Greene Room At Dreamforce

Google Cloud Chief Diane Greene was an unexpected guest at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce mega-conference, her attendance revealed only after a surprise announcement of a partnership between the two technology giants.

To better introduce the former-VMware CEO to the Salesforce community, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spent an hour interviewing her in depth about her upbringing, marriage, and legendary career spanning from naval engineering to VMware to Google Cloud.

Benioff, displaying some serious journalism chops, got Greene to open up about her formative experiences, gender discrimination, meeting Google's founders, and her vision for the future of technology.

"It's probably one of the greatest success stories in the software industry," Benioff said in describing Greene's career.

"This is my first Dreamforce," Greene told Benioff. "Shame on me. I love how non-commercial it is. And inspired. It's sort of holistic and yet we've all got jobs to do and we're all moving our jobs forward."

Here's what we learned from their conversation.