs who really believed in her vision from the start. Even when she had no idea how to get there, she insisted to her staff that this idea was huge.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come back to Diane and her metaphorical Swiss army knife. She was building tool after useful tool for VMware, and she was certain that someday they would all be used. From the beginning she had a big vision for what VMware could eventually become.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And here's where I have to tell you something else about Diane her ability to read the competitive field is second to none, and I suspect it has to do with the formative years that she spent as a competitive sailor. I suggested the store as we spoke.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Diana Mendel secured a patent and just in time. As an entrepreneur, you need to know how to read the competition appropriately, whether it's competition from large companies or startups. If you're sailing in a space by yourself and everyone else thinks you're kind of crazy, that's great. Then you actually have time. But if you think your competitors are coming, then frequently it isn't just one, but five or more competitors. Does that mean you're shot at success shrinks to one out of five? Nope. The odds are even worse, because it's possible that not a single one of you will succeed. You end up in a circular firing squad. Not one of the companies reaches critical mass in customers or talent. You're all scrambling for capital. Investors look at you and all go, I don't know which one of you to pick, so I won't pick any of you. So as an entrepreneur, you need to see and hear potential competitors as they come at you sideways. And you need to break away from them quickly. It can be the difference between life and death.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be Nathan Mervold, the founder of Microsoft's research department. Alright, I don't know who that is, but look, once you have Bill Gates circling on your idea, that's an awfully strong indicator that you're on to something. And this raises a crucial point in your sideways journey to scale You don't just have to look sideways, you have to listen. Fortunately, your ears on the side of your head use them. Your competitors might just be rustling in the bushes, and if you spy a big idea off to one side, you should rejoice for about a millisecond, and then you should sprint.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if it was irrelevant, she had it on her radar. She may not have prioritized building a business, but she didn't want someone else to do it first, and she noticed out of the corner of her eye a growing excitement beyond Mendel's breakfast clubs. His research was gaining attention, unwanted attention.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It soon became clear that this sideways glance would draw their full attention, but notice how Diane didn't feel that strongly about building a business. She was passionate about an idea. She had a vision of the future, a new virtual machine that could communicate across all devices.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quiet conversations among colleagues are critical for any idea that comes to you sideways. You ask, are you seeing what I'm seeing? With each conversation your own vision gets sharper. The true idea comes into view.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was the crux of Mendel's research. He was investigating whether he could get these two operating systems to talk to each other, whether he could build a bridge between these two walled gardens. It was anybody's guess how big that wedge could be.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you could replace all of those layabout servers with one busy machine, a server that could speak to any device. That's essentially what Mendel was proposing. One server to rule them all. It didn't even require hardware. In fact, he could add a bit of code to existing servers and get them all talking. As Mendel described how this code might work, it dawned on Diane. Perhaps they could liberate the data and allow it to move freely across servers. All it would take is creating a virtual machine.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was a breakfast, Diane wouldn't want to miss. She was about to get a glimpse of the future, a huge industry shaking idea. That idea? Server virtualization. If you're not hopping out of your chair with excitement, allow me to explain. When you retrieve emails or open documents or launch an app, your computer most likely fetches the data from a server. Twenty years ago, those servers were physical machines, big metal boxes that you had to own as a company, and they were finicky machines. They only talked to certain computers. If your computer ran Windows, you needed a Windows friendly server. If it ran Unix, you needed a Unix-friendly server. They required constant maintenance and consumed tons of energy.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She spots a need and starts solving for it, whether it's a women's hockey team or a new use for some emergent technology. Diane tends to see tectonic shifts in technology before anyone else around her. She doesn't know what role she'll play in the future, but she's so far ahead of the curve that she ends up shaping that future.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There sooner. On today's show, we're going to explore how an entrepreneur can crab walk as quickly and as intelligently as possible. I wanted Diane Green to share her story because if anything defines her career, it's a series of pleasant surprises. She doesn't have a master plan so much as a big idea and an extraordinary ability to sidle up to it. She has a knack for starting on a small project and leaving behind a lasting legacy. This goes all the way back to her college days.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Masters of Scale I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner Greylock, and your host, and I believe the most scalable ideas often come at you sideways. There's something liberating about this theory. You don't have to have a completely scalable idea from day one. In fact, you can have no idea what your product might look like or how you'll get to market or how you'll make money. You might survive so long as you know how to look sideways. And there's an art to the sidelong glance that will get to in a moment. But first I should clarify that sometimes a scalable idea does come at you head on, exactly as you imagined. Jeff Bezos saw the master plan for Amazon clearly laid ahead of him step by step. Most entrepreneurs crab walk towards a bigger market and then a bigger one still. And as they move along, the full market will come into view, and the wonder why they couldn't have gotten”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“rarely sit squarely on the path ahead, it's always scurrying off to the left or right, and if you can't get your team to adjust course quickly, it will slip out of sight. I believe scalable ideas often come at you sideways.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing you should know about Diane She's not just a master crabber, she's also a master of scale. She co founded a company VMware. If you're outside of Silicon Valley, you may not recognize the name VMware, but their work impacts you every day. They're one of those behind the scenes companies that brought us into the age of cloud computing. If not for VMware, you could argue there would be no cloud, which means no Gmail, no Dropbox, no way to connect your information from any device. VMware is such a big deal I was surprised to hear our tech savvy producers didn't know about Diane. In my world, she is a household name VMware hauls in seven billion dollars of revenue each year. That's more than ten times the revenue of the entire seafood industry of Diane's home state of Maryland. There's a common thread here between Diane's crabbing days and her scaling days, a scalable idea”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so even inexperienced kids can now catch a few crabs, but we're talking about being a master crabber. A master crabber can't rely on a lucky catch. They need the skills to find crabs on unlucky days. In short, they have to think like a crab. Where do crabs tend to congregate? Diane has a tip.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Diane Green has been hauling crabs out of the Chesapeake Bay since she was a kid. Not long ago, she and her kids returned to her old fishing hole.”
2017-11-10 · Masters of Scale · Look for the ideas that come at you sideways, w/Diane Greene of Google, VMware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source