Handspring Inc. and Beyond
Dubinsky, Hawkins and Palm marketing manager Ed Colligan quickly became disillusioned with 3Com's plans for Palm, Inc. and left in June 1998 to found Handspring. Their track record and the tech boom that was then underway in the US meant that the trio were easily able to finance their new company.
Dubinsky was the CEO of the new company which produced its first product, the Handspring Visor, by September 1999. The company decided to target the lower end of the market. Within a year, the company had managed to capture 25% of the market. Handspring ultimately became a leader in the market of smartphones with the Treo. In 2003, Handspring merged with Palm, Inc., having found that they had evolved in complementary directions, and that they would be far stronger by joining together. The company, formed through the merger of Palm and Handspring and the simultaneous spin-off of Palm's operating system group as PalmSource, was named palmOne. In 2005, palmOne was renamed to Palm, Inc., returning to its roots, and the independent PalmSource was acquired by Access Corporation of Japan.
Donna Dubinsky, together with Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George recently founded Numenta, Inc. to further develop the pattern recognition software termed Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
Dubinsky serves as a director of Palm. She also serves on the board of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and recently was appointed to the Yale Corporation.
Dubinsky adopted a child from Russia in the mid-1990s and married Len Shustek in 2000.
Dubinsky is one of three professors teaching a course at the Stanford GSB entitled Entrepreunership: Formation of New Ventures (Strategic Management 353).
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