More than just about anyone else at Google, Diane Greene is in the hot seat.

The onetime cofounder of VMware, a pioneer in what’s now known as cloud computing, heads Google’s enterprise and cloud businesses, seen by many as its next big business beyond advertising. Appointed last November when Google bought her startup, the senior vice president (pictured above) has an ambitious goal to rival Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which it trails far behind in the fast-growing market for cloud services.

In March, Greene spoke publicly for the first time since her appointment, laying out her plans at Google’s first global cloud users conference. Addressing concerns about Google’s commitment to the cloud and the enterprise, she promised, “this is a long-term forever business” for the company. And in the company’s recently reported first quarter, that commitment was apparent in high spending for data centers, which contributed to lower-than-forecast profits at Google parent Alphabet Inc.

Greene shed a little more light on Google’s enterprise and cloud plans, as well as some insight into her early entrepreneurial experiences, today at the TiEcon conference held annually in Santa Clara, Calif. by The Indus Entrepreneurs. She spoke with Ashmeet Sidana, managing partner at the venture capital firm Engineering Capital. Here are some highlights, sometimes paraphrased, of what she had to say:

On starting companies:

Q: What is it like to start a company from scratch?

A: VMware was my third startup. My husband at Stanford [Mendel Rosenblum, a professor in the computer science and electrical engineering departments], published a paper … on virtualizing a MIPS [microprocessor] chip to show value of virtualization. We figured if it was put on the [Intel] X86 chip, it could be really valuable.

Two of his grad students got approached by other companies to port the work over. We said we really think there’s a company here. They decided to do that with us. I thought at the time–I was pregnant with my second kid–I said, Well, I’ll help you get it going.

We were frugal, so we tried to find a narrow way to bring it to market. We defined this little desktop product to run Linux with Windows.

We were also very careful about whom we hired. A very talented person we considered hiring was too much of a prima donna. We were very lucky to realize our vision.

Q: Why didn’t you didn’t raise any traditional venture capital at VMware?

A: VCs didn’t really see the point to what we were doing, they made a little fun of us. Then later we approached the VCs and their vision of what we should do with the technology seemed really wrong to us.

So [Sun Microsystems cofounder] Andy Bechtolsheim and [Stanford computer science professor] David Cheriton were our first investors. They got it immediately and said I’m in. I put in a bunch of seed money. We thought maybe we’ll take VC money later.

We got to market. Intel tried to invest in us. In April 2000, the bubble burst. The VCs came back and said we’re going to have to halve your valuation. I was running through parallel funding with VCs and hardware vendors, in particular Dell. When the VCs backed out, Dell Computer was our first Series A investor.

Q: What was it like starting your very first startup?

A: The first company I did I cofounded with three IIT graduates and someone from Spain. It was a streaming video company, a little ahead of its time. I was working on the interactive television project at Silicon Graphics. I was going to stream movies on demand over the cable. I was looking around for something besides MPEG that didn’t use so much bandwidth.

Two others at Stanford developed a codec. We started VXtreme. I was going to be CTO. We couldn’t convince anyone to be CEO. This was in 1993 I called up Phil White at Informix and he gave us seed money. Sun Microsystems got really excited and CEO Scott McNealy took us up onstage in New York. We got some funding after that. [The company was bought by Microsoft in 1997.]

Q: You’ve broken so many rules–starting a tech company as a woman, coming back to a large company. Advice for entrepreneurs?

A: I was very happily running a startup with my friends. Because I’m on the board of Google, I was spending a lot of time with the cloud folks, like [Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure] Urs Holzle. I realize now he was recruiting me. I was trying to help him find someone to run this thing. One thing led to another and here I am in a pretty intense job. It’s cool to have a front-row seat on the biggest IT revolution ever.

On the cloud and Google’s role in it:

Q: Why is everyone so excited about the cloud, especially Google?

A: The cloud is the biggest IT revolution ever. Everything’s changing and everything’s moving to the cloud. It’s an incredible way to share everything you’re doing, Google’s been doing cloud data centers for 16 years. It’s a core competence of the company. It’s a new time for the enterprise. The enterprise is more receptive to innovation than it ever was. If they don’t make that digital transformation, they’re going to get left behind.

Q: What will Google do differently in the cloud?

A: Yeah, Amazon was out a good four years before us, hosting virtual machines in the cloud. There’s a next generation of cloud going on. The underpinnings of the technology really matters. It’s going to be about data analytics and data insights … and big machine-learning (capabilities). It’s going to go on a very steep innovation curve. We have incredibly efficient data centers and also a lot of hooks for automation.

Q: How will Google differentiate against AWS and Microsoft?

A: Only 5 percent of workloads are in the public cloud. Effectively you’re riding another company’s innovation curve for free. We’ve open-sourced a lot of technologies like Kubernetes and TensorFlow. As we add more features, we’ll be able to share a lot more strengths with applications.

On issues with cloud adoption:

Q: A big debate is public versus private cloud. How do you see that evolving?

A: Eventually everything will wind up in the public cloud. People have investments and leases on their data centers, equipment they haven’t amortized yet. So there’ll be hybrid cloud for a long, long time. The more simple applications that don’t have a lot of dependencies will move at first. But eventually all of it will move over. It’s way more secure to be in the cloud.

Q: How does everybody trust the cloud with their data?

A: We’ve been in the crosshairs of the best hackers for years. We take CIOs and chief security officers through the threats we deal with. Our data centers are very protected. One UPS truck got caught in a sweeper when it tried to piggyback into the entrance.

Q: How should startups approach virtual machines, containers and the like?

A: Things will evolve from virtual machines to containers. There’s this trend toward complete automation–zero sysops. Snapchat basically created an application and UX and ran it on Google.

Q: How do you see Big Data and the cloud combining?

A: That’s one of the huge benefits of the cloud. People couldn’t share data very easily. People can’t hire their own machine learning researchers on the scale of Google. So the ability to get these data sets and increase and grow them can lead to extracting insights from them.

Photo by Robert Hof