Meg Whitman’s heart may have been with Uber
Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman awkwardly tried to explain Tuesday why she almost left the company to run Uber.
While Hewlett Packard Enterprise was “special in its own right,” Uber, the ridehailing upstart whose board courted her to replace cofounder Travis Kalanick, reminded her of eBay, the online auction powerhouse she oversaw for a decade, Whitman said.
“I thought it was a very interesting business model,” Whitman told analysts during a conference call to discuss her current employer’s third-quarter earnings.
“To me, it’s actually quite similar to eBay — very disruptive,” she said. “It relies on a community of drivers just like eBay relies on a community of sellers. And the growth prospects reminded me of eBay in its early days.”
In other words, Whitman just couldn’t resist the lure of a startup. Though Uber is hardly small — it’s roughly the size of eBay when Whitman left a little under a decade ago — the ridehailing company represents the future. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, on the other hand, sells servers to businesses — a business under siege by the shift to cloud computing.
Whitman’s remarks brought to mind a conversation I once had with Jawed Karim, one of PayPal’s first engineers and a co-founder of YouTube. Karim had graduated from high school in St. Paul, Minn., before moving to the Bay Area.
In the Midwest, people feel bad for anyone who starts a business because they think it means you can’t find a job at an established corporation, Karim told me. In Silicon Valley, the opposite holds true: People feel bad for anyone who works at a corporation because they are not working at a startup.
The Midwest values things like stability and longevity while Silicon Valley prizes growth and newness.
Today, Uber is Silicon Valley. And Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the Midwest.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is technically a new company, having spun off from Hewlett-
Packard last year. But no one would ever confuse Hewlett Packard Enterprise with a growth-hungry startup ready to tear up the world.
Uber is hip; Hewlett Packard Enterprise is undoubtedly square. Uber is the Millennial who parties until 4 a.m. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is your grandfather who eats dinner at 4 p.m.
It’s not surprising Whitman brought up eBay, the company that made her a star. Under her leadership, eBay grew from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. Along with Carly Fiorina, Carol Bartz and Marissa Mayer, Whitman is one of only a small group of women to ever run a major tech company in Silicon Valley.
So maybe we can forgive Whitman for wanting to relive her glory days. But she could have handled the Uber situation better.
Since Uber’s board of directors forced Kalanick to resign as CEO in June amid allegations of misconduct, pundits had mentioned Whitman as a top candidate to replace him, and she was a favorite of Uber investor Benchmark Capital, which had also backed eBay.
But after the New York Times reported that Whitman had met with Uber’s board of directors in late July, she issued a seemingly unambiguous statement denying her interest.
A source close to Whitman said that she meant what she said at the time. As an Uber investor, Whitman offered her advice to the board on how to proceed after Kalanick’s resignation, but she did not consider herself a candidate, the source said.
But Whitman did eventually become a candidate — albeit a last-minute one, with the board asking Whitman what it would take. She told them. The job went to Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
“In the end, (Uber) wasn’t the right thing,” Whitman said Tuesday on the call.
“I’ve dedicated the last six years of my life” to Hewlett-Packard, she said. “There’s a lot more work to do. I actually am not going anywhere.”
Perhaps Whitman’s head is still dedicated to Hewlett Packard Enterprise. But her heart seems to be saying something else.