Early Employees: Joel Jewitt & Palm

A series of conversations with early employees of iconic tech companies. If you have recommendations for future interviews, tweet them to me via@hunterwalk.

Palm popularized the PDA category, leading to the first mainstream smartphone, mobile app platform and even a tablet/netbook in early development. The company was quite successful but ultimately couldn’t hold its leadership position, and the rest is history. Or at least Apple’s history.

Joel Jewitt, Palm (@joeljewitt)

Q: Was it the idea or the people that attracted you to Palm?

A: Bruce Dunlevie introduced me to Jeff [Hawkins, Palm founder] and I liked him and the idea.

Q: How did you first meet Jeff and Donna [Dubinsky]?

A: Bruce Dunlevie intro to Jeff and two engineers, Ain MckEndrick and Art Lamb. We incubated Palm at Merrill Pickard Anderson and Eyre (now the Benchmark offices). Donna joined Palm when we moved to a new building (across from Lozano's brushless carwash in Los Altos, but usually we didn't have to tell people Los Altos, all we had to tell them was that it was across from Lozano's).

Q: What stage was the company at when you signed on?

A: Jeff and Ain and Art had just incorporated, I wrote the first business plan

Q: What was your most meaningful contribution to Palm's success?

A: I have three: (i) I created a spinner that we put on the wall that had on one half "Mother of All Markets" (which was John Sculley's view of the PDA market) and on the other half "Pipe Dream Driven by Greed" (which was Andy Grove's view of the PDA market), and we could spin it each day and see what our prospects were, (ii) I had a Brooks Brothers 15 1/2 - 35 shirt and we used its front pocket to determine when the Pilot design was "pocket sized", (iii) In 1996 we were trying to raise money but by then Sand Hill Rd had given up on PDA's (Apple Newton and GO/EO had failed). Our valuation was dropping and we were headed to a bad place in terms of needing money and no one wanting to bite the bullet and invest. I flew over to Stockholm and got Ericsson to give us a letter of intent to invest in the company as part of a project to build what would have been the first smartphone. The valuation in the letter of intent put a floor on our value and propped up our confidence, basically kept us above water until John Zakin from US Robotics swooped in and bought us (I still have the US Robotics shirt that he gave us at our deal party).

Q: When did you know it was going to be incredibly successful and/or did you ever have significant doubts about the company's prospects?

A: It wasn't until the first developer's conference at the Javitz Center in NYC in 1997 that folks at Palm got the visceral feeling that it was going to be big. Jeff was always confident (at least relative to everyone else). In 1994 and 95 we all crossed a desert and Jeff was Moses.

Q: Did you have any traditions or rituals that helped define the company's culture

A: Donna brought in some great best practices about creating solid culture, but the tradition I remember was that at 5:59PM all was quiet around the office, and then at 6PM all hell broke loose in most of the cubicles as we worked our way through Wolfenstein 3D and then DOOM and Duke Nukem (Ain McKendrick was the best at it.).

Q: When did you know it was time to leave?

A: When we got bought I wasn't going to end up as a top level exec so I left to start another company (Adaptive Media).

Q: Palm had the first mainstream smartphone, the first mobile app platform and even was developing a mainstream tablet/netbook before other PC companies. Why didn't you guys turn into Apple?

A: The ipod/itunes service phenomenon was the seed for every other mobile product Apple has developed. Or put another way: we should've been the ones who built a great music player and service

Q: What are other Palm alumni doing today?

A: Running small companies and divisions of large companies, VCs, many places in mobile, Hiroshi Lockheimer runs engineering for Android at Google.

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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