The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 128: Donna Dubinsky - Standing Up To Steve Jobs And Being Right

Episode Date: May 30, 2016

Episode 128: Donna Dubinsky – Standing Up To Steve Jobs And Being Right Donna Dubinsky was made famous by the Harvard Business School study about the time when she disagreed with Steve Jobs (when he decided that Apple should eliminate their distribution warehouse).  She ultimately prevailed and we discussed what happened next in her incredible career.  We had a fascinating conversation on this episode of The Learning Leader Show. Donna Dubinsky first partnered with Jeff Hawkins at Palm, Inc. in 1992, where she served as president and CEO. She held this position throughout Palm's acquisition by U.S Robotics and subsequently 3Com Corporation. In 1998, Donna and Jeff co-founded Handspring, creator of the category-defining Treo smartphone. Handspring merged with Palm in 2003, and Donna continued to serve on Palm's board until 2009. Previously, Donna spent 10 years at Apple Inc. in a multitude of sales, sales support, and logistics functions—both at Apple and at Claris, an Apple software subsidiary. Donna earned a B.A. from Yale University, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She is currently on the board of Yale University. Episode 128: Donna Dubinsky – Standing Up To Steve Jobs And Being Right Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show "When I Worked With Steve Jobs, He Was Interested In Vision, Not Practicality" In This Episode, You Will Learn: The ability to defy conventional wisdom and curiosity leads to sustained excellence The specifics on the story when she vehemently disagreed with Steve Jobs and what happened Why Donna wanted to change the world and how she set out to do it What it was like working with Steve Jobs in the early days at Apple Steve Jobs initially said he would never be involved in mobile phones… Donna and her colleagues changed his mind when they came out with the first version of a smart phone The future is built on learning machines Steve Jobs redefined the relationships with the phone carriers – Something that nobody before him could do What it's like to find patterns in streaming data Being a learning leader – It's not a batch process, you have to continue learning and always deploy as you learn more  "The Future Is Built On Learning Machines" Continue Learning: Go To: Numenta.com Follow Donna on Twitter: @ddubinsky Read: Ten Lessons I Learned From Bill Campbell To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 001: How To Become A Master Connector W/ Jayson Gaignard From MasterMind Talks Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 082: Dan Pink – The Science of Motivation, Legendary Writer & Ted Talk Episode 086: Seth Godin – How To Become Indispensable & Build Your Tribe Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Donna Dubinsky on the show, please don't hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell Bio From Numenta.com Donna first partnered with Jeff Hawkins at Palm, Inc. in 1992, where she served as president and CEO. She held this position throughout Palm's acquisition by U.S Robotics and subsequently 3Com Corporation. In 1998, Donna and Jeff co-founded Handspring, creator of the category-defining Treo smartphone. Handspring merged with Palm in 2003, and Donna continued to serve on Palm's board until 2009. Previously, Donna spent 10 years at Apple Inc. in a multitude of sales, sales support, and logistics functions—both at Apple and at Claris, an Apple software subsidiary. Donna earned a B.A. from Yale University, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She is currently on the board of Yale University.

I just wasn't going to stay if they were basically telling me to shut down Apple. I mean, I wasn't going to stay and do that. You know, there's a point in which if you believe something strongly enough, you don't, you know, you can't stay, you know. So I did the work. I presented the data, and then it was shortly after that that Steve left and nobody, you know, everybody dropped it. Nobody picked it up. It just, it really wasn't important. It really wasn't the problem the company was facing.

The problem the company was facing was. the Macintosh and how to get that next generation of computer going while still keeping the first generation, the Apple II, successful as well. That was the real problem in the company. So as soon as Steve left, it became a moot point. People started focusing on the bigger issues. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success.

You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey everyone, it's Ryan. I wanted to make a quick announcement. A number of you had sent me emails in regards to asking for a place to further this dialogue with like-minded people, other listeners, fans, and friends of the Learning Leader show. So I set up a group on Facebook. It's Facebook.com slash groups slash learning leader. It's a closed group.

But if you'd like an invite, simply shoot me a quick note, and I'd be happy to bring you into the group. This is a place where we can freely communicate and discuss leadership, learning, creative ideas, podcasting, and new and innovative ways of thinking a place where we could potentially argue a little bit, have an open mind and have constructive dialogue. I've loved the early response from the people who are already in the group, but simply send me a note. I'll add you to it. I look forward to talking with more of you very soon. Hey, and welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. This is an incredible episode.

