Ex-HP board member who voted to fire Fiorina endorses her

A former board member of Hewlett-Packard who voted to fire Carly Fiorina as CEO is now endorsing the businesswoman’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign.

“Carly did what she was brought in to do: turn the company around and make it successful again. Not only did she save the company from the dire straits it was in, she laid the foundation for HP’s future growth,” Tom Perkins wrote for a full-page New York Times ad.

{mosads}”Critics often claim Carly was fired at HP because she was unsuccessful. As a member of the board, I can tell you this is not true. In truth, it was the Board I was a part of that was ineffective and dysfunctional,” Perkins wrote. He added that his vote to fire her “was a mistake.”

The comments, in an advertisement placed in the newspaper’s business section Thursday by a pro-Fiorina super-PAC, were framed as a response to an Aug. 18 Times column criticizing Fiorina’s business record as “not so sterling.”

That article, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, noted that HP’s stock “dropped by half in 2005” and questioned the success of its merger with Compaq. It also suggested Fiorina “presided over such a sharp decline in one of America’s great companies.”

“The merger, while controversial, was unanimously approved by every member of the HP Board and won approval from shareholders. Thanks to Carly’s leadership there was a path forward for this storied by troubled company,” wrote Perkins, a founder of the California venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, in his ad.

Fiorina has repeatedly defended her rocky tenure as CEO of HP during her 2016 campaign.

She is currently tied for seventh in the 17-person GOP field with Ohio Gov. John Kasich in a national Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday.