Donna Dubinsky

Early years

Dubinsky grew up in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where her father, Alfred Dubinsky, worked as a scrap-metal broker. She later attended Yale University where, as a student in Jonathan Edwards College, she majored in history and earned her bachelor's degree in 1977. Dubinsky then worked for the Philadelphia National Bank before obtaining an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1981.

After graduating from Harvard Business School, she went to Apple Computer where she worked as a customer-support liaison. By 1985, she ran part of the company's distribution network.

In 1986, Bill Campbell recruited her to a senior position in Claris, a software subsidiary of Apple. Dubinsky was responsible for international sales and marketing, and within four years, her group was responsible for 50% of Claris's sales. However, Dubinsky decided to leave in 1991, when Apple did not allow Claris to become an independent company.

Palm Inc. and Handspring

After a year's sabbatical in Paris to study French, Dubinsky met Jeff Hawkins through the introductions of Bill Campbell and Bruce Dunlevie. Hawkins was looking for a CEO to manage Palm Inc.

In 1995, U.S. Robotics acquired Palm Inc. for US $44 million. The first PalmPilot went on sale in April 1996. After a few months, sales started ramping quickly. In its first 18 months, more than one million PalmPilots had been sold. 3Com acquired U.S. Robotics, with its Palm subsidiary, in 1997.

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. Handspring became a leader in the market of smartphones with the Treo. The bursting of the dot-com bubble took its toll and Dubinsky lost her place on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list in 2001. Furthermore, in 2003, Handspring merged with Palm, Inc. The company, formed through the merger 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.

Numenta

In March 2005, Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George, founded Numenta, Inc. The company is based in Redwood City, California. Their goal is to create machine intelligence by developing theory based off the principles in the neocortex.

Numenta builds solutions that help companies automatically and intelligently act on machine generated data. The company claims that its biologically inspired machine learning technology is based on a theory of the neocortex first described in co-founder Jeff Hawkins’ book, On Intelligence. Grok, its first commercial product, is an anomaly detection system for IT Analytics. In addition, Numenta has created NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) as an open source project.

Harvard Alumni Achievement Award

On September 27, 2007, Donna Dubinsky was conferred the Harvard Business School’s highest honor, the Alumni Achievement Award, by Dean Jay O. Light. The award was also given to: Ayala Corp. chair Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, A. Malachi Mixon of Invacare, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP Group and Hansjorg Wyss of Synthes. She was cited for “introducing the first successful personal digital assistant (PDA) and who is now developing a computer memory system modeled after the human brain.”

Other activities

Dubinsky was a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Several business school case studies have been written about her entrepreneurship. She is involved in philanthropy, and has written an op-ed in support of Obamacare.