Oral History of Carl Eschenbach

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Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2023-12-04 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Carl Eschenbach was born in 1966 grew up in a close-knit family in northeast Pennsylvania. As is evident throughout the interview, his family and Christian faith are the most important aspects of his personal and professional lives. He played football, baseball, and was on the high school wrestling team. He excelled at the latter and earned a Division One wrestling scholarship when entering college. He thought he might go into the food business, having grown up helping his parents in their Dairy Queen.

After starting college at Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre PA to potentially study business, his brother-in-laws’ success at DeVry University caught his attention when he was able to get a good technology job after only two years. So Carl switched to DeVry and never looked back.
His first job was with a PBX company, Inktomi, starting in 1987. His job there, as would be the case for future positions, was customer-facing. Initially, he started on the technical side but over time moved to a sales, then sales management roles. His company progression after Inktomi included NET, 3Com, then Inktomi and EMC.

Eschenbach’s stay at EMC was only 3 weeks, as he was immediately recruited away by Diane Greene, founder and CEO of VMware. He would spend 14 years at VMware, mainly as COO under 3 different CEOs. He established his reputation as an outstanding operations executive and took a major role in building VMware from a small operation with only 200 employees to a multi-billion dollar organization with over 20,000 employees.

In 2016, VMware was acquired by Dell (as part of the EMC acquisition) and Carl decided to move on to Sequoia Capital, the leading venture firm in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he took over as co-CEO of Workday.

Catalog Number: 102808943
Acquisition Number: 2023.0200