You'll hear that I found myself almost speechless on a couple of occasions just because I was just all of the stories I was being told by Donna Dubinsky. Donna played an integral role in the development of personal digital assistance, also known as PDA, serving as the CEO of Palm Inc. and co-founding Handspring with Jeff Hawkins in 1995. She also co-founded Numenta in 2005 with Hawkins. Even maybe more interestingly, she began her career in 1981 working for Apple Computer. She worked there for 10 years.

And one of the fascinating stories that she told me during this conversation was about a time in 1985 when Steve Jobs wanted to eliminate all six U.S. warehouses. and moved to a just-in-time production system. Donna thought that was a terrible mistake and said that if she did not get 30 days to make a counter-proposal to Steve, that she would quit and leave Apple. And she said this because Apple would go out of business immediately

or almost immediately if Steve's decision was allowed to go through. And it turns out at the time Donna was right. You'll hear about this story and much more in this extremely fascinating conversation with Donna Dubinsky. Donna, so excited to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show. So first, thank you for being here and welcome to the show. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Absolutely.

And that question is around specifically leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time. You've spent a great deal of time around those types of people. You obviously have embodied that in your career. I'm curious, what are some of the common characteristics that those people all seem to share? One thing I've noticed in my career and in the fields that I've been in is that a common characteristic success is the ability to defy conventional wisdom. I feel like there are so many people you encounter who do and believe what everybody is doing and saying. kind of go with the flow, go with the crowd. And the people who really stand out are the ones who say, hmm, I'm not so sure that's right. And this is why, who just don't accept what everybody

else says is truth and are able to challenge it. So for me, it's a kind of a curiosity and a kind of an intellectual depth that lets people go beyond the obvious to say, you know, I'm just not going accept that and I'm going to challenge it. I think there's a couple other things I'd throw in there, which is an ability to listen. A lot of people have an ability to talk. Fewer, I think, have an ability to listen. And I think that's really critical. I just had the great good fortune to see the Hamilton show. And there's one song that's about, you know, talk less, listen more. And I thought, oh, that song is so appropriate for business leaders as well. I mean, one does need to be able to quote unquote, talk well to be able to inspire others to follow you and to, you know,

participate with what you're trying to accomplish. But the area where I've seen, you know, very interesting people succeed is also people who can listen as well as they can talk. Very interesting. I love the thoughtful answer there. Who are the first people that come to mind when you hear the phrase sustained excellence? Well, I think that my business partner, Jeff Hawkins is one who has shown all these characteristics that I talk about through the years of bucking conventional wisdom to create handheld computers, figuring out how to do smartphones before anybody else did, now working on the next generation of computing and always kind of looking ahead and figuring out what are the big trends. My former mentor, Bill Campbell,

is a guy who showed remarkable ability to listen and learn and inspire and bring people along with a vision and a direction. So those are just a couple people that come to mind. Again, I love it, Donna. I want to take a step back and look at your career as a whole since you've done remarkable, you've achieved remarkable feats over an extended period of time. And let's take it back to your time. at Apple. I first learned about you through reading about stories that interactions you've had with

Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs has pretty much like a mythic-like. I think that's how we view him now. And it's so unfortunate that he passed away. But that, that I think, has even gotten stronger since then. And you, you know, worked at Apple for many years through the earlier days before they were obviously anything close to what they are now. So I'd love to learn about you, your career, specifically some of those times at Apple. Sure. Do you have specific questions on it? I mean, where do you want to go with that?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, take me back to the time when you started there, some of the early projects you worked on and really the culture that was initially being built. How many people worked there? Just really, I love to learn about the specific scene that you were in. Well, when I joined Apple, it was a pretty small company. It was in 1981, I believe, and it had just gone public. And I don't know, there were probably a couple thousand people, but a big number of them were in the factory, which was in Dallas. So it was a relatively small number, maybe in the hundreds, that we were in the corporate offices on the product and, you know, sales and marketing side. I was in a group. called distribution and was a part of the whole logistics chain of delivering computers to the retail channel. Now, mind you, the retail channel was very new at the time. There weren't computer

