*NEWS*HP DIRECTOR’S BOOK…..A SCANDAL !

[Anonymous]

Ex-HP Director’s Book Opens With Scandal
NOV
07 SAN FRANCISCO — Tom Perkins co-founded the firm that helped spawn
Google, Amazon and Genentech. He married — and divorced — romance
novelist Danielle Steel.
And
his resignation from Hewlett-Packard Co.’s board revealed the spying
that rocked that Silicon Valley institution.The venture capitalist has
been relatively quiet since the effort by HP’s hired security
consultants to ferret out boardroom leaks by spying on employees, media
and directors exploded last year. Now, at 75, Perkins is returning to
the spotlight with a memoir that starts with the HP scandal.A week
before “Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins” goes on sale, Perkins
marveled at how the affair still generates headlines even though most
of the criminal cases have been settled and the computer company’s
business was largely unaffected.”These ladies just can’t stop taking
whacks at me,” Perkins said of former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and
Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, who left the board in the wake of the
scandal. In an interview published last week, Fiorina called bringing
Perkins back to HP in 2005 the worst mistake of her career.Perkins — a
self-described “player,” “smooth operator” and “billionaire who writes
books” — is usually direct like that, and self-assured. “Valley Boy” is
his fourth book, after a textbook on laser science, a treatise on rare
antique sports cars, and the novel “Sex and the Single Zillionaire.”

Sometimes, he can be brutal, a venture capital colleague said.
“If
you want to stand up to him, you’d better be ready to, A, have your
reasoning lined up and, B, be ready for a very emotional
confrontation,” said Franklin “Pitch” Johnson, 79, who has known
Perkins since the 1970s when they funded Tandem Computers, where
Perkins remained deeply involved.A 1953 electrical engineering graduate
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Harvard MBA,
Perkins said his greatest legacy will be co-founding the iconic venture
capital firm Kleiner and Perkins in 1972. From an $8 million fund, it
grew over the following three decades into the multibillion-dollar
force now called Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers.

The 525
businesses the firm has helped nurture include AOL, Amazon Inc., Sun
Microsystems Inc., Intuit Inc., Verisign Inc., Google Inc. and
Genentech Inc., where he stayed on as chairman of the board for 10
years. What set apart his style of funding companies, he said, was an
intense involvement in forming their strategy and management from the
start.Perkins’ on-again, off-again history with HP goes back decades.
In 1963, co-founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invited him to
become the administrative head of the research department. He was the
first general manager of its computer business.He says that when he
rejoined the board — for the last time — at Fiorina’s urging in January
2005, the celebrity CEO and the board were struggling over the
direction of the company since it acquired Compaq Computer Corp.
Fiorina was out a month later and Dunn took over as chairwoman.”She
still doesn’t get it: The day she was fired, the stock went up,” he
said of Fiorina. “The employees were in the parking lot singing, ‘Ding,
Dong, the Witch is Dead.’ And she still doesn’t understand that she
bears some responsibility for that. It’s amazing.”

Fiorina’s
spokesman did not return calls seeking comment. Dunn’s spokesman said
she has commented about Perkins only to correct the record.
Perkins
said he pushed the new chairwoman to think strategically. Instead, he
says, she insisted on focusing on audits, legal compliance and the
media leaks that started with Fiorina’s departure and continued after
her replacement as CEO, Mark Hurd, was hired.Perkins said he worried
that minutiae were obscuring the bigger picture — that HP was
continuing to struggle with intense competition, a sagging stock price
and low morale more than three years after completing the purchase of
Compaq.

“Dell Computer was killing us at the lower end of the
market and IBM was beating us up at the higher end of the market, and
the whole corporation was getting scrunched between these two very
excellent, growing, powerful companies,” Perkins said he kept reminding
the board.Perkins quit the HP board in May 2006, after Dunn revealed
that security consultants — by using false pretenses to obtain phone
records — determined fellow director George “Jay” Keyworth had spoken
with the tech news site CNet.com. Keyworth was asked to resign but
didn’t.

Perkins insisted last week, as he did in 2006, that the story that appeared was harmless.
Keyworth
left the board when the spying became public in a September 2006
regulatory filing. The filing was prompted by an August letter from
Perkins, who said he might tell the Securities and Exchange Commission
that HP was violating disclosure rules by not saying he quit over the
spying.”I just felt that what the company was doing … and the
sacrifice of Director Keyworth, who in my opinion was the best director
on the board, was throwing him to the wolves over essentially
nothing.”Perkins learned in the interim that investigators had
pretended they were him — or pretexted, as they’d done with journalists
and other directors — to get his personal phone records.He still guards
his privacy in some matters — what private boards he belongs to or how
much his sailboat cost, for instance. The memoir is a smattering of
vignettes, including an account of commissioning the 289-foot,
three-masted clipper ship — the world’s largest sailboat.”Valley Boy”
also includes a mock Q&A about his experience as novelist Danielle
Steel’s fifth husband.”It was the intensity and the chaos,” he said
during the interview in his Embarcadero Center office to explain their
divorce. “Danielle and I still love each other. We see a lot of each
other, and it’s really too bad that it didn’t work, but it didn’t.”

[Author]

November 7, 2007 at 11:37 AM