The Next Small Thing

Sidebars: The Right Way to Make Mistakes,This is Jeff Hawkins on Brains

This is what a noble failure looks like.

Back in 1974, when he was just a teenager, Jeff Hawkins and two of his buddies took a cruise down the Hudson River. They were in command of the world's largest air-cushion vessel - a bizarre contraption invented by Jeff's father, an eccentric scientist. The ship, big enough to hold a 50-piece orchestra, had eight retractable legs and was inflated using vacuum-cleaner motors. To add fanfare to their voyage, Jeff and his friends played kettle drums. Then came a bit of unexpected fanfare. Just off Manhattan, a strong current caught the ship and slammed it into a railroad bridge. Commuter trains to and from Manhattan were shut down for an entire day.

It was a wild ride - and it ended with a loud crash. "My dad was always coming up with spectacular, impractical ideas," says Hawkins. "We were exposed to crazy things. But we learned to look at the world from all kinds of angles: mechanical, electrical, even business."

This is what a breakthrough looks like.

Palm Computing Inc., with Jeff Hawkins at the helm, shipped the Pilot in April 1996. This nifty device (soon to be renamed the PalmPilot) was small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, powerful enough to store thousands of addresses and appointments, and cheap enough to appeal to a mass market. Within 18 months, Palm had shipped more than 1 million Pilots. Which meant that Hawkins, leader of that ill-fated voyage so many years ago, had created one of the fastest-selling consumer-electronics products in history: The Pilot sold faster than cell-phones, pagers, even color TV. It was the fastest-selling computer product ever.

In short, a very small thing had become the Next Big Thing - an innovation that affects how people work and live. And it had come as something of a miracle. Most new-product launches follow the same course as Hawkins's trip down the Hudson: They're a wild ride, and they end with a loud crash.

The handheld-computer market has been no exception. Apple spent $500 million on the Newton - and announced last February that it would stop development. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the powerful venture-capital firm, funded a startup, called GO Corporation, to pioneer the handheld market. GO spent $75 million - and went out of business. All told, startups and big companies spent $1 billion trying to crack the handheld market. Hawkins and his 28 colleagues at Palm Computing spent only $3 million to develop a working model of the device that would launch an entire industry.

Why did they succeed where so many others had failed? The story of the PalmPilot (called the Palm III in its latest incarnation) is the story of one man's obsession with an idea that was bigger than a product, of a partnership between two very different people, of dramatic mistakes and brave corrections, and of sheer tenacity. In that sense, it is a story for our times - a story of the kind of breakthrough that every startup dreams of.

"Has it been worth it?" asks Hawkins, now 40, reflecting on a 15-year journey that's still unfolding. "As long as I am progressing toward my goals, doing good work, and having fun, then it's worth it. I have no regrets. I have always told everyone at Palm, 'If you're not enjoying yourself, you shouldn't be here.' That's how I run my life. I have never felt burdened by my work."

One Man's Obsession

How long does it take to create an overnight success? in the case of Palm Computing, about 15 years. That's not how long the company has been around: It was formed in January 1992. Nor is that how long it took to design the Pilot: Serious work on it began in June 1994. But that is how long Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing and the father of the Pilot, has been obsessed with the big intellectual challenge at the heart of this tiny device.

"I want to solve the major problems in the study of human intelligence,'' he says. "I want to achieve a theoretical understanding of how the brain works. My research into human cognition is a lifelong pursuit. It began before Palm, and it will last beyond Palm. The research and the company go together. I intend to use the next decade of my life to make my work on cognition much more visible."

Hawkins graduated from Cornell University in 1979 with a degree in electrical engineering. He went to work for Intel, first in Oregon, then in Boston. He lasted just three years at the company: "I wanted more responsibility. Intel said I needed more seniority.''