Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2024-02-07 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Robin Matlock was born in 1965 and raised in Arizona. In high school she participated in a wide variety of sports. She attended Rice University on a music scholarship. Although she majored in music, that was not her long-term career path. In fact, she didn’t have a clear direction, so took a number of economics courses figuring business might be her career direction.

A lucky opportunity took her to the San Francisco Bay Area living with relatives where she found a job in sales working for ADP. Over the next few years, she moved through several tech companies and expanding her responsibilities to include not only sales, but business development and product marketing. Among other lessons, these experiences taught her to think like a customer, a perspective that served her well throughout her career.

After a job at a company called Imperva didn’t work out, she thought strategically about her next step and found an opportunity to be VP of Corporate Marketing at VMware. This was a big step and brought her into a job in which she didn’t have any direct experience. However, with her willingness to learn from others and hard work, she made a success of that position. This success led to higher level and more diverse responsibilities until she was named Chief Marketing Officer in 2013. In this oral history, she outlines many of the marketing challenges faced by a high growth tech company, which was actually largely owned by EMC and/or Dell throughout her tenure.

Robin held that position until 2020, deciding that she could continue to grow her career and give back by joining the boards of a select group of companies. She is currently serving on six different boards, both public and private. The most meaningful of those is the George Mark Children’s House, which is a pediatric palliative care house focused on serving children with incurable diseases and their families.

She maintains her interest in sports and fitness, working out almost every day, playing tennis and running for several miles on a regular basis.

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Catalog Number: 102808966
Acquisition Number: 2024.0016