Meg Whitman Back in Spotlight at H-P

By VAUHINI VARA
Meg Whitman is back in the spotlight.
As Hewlett-Packard Co. board members met Wednesday to discuss the fate of Chief Executive Leo Apotheker, several people briefed on the situation said H-P board member Meg Whitman is a candidate to be named interim CEO of the giant technology company, though she may not be interested in the position.
In considering Ms. Whitman, H-P is looking to a Silicon Valley veteran who turned eBay Inc. from a quirky start-up into the world's leading online auction company and who remains an influential figure in the technology scene as an H-P director and an adviser to a leading venture-capital firm.
But the former eBay chief executive also has little background in the hardware industry, never ran a company of H-P's size, made some missteps at eBay and most recently drew attention for a failed bid to become governor of California.
In an interview Monday, Ms. Whitman, 55, described H-P as "a Silicon Valley icon that is the process of reshaping itself." She acknowledged that the Palo Alto, Calif., company "has certainly had challenges" and that "time will tell" how it fares, but she added, "I'm optimistic about H-P's future."
Asked about Mr. Apotheker's recent decision to potentially spin off the company's personal-computer business, Ms. Whitman said, "There are tremendous strategic changes that are taking place in the PC business, and H-P wants to capitalize on those changes and make sure this operating division has the autonomy and the ability to respond to rapidly changing technology."
On Wednesday, a spokesman for Ms. Whitman referred a request for additional comment to H-P. H-P declined to comment.
The re-emergence of Ms. Whitman—who has kept a relatively low profile since losing her gubernatorial bid to Democrat Jerry Brown last year—is likely to renew investors' focus on her track record at eBay.
Ms. Whitman joined eBay in 1998 after stints at Hasbro Inc., Florists Transworld Delivery and Stride Rite Corp. By the time she left the Internet company in March 2008, eBay's annual revenue was $7.7 billion, up from $86 million when she joined.
But concerns later mounted as eBay's once-torrid growth slowed amid competition from other e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com Inc. Ms. Whitman was also roundly criticized for eBay's 2005 purchase of Internet-calling firm Skype for $2.5 billion, for which it later took a $1.4 billion write-down. EBay has been viewed as a turnaround situation for the last few years under current CEO John Donahoe.
A year after leaving eBay, Ms. Whitman announced she would run as a Republican for governor of California, which had struggled with deep deficits during Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger's tenure. She won the Republican nomination, but despite spending a record amount on her campaign—$178.5 million, most of it out of her own pockets—she ultimately lost to Democrat Jerry Brown.
In March, Ms. Whitman became a part-time adviser at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a prominent Silicon Valley venture-capital firm.
In the Monday interview, Ms. Whitman also mused about the challenge for big companies of keeping up with increasingly rapid change—especially in the technology industry. "The bigger you get, the harder it is to be nimble," she said. "How do you grow big and stay small? That still is the fundamental question."
—Ben Worthen contributed to this article.

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