dealers before this time. Apple was essentially having to create them as we went along. And so that was a very new part of it. We had to reinvent distribution along with reinventing or an inventing category. So it was a very young company. It was growing extremely fast. At any time, it seemed like 20 percent of staff had been there less than six months. So if you were there a year, you were a bona fide old timer. So, you know, you quickly became, you know, had seniority. My career went very well. I grew my responsibility extremely quickly. I started as a, you know, kind of a brand new a business school grad with just a couple of years of business experience before business school. And very quickly rose to a, you know, so it was a middle manager level position, say,

director level position running a part of the distribution channel. And just the thing was explosive growth under us. It was an exhilarating time. And I learned so much from it. I mean, it was an amazing experience and learned a lot about this core notion of defined conventional wisdom, which certainly Apple did in spades. So it was a thrilling time to be a part of the company. And the story that I think got out there that we briefly spoke about before we recorded was basically Steve Jobs proposed eliminating the correct, obviously you live this. I didn't. I'm reading about it. But eliminating the warehouses in the U.S. and moving to a just-in-time production system in which computers would be assembled upon order and then overnight.

United by FedEx. And the original story goes that you thought this was a big mistake and that you had stood up to him and told him why and put together a reason. And initially in the story that I've read is that that's what happened. However, I'm glad I did some more research on this because it seems like that actually is not the case now that I dug into this deeper. Can you share exactly that moment and what happened when you thought what he was asking to do was a a colossal mistake. First, we have to put it in a context of what was going on in the company. It's critical to understand this issue.

The Apple II was the big success at Apple. It was shipping like crazy. I mean, we were struggling to keep up with the demand and to meet the needs of our dealers. Secondly, the dealers were extremely undercapitalized. They were little mom and pop operations. It wasn't the big chains that we're familiar with today. Essentially, you know, every tech-savvy person in some city or town set up an Apple dealership and got into business. So the way we shipped the Apple, too, was by shipping to six distribution centers around the country

and kind of configuring a system for the dealers so that when he sold it, we could ship him everything complete. The disc drives came from one part of Asia. the monitors came from another part, the computers came from Dallas, I believe. And so we would put together the system at the distribution, and as soon as he sold it, we'd ship it to him. He could collect the money, and it was a way to grow this undercapitalized dealer channel by configuring these systems form and these distribution centers. That's a bit of a long-winded explanation, but it's an important context because along comes

the McIntosh, and Steve was extremely focused on the McIntosh. The Macintosh was different than the Apple II in that it was one box that all came together. So Steve's view was we could just ship it directly from the factory into these dealers. Well, as a result, he wanted to eliminate all the distribution centers. The problem with this, however, was that we weren't shipping any McIntoshes. Macintosh was actually a big failure in its first few years. It took a couple of iterations to get to a Macintosh that people wanted to buy. And what we were shipping like crazy was Apple Twos, which we were.

couldn't ship that way. So the notion of shutting down all these distribution centers would have put Apple out of business. I'm 100% convinced of that. So though it was right, Steve's vision was absolutely right in a bigger sense of, you know, the longer term direction of reducing the number of inventory and the number of steps and so and so forth. It was really the wrong thing for what Apple's real business was at that point in time. And Steve often was much more interested in vision than practicalities. And I'm sure he viewed me as a kind of boring logistics person, but I was extremely concerned about the idea that we would shut down these distribution centers and effectively shut down our dealers. So what happened next then? Well, he kept kind of

attacking me and I basically kept ignoring him because, mainly because I was very busy. I mean, what people lose sight of a lot is that the extraordinary growth we were experiencing was more than a full-time job. I mean, I was probably working 80-hour weeks and traveling a lot and killing myself to keep this thing running. And we didn't have the kind of spectacular IT systems we have today. We were very rudimentary IT systems. I mean, it really was a very different era. So I was very busy. So it just to me was a ridiculous thing to spend time on because I knew it would never make sense. So I just didn't. That was politically very naive of me, of course, and that's what the Harvard Business School case that's about this time is written about,

is how I was kind of inappropriately ignoring this pressure from above. And then eventually we said, okay, we've got to do a study on this because we're getting so much pressure on it. So we did go, we stopped, we did a whole big study on it. We presented the data. We did the work. and in the end it became a moot point, which is because Steve left the company. It was really a part of his bigger struggle with John Scully and the struggle between the Appletoe and the McIntosh having nothing to do with this issue. I mean, he didn't leave the company because of this. It was really the failure and the difficulties of the McIntosh at the time

and the power struggle at the very top of the company that essentially was rippling down to me in the middle management layer that I was trying my best to keep the wheels on while I was trying to deal with this power struggle. So that's what the case is about, in some sense, it's very unsatisfying to students because they want a different kind of resolution. Steve either says, oh, you're right, I'll do it that way, or I say to Steve, oh, you're right, I'll change it.

