Diane Greene: Inspiring female founders and CEOs

According to technology entrepreneur Diane Greene (M.S.’88 EECS), “The world will be a better place with more female founders/CEOs.” She should know. She’s the former CEO of Google Cloud and a former director of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Before that, she cofounded and ran three technology companies: VMware, which went public for a $19 billion first-day closing valuation; VXtreme, a low-bandwidth streaming video company bought by Microsoft; and Bebop, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup acquired by Google. She previously worked at Sybase, Tandem and SGI as a software engineer; before that, she was a naval architect in the shipping and offshore oil industries.

Greene was recently appointed chair of the MIT Corporation. She was named among Forbes’ “America’s Top 50 Women in Tech” in 2018 and received the 2017 Abie Award for Technical Leadership from AnitaB.org. She has been featured as a protagonist of LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s “Masters of Scale” podcast series, among other successful businesspeople such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Elkann and Brian Chesky.

She now focuses her time and energy on education and mentoring, investing in and helping female founders/CEOs who have engineering or science backgrounds. “I want to encourage every woman engineer and scientist to think in terms of building their own company someday,” she says.

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