Notes on Chapter 31
… and we’re back, after the holidays. Getting near the end now.
Chapter 31 turned the focus on Cassie and Palm. At this point, I should mention that Donna Dubinsky, who was the CEO of Palm at the time, actually reviewed this chapter for accuracy.
Palm really did have a great product, which we now know as the Pilot. Still, it was hardware, and that takes a lot more money to launch than software. Handheld devices, by the mid 90’s, were out of fashion, and venture capitalists had no interest at all in financing another one. So Donna and Jeff Hawkins were out beating the bushes for a large company that would partner with them.
Finally, they found one: US Robotics! The Silicon Valley A-dream is to have your own initial public offering, but the B-dream is getting acquired. Usually the employees don’t make as much money with the B-dream, but still: $5 a share isn’t nothing.
The Pilot came out and the rest is history, as they say. US Robotics got bought by 3Com, and then the Palm founders started Handspring, but none of that is in this book.
Len discovers that everything he’s been doing since retirement has made him the perfect person for East Coast money people who want to get in on this Internet thing. He’s run his own little private mutual fund, he’s worked with NetsForAll, an Internet company before anyone knew what that was, and he’s looked at it from the venture capital side.
OK, this is fiction. There certainly were Internet-oriented sector funds, which had their heyday in the late 90’s. Would someone like Len have been chosen to be the manager of one of them? Suspend your disbelief. Money was flying around, and some of it came his way.
The real business here is father and daughter, Len and Janet. They’re both getting rich, and neither of them expected it to happen this way. Len had thought Janet would be a CEO someday, not a regular engineer, and Janet thought he was ready for a life of fishing every day.
She wonders if he’d been hiding his light under a bushel all his life so he could raise her. They have this exchange:
“Dad, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Did you ever feel like striking out on your own, when I was growing up?”
“Striking out on my own? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know… switching jobs, going to a small company, something like that?”
Len thought about that. “Back in those days, if you had a good job with a big company, you held onto it. We didn’t move around like you kids do.”
She took that in.
“Besides, I had you to support! I couldn’t take a risk of being unemployed with the mortgage and all those tuition bills to pay.”
“Now you’re making me feel guilty!” she said.
He squeezed her harder. “Never, honey. Never!”
That’s what the whole book’s been leading up to. Only in our modern age could Len’s and Janet’s stories have unfolded like this.