Those things don't happen. Steve leaves for other reasons. The distribution network stays intact, continuing to service the Apple 2. And over time, Apple moved towards a much better and more sleek distribution environment. And once the Mac finally gets momentum and starts taking off, then it becomes a little easier to do that. So the part about you, the part of the story that we originally read that where it said you gave,

you said, if you don't give me 30 days to make a counterproposal, I'm going to quit. That didn't happen? Oh, no, that happened. I mean, I basically said, I've got to, you know, that was me admitting I had to go do the work and get the data and refute the argument on it as opposed to ignoring it. And so I, and I just wasn't going to stay if they were basically telling me to shut down Apple. I mean, I wasn't going to stay and do that. You know, there's a point in which if you believe something strongly enough, you don't, you know, you can't stay, you know. So I did the work.

I presented the data. And then it was shortly after that that Steve left and nobody, you know, everybody dropped it. Nobody picked it up. It just, it really wasn't important. It really wasn't the problem the company was facing. The problem the company was facing was the Macintosh and how to get that next generation of computer going while still keeping the first generation, the Apple II, successful as well. That was the real problem in the company. So as soon as Steve left, it became a moot point.

People started focusing on the bigger issues. If you had to take a couple of key learnings away from your time there, and specifically, I don't want to make this hard. whole conversation about Steve Jobs. Just one more question on him. But what would be the few takeaways that you learned directly from him during those early days of Apple? Well, the positives I learned from Steve are just huge. You know, he really showed me how an absolute, you know, passion for the product is

essential. And doing beautiful products that really do things well is a course. part of my philosophy ever since. He was so driven and particular and passionate on that issue. It's just totally been integrated into my thinking. So Steve Jobs was absolutely brilliant in that regard. You know, on the other side, on the downside, I'd say I had, you know, took away negative things from Steve, which is that I would never treat people the way Steve Jobs treated them. He treated people with total lack of respect and a very, you know, it was a very difficult personality from that perspective. And that's not who I am and then not the way I operate.

So I've kind of gone a different way in terms of the kind of culture I build and the kind of people I want to work with and the way I want to work with them. But, you know, Steve was clearly one of the most brilliant people we've ever seen in terms of really creating out-of-the-box great. products and that legacy is a huge part of Apple today. Did you see that, I guess, creative genius at the time or do you just see him as another guy? Oh, no, I could, he was absolutely a creative genius. I hung on every word. He was so inspirational, you know, and he, he was my age.

So it was very weird for me as a young person to look at this other young person who could get up in front of a group and, you know, just help you see the future. I mean, he got up there and he said, everybody's going to have a computer, one person, one computer. This was outrageous at the time. You know, today it's so hard to put yourself back in that time. But at that time, the computers were in big rooms, raised floors, locked doors for the computer experts, access only. You didn't experience a computer. And the idea that everybody could have access to this amazing tool.

was astonishing. And here this guy was standing up and saying that, and you felt like, wow, this is something worth working for. This is something that can change the world. So he really helped me understand that even as one little cog in a very big wheel, you can work to change the world. And I totally attribute that to Steve. It was totally inspirational. Love hearing it. And you further went on to leave your dent in the universe in a number of different ways.

and I know you're known as you've played an integral role in the development of the personal digital assistance, PDAs, and have done a number of things I'd love to hear if you could tell your origin story, so to speak, since leaving Apple, meeting up with some great other leaders to then create a few companies or to work at a few different companies that have really helped us progress as a society in a number of different products. Sure. I left Apple after 10 years between Apple and Apple's software subsidiary Claris, and I took a year off. I went Claris to Paris, I love to say, so I just felt I needed a break. As I said, I'd been working extremely intensely for those 10 years. And when I was taking that year off, I spent a lot of time really introspective and saying to myself, what do I want to do?

