Diane Greene has been a powerful engineer and tech entrepreneur for decades, but in 2015 she burst into the scene in an even bigger way.
That's because Google bought her stealth startup in order to hire her to run its cloud computing business.
Greene's first huge success was VMware, the company she founded with her husband and Stanford professor, Mendel Rosenblum, and a few others in the late 1990s. She led the company as its first CEO through its $635 million sale to EMC. She then went on to become a big angel investor while working on her new startup.
She was on the board at Google when it bought her company for $380 million, so she and her husband are donating their take (worth over $150 million) to charity, they said.
At Google, Greene is leading a new team that combines all of the company's cloud businesses. Google's goal is make its cloud business bigger than its ad business by 2020, and given that Google brought in $66 billion in revenue last year, mostly from ads, that's a big, powerful job.