Queen of the Palm Pilot - Donna Dubinsky

Despite early and expensive industry failures, Donna Dubinksy gambled that consumers really did want a pocket-sized digital daytimer. She was right. Over 400,000 PalmPilots were sold in its debut year. This is Donna’s success story….

By 1996, Silicon Valley had spent nearly $1 billion trying to develop a handheld computer, and about all there was to show for it was a rather rotten Apple Newton. It seems basic now, but no one had made the logical leap that this organizer was a PC accessory, not a stand-alone PC.

Then along came Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins. Jeff glued together bits of mahogany and cardboard in his garage and transformed them into the first PalmPilot. Donna was excited to go out and sell the idea, even though bigger companies with deeper pockets had already spent about $1 billion developing PDAs like Apple's Newtons. But because of the history of the Apple Newton, the idea wasn't very salable. Basically, people were skeptical, and they just didn't buy it. Plus the timing was bad. The Internet had just taken off, and people were very excited about that, not about the potential of a PDA.

However, from the garage-built PalmPilot to it’s debut, Donna built up Palm Computing and turned the wooden experiment into one of the most successful consumer electronics product launches in history, selling 400,000 units during its 1996 debut.

Dubinsky repeated herself in 1998, when she and Hawkins left Palm Computing to start Handspring Inc. Donna was a brave entrepreneurially minded 47-year-old, ready to start anew. So Donna and Jeff left Palm Computing, took three days off, and then Jeff and Donna got together and said, 'Okay, what next?' And they started creating Handspring Inc.

Donna did the corporate things, like financing, finding office space, and negotiating with 3Com to license the Palm operating system. They were primed, but didn't have a product, so decided to focus on the low end of PDA’s and innovate there. They decided to create something low cost, familiar, but still new. Jeff made a list of the things he wanted the new device to do. Their newly engineered device enabled them to create a product that could become a phone, an MP3 player, a digital camera, and almost anything consumers might want.

Venturing out on their own paid off. By undercutting Palm's prices by as much as 30%, Handspring's Visor gained market share quickly, representing one out of every four personal digital assistants sold after just a year in business. Within 12 months Donna and Jeff were selling a differentiated product and captured 28% of the market with one of the first alternatives to a PalmPilot.

Has Donna’s success to date been solely due to technological advances? Unlikely. As the following interview by a leading business magazine shows, Donna has a very sharp business mind. Her management style obviously appeals to many employees and she has some great strengths that she brings to her business dealings. A Mentor Women indeed.

Interview with Donna Dubinsky

Donna: You have to be nimble. I doubt there's any entrepreneur who's succeeded on her original business plan. Situations change, the dynamic changes, the competitive environment changes, the technologies change.

You have to be able to adapt. You also have to be able to stop things. One of the disciplines I'm most proud of at Handspring is that we kill projects. That is so hard to do when people have invested their time and effort. And they're good projects. But you have to decide, hey, when we started, it made a lot of sense. Today, for whatever reason, it doesn't. We can't keep doing it just because it's got momentum.

To keep your edge, you also have to get everyone who works for you invested and involved. Luckily, building a culture like that is very natural to us. Everything we do is always challenging and asking questions and probing things and trying to understand what the best course of action is.

We do lots of management by walking around. I do these things called Dine With Donna, where I get groups of employees together -- sort of a group of a dozen or so -- and get wonderful information about what the real issues are and what's going on in the company. I also have lunch in the cafe almost every day. It sounds like a stupid little thing, but to me it's one of the most incredibly important things I do. I could go off and have big honcho business lunches, but I sit out in our cafe because I can be with different employees and be accessible. That philosophy of easy access permeates the entire company.

And with success like what she has had, it's easy to see that Donna's management practices and charisma have stood her in good stead.