At the age of 19, Greene organized the first Windsurfing World Championship and won the national women's dinghy championship in 1976. She worked as an engineer and manager at Sybase, Tandem Computers, and Silicon Graphics, and then some start-up companies. In 1998, Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion founded VMware. In 2004, VMware was acquired by EMC Corporation. On July 8, 2008, Greene was fired 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. In August 2006, Greene joined the board of directors of Intuit. In October 2013, Greene was one of the speakers at YCombinator's Startup School, where she shared details of the early days of VMware. Greene was also a judge for the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2013.
On January 12, 2012, Greene was appointed to the Google board of directors. Greene filled the 10th seat on Google's board of directors, a seat that was last filled in October 2009 by Arthur D. Levinson. In November 2015, Greene was named the senior vice president for Google's cloud businesses, following the acquisition of her startup, Bebop. In 2017, she featured as a protagonist of Reid Hoffman's "Masters of Scale" podcast series, among other successful businesspeople such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Elkann, and Brian Chesky. In this interview, she discussed the strategy VMware adopted in order to scale. On February 8, 2018, Greene was elected as a member of US National Academy of Engineering. Greene was succeeded as CEO of Google Cloud by Thomas Kurian in early 2019. She retained a seat on the board of Alphabet. On April 30, 2019, Alphabet announced that Diane Greene wouldn't be seeking re-election to the Board at the expiration of her term on June 19, 2019.
Greene met her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, while at Berkeley. Greene has two children. In 2011, Greene along with Rosenblum 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. Greene is also an expert crabber and sailor, having grown up doing both in Maryland.
