Seeking Out Partnerships

Your whole thinking about strategic partnerships, that’s interesting. You’re the first CEO that I’ve talked to that has this system in place where you have four companies pitch to you on a regular basis. How do you go about identifying those companies? Where you are in Texas and also in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of startup companies.

Yeah. Well, that’s why you need a process, right? So we have a fantastic team, both on the corporate M&A and these joint ventures that we drive, that they are scalpers. And then my direct reports are part of the process, because they’re multi-billion-dollar businesses. And we give them very precisely, so which domains we want them to scalp, as I think about the enterprise of the future being edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven.
And so as we go through that process, they bring companies across those three domains. And the CEOs and the co-founders of those companies pitch directly to me and my executive team, not to the corporate M&A, or the investor’s team, because ultimately, I want them to know I’m all in and supporting them if we decide to go forward. Because in the end, we’re voting with dollars in their companies, but it’s reciprocal the other way, because we establish a strategic partnership, I need to make sure they make HPE also a top priority.