The Handspring Story: Renegades, Aspirations, and Disasters

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades attempted to build the modern smartphone.

The 30-minute documentary Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone tells their story, complete with big aspirations, bad decisions, and outside disasters.

Join us for a screening of the documentary and a panel discussion featuring Host Dieter Bohn and two key players in the story: Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan.

What You’ll Learn

• Dive into the rat race of the late ‘90s internet, before the tech monoliths were set in stone and when many futures seemed possible.
• Hear the story of the people whose ideas are inside the phones you use every day.
• Learn how what Donna Dubinsky calls “the biggest mistake of my career” forced the company to find a buyer.

Why You Should Join Us

Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready.  Their story casts light on questions that continue to impact technology today:

• If a company’s products don’t succeed, is the company a failure?
• If a company goes out of business, does that mean they have the wrong ideas?
• What are the risks and rewards of being early to market?