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VMware Founder Diane Greene on Scaling Products and Culture

Diane Greene co-founded VMware in 1998 and served as its CEO until 2008. She was at the helm taking it from $0 to $2 billion in revenue as well as making it the largest tech IPO of 2007. VMware has been one of the most successful tech startups in large part to her leadership in the early years.

After her time at VMware, she joined the board of Google in 2012 and became the CEO of their cloud business from 2015 to 2019. She left Google Cloud with $8 billion in annualized revenue.

She sat down with Jerry Chen to discuss her time at VMware in the Blitzscaling series. Here are 4 lessons she shared about scaling products and culture.

Creating a strong culture matters the most at the start

She said that you can never drop your standards when hiring people. With a small team, each member has an outsized impact on the culture compared to a person joining a 100,000+ person company. If a company is able to get a critical mass of really great people, a person who doesn’t fit will self-select to leave.

VMware attracted people with hobbies outside of work. Comparing themselves to the employees at Google, Diane said that Google created a culture of working 24/7. It worked out for Google and the people there, but not everyone is wired in that way. VMware was good for people with families for that reason.

Consistent org-wide communication keeps everyone in the know

She got into the habit of asking her direct reports to send her an email by Sunday sharing items they are working on for the week. She would collate and distribute the most critical pieces of information to her team. It caught on to the point where her direct reports would do the same with their teams.

The best piece of advice she received was you can never over communicate.

Focus on customers first, then vendors, then VMware

VMware was platform-agnostic and took the approach of being Switzerland in the tech world. It didn’t matter if the hardware was IBM, HP, or Dell, they would all run VMware’s products. Being platform agnostic accelerated their growth in many ways. What was good for the customer, was good for the vendor, which was good for VMware. The customer could pick the hardware of their choice and still have the ability to run VMware.

VMware was able to go to market with the major players in the industry and wasn’t tied to one vendor. Being platform agnostic gave them more channels to go to market and made their sales process easier. 

You enable disruptive R&D by having self-driven people

VMware purposefully asked their engineers to give slack on their delivery schedules. Diane and the other leaders wanted their teams to have time to experiment with new ideas. This experimentation only happens with self-driven people who are engaged with their work. 

Not everything is going to work when experimenting with new ideas. It’s critical not to single a specific person out if something doesn’t work, it’s everyone’s shared responsibility. 

Check out the full interview with Diane! 

End Note

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Have a great day,

Nick