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Lunch with Meg

By Rod Drury

A large group of New Zealand exporters were up in San Francisco earlier this month as part of the NZTE Beachheads programme. Many of our entrepreneurs were balancing attending events with getting around the City and Valley doing deals. But few of us missed one of the big highlights of Beachheads Forum - a lunch with new HP CEO Meg Whitman in the HP Corporate Boardroom.

Getting an hour with Meg shows the power of New Zealand networks (thanks Ben Anderson). Meg certainly was familiar with our country, planning to visit us over the next few months.

The scale of Meg’s job is mind blowing for New Zealanders. Her company has over 320,000 staff and does revenue of over $30 billion a quarter. They have done a number of huge acquisitions and her focus for the near term is to stabilise the company after a traumatic year.

The hour with Meg was a fairly informal Q&A where she covered scale and related a lot of relevant stories as she grew eBay from a small company. It was amusing hearing how she couldn’t buy TradeMe and how she eventually brought PayPal from Peter Thiel for $1.5 billion (he has since invested in a number of New Zealand companies). The circle of life of tech companies.

It was also very interesting to hear how HP had gone a bit too virtual. A huge number of employees work from home but if they brought them all back they’d be 85,000 seats short! With a number of big acquistions, like Autonomy in the United Kingdom and significant outside hiring, getting the HP culture and values set is an important challenge for her. It was clear that HP is an iconic Silicon Valley brand that many people are passionate about preserving.

For a country like New Zealand Meg advised web, web, web as it democratizes the world and provides immediate access to the global market. Like Steve Jobs she also said focus on three key things.

An hour with Meg made all of us think big. Having quality time with the engaging CEO of one of the world’s biggest tech companies was a unique and valuable experience.

Rod Drury is renowned for entrepreneurial skills in the technology sector and is the founder of Xero. He was the recipient of New Zealand’s most prestigious hi-tech award the Tait Flying Kiwi in 2009.

23 November 2011