Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina was not afraid to defend her time as CEO of Hewlett-Packard during the last GOP debate on CNN.
“I led Hewlett-Packard through a very difficult time, the worst technology recession in 25 years. Despite those difficult times, we doubled the size of the company, we quadrupled its top-line growth rate, we quadrupled its cash flow, we tripled its rate of innovation,” Fiorina said.
The Washington Post shot back that week in an article titled, “5 other times that Carly Fiorina has exaggerated things.” In it political reporter Jenna Johnson wrote, “Fiorina’s defense leaves out a number of key details. Much of the growth she cited is because of a controversial merger with Compaq, instantly increasing the company’s number of employees and productivity. Fiorina also oversaw cutting 30,000 jobs and then, as the company’s stock fell, was fired by the HP board and received a severance package worth more than $20 million.”
On Oct. 1, Yahoo News went straight to the mecca of tech and startups, Silicon Valley, to find out just what some of today’s voices in technology think about Fiorina, whose career also includes time at Lucent Technologies and AT&T.
Julie Samuels, executive director of the San Francisco-based policy and tech group Engine, told Yahoo:
“We haven’t seen a candidate from either party really resonate yet with the startup community. No one has really come in with big ideas to fix these big problems.”
Could Fiorina be that person? Garrett Johnson, a co-founder of the Republican policy and tech group Lincoln Labs seemed to think Fiorina couldn’t win the crowd just by going off of her former job description.
“HP is an old, stale company,” Johnson said. “Silicon Valley is really focused on what’s hot and what’s next. I don’t think that she’s going to have a lot of street cred today because she was the CEO of HP in the late ’90s, early 2000s.”
Read the full article by Alyssa Bereznak here.
photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore
Add Comment