VMware Cofounder Diane Greene with Jessica Livingston at the Female Founders Conference

TL;DR

Diane Greene recounts cofounding VMware with her husband and Stanford grad students during the late 1990s dot-com era, raising seed money from engineers like Andy Bechtolsheim who deeply understood the technology, and later founding Bebop to fix broken enterprise software, which Google acquired.

Key insights

• VMware’s idea was considered "dubious" during the dot-com boom; the founder could not even get a PR firm to work with them, and it was nearly impossible to hire business-side people.
• Greene raised seed funding only from friends and family, then brought in outside investors (Andy Bechtolsheim, John Hennessy, David Cheriton) who were deep engineers and understood the technology—taki
• VMware never raised from traditional VCs; later money came from Dell and banks that wanted to take the company public, giving the founders total control.