Those companies had problems but there aren't that many people who have experience leading large companies across different industry segments. Who has run HP well? Or IBM. Those companies were in legacy industry segments in a sense and lost their innovative sense. Sure, my view as an outsider and non-executive dev is that hp fumbled one thing after another (pa-risc, getting so much money and pissing off customers from printers, etc), then terrible combinations and buyouts except maybe compaq. But as I get more leadership roles over the years, I see my own limitations in leadership.

Companies and funders go back to these people with opportunities because they understand some parts of the market that people like me don't (finance, how to make these top level connections). I think like F Scott Fitzgerald kind of said,"Let me tell you about the ... [Ceos]. They are different from you and me". [1] It's fun to switch up that quote, but I do think they think of companies and strategies a lot differently than I do. I think about what is good technology, what will programmers use to build solutions.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10367-let-me-tell-you-about...

Least bad was probably Mark Hurd. When I worked at HP Labs everyone hated Fiorina.

She grew EBay from something small to one of the largest and well known brands in the world. We don't talk about it a lot bit it's a behemoth.

Maybe it's just me but when I look at eBay I see a combination of luck and turning a blind eye to counterfeiting. You're right they make a lot of money but it doesn't mean she is a genius leader.

'Genius' would be the wrong word.

She was lucky to be hired at EBay, but growing a small company into $8B in revenues is a highly credible act that validates a certain set of qualifications that are essentially rare.

Nobody really knows what the next big thing is going to be, but some people are strong in some areas. They theoretically make a good team on paper. But it's hard to know what the reality is.

He is content oriented, she is operations oriented, I'm not sure if anyone was behind the end-to-end experience.

Yes, but the eBay flywheel was already in place when she arrived. In a marketplace business it's hard to get started but hard to be disrupted, so while growing the company to $8B revenue demonstrates great managerial skill, it doesn't have anything to do with the skill of being the CEO of a startup without product-market fit. She hasn't ever demonstrated the skill of breathing life into a company.

It looks like she was running it while Yahoo Auctions was competing; in that time frame, Yahoo was a force to be reckoned with, and they had some scaling issues to manage (which is mostly a tech thing, but management can screw up tech things). So, while ebay did have market fit, it wasn't a sure thing.

Luck factors more into most successful enterprises than said enterprises will ever admit..

That said, hard work and good decisions are also important. =)

Whitman also integrated Paypal after the acquisition.

Eric Jackson's book, Musk's biography, and other sources paint Paypal as an organizational mess. Successful mergers are no small order. Whitman succeeded.