what am I good at? What am I not good at? How can I maximize my impact and my value to the industry to society? How do I want to spend my time when I go back? And after giving that question a lot of thought, I came up with a little bit of a balance sheet. Here's my assets. Here's my liabilities. I was totally hooked on the idea that, again, that I learned from Steve of trying to change the world and have leverage and create things with an impact. So I decided that I wanted to come back and find a CEO job where I could have an impact where I could help change the world. And I wasn't sure what that was. And on my liability side of my personal balance sheet was the fact that I'm not a technologist, I'm not a product person. So I came back with a very clear mission, which was to find

a product person to partner with where I could be the business side. and the product person could be the technology side. And together we could create companies, businesses that might have a big impact. To me, it's been all about impact. Where can I have the most impact? And I came back from Paris and I started taking headhunter calls and I started chatting with friends. And I found that I was not the least but interested in small things. You know, somebody who would call me and say, oh, I've got this great, you know, firewall product that's a little bit better than

the existing firewall products on the market. That did not interest me. I was holding out for an environment like Apple had been. And along that process, I met Jeff Hawkins. Jeff started talking about handheld computing. He showed me a small Sony computer, handheld computer that was all in Japanese that had been shipping in Japan only. It was one of the first handheld computers. And I really felt the light bulb go off. It was much as we didn't talk about how I got to but I'd seen a demonstration of an Apple, too, that had given me a similar experience where I saw the light bulb go off. So I'm not a technologist. I'm not a product person, but I'm a product admirer, and I know it when I see it. And I saw that hand in a computer, and I said to

myself, immediately that's the next generation. And I want to be a part of that. That's going to be in everybody's pocket, just like Steve's vision of that computer being on everybody's desk. Jeff's vision of that computer being in every pocket was totally compelling to me. I had no idea what the applications would be. I didn't know how people would use it, but I'd seen from my Apple experience that as long as you have a strong platform for developers, very clever people will come along and figure out things that you never figured out about how to put these to use. So I got into handheld computing, and fortunately Jeff decided to bring me on as a CEO,

and we've been partners ever since. So as I've kind of looked at my career, big picture-wise, I've had the enormous pleasure to have a front row seat at four major computing revolutions. The first being the desktop revolution under Steve Jobs. The second being the handheld computing revolution with Jeff. The third being our third company, our next company, handspring where we did smartphones.

So really taking these handheld computers and connecting them through to each other and to the world. And the fourth being the one I'm working on now, which is intelligent computing, computing modeled after the human neocortex. So each of these four big, big fields that I've been a part of has had huge impact on the world and will continue to do so. Wasn't there a time that Steve walked up to you and said he would never get involved in making a phone?

Well, Steve, he said, I remember him talking at a conference. I think it might have been the D conference. I'm not 100% sure, where he talked from the stage about how he would never make a phone. He said, he called the carriers the orifices. I remember that quite clearly. The carriers were very difficult to deal with. So I think that was not badly put. And then we did have some private meetings with Steve over the course of our time at Palm and later in Hanspring.

And Steve's view was very much that the PC was going to be the central part of somebody's computing life and that everything else just kind of hung off the PC, but the PC was the point. And we really felt that the weight would shift to the mobile and that people's lives would really start centering around the mobile. And he differed with that opinion. I think by the end of his life, he changed his mind. But through the earlier years, he really was not inclined in the same direction we were. Now, I think the thing that's important to realize about what he ended up doing with the iPhone and with his work in that area is, In my view, the big thing he did was he redefined the relationship with the carrier. Everybody focuses on the device and what it did or didn't do, but honestly, our devices were so much better in the beginning.

I mean, obviously, the iPhone got better and better, but it really wasn't very good in the beginning. But what was radical was he got AT&T to agree to let him do whatever he wanted to do. And we could never get any of the carriers to agree to that. So the carriers were constantly putting up barriers to us to do good product. I remember a big meeting with Sprint where we were trying to convince them when we had the camera and we wanted to be able to take a picture and send the picture in an email. Sounds like a good idea. You probably have done that if it comes yourself.

We had done such a thing at the time. And Sprint was like totally shut us down, wouldn't let us do it. because they said, no, it's got to go through our photo processing service, and we want to keep the photos on sprint. We can't send them directly. It's got to work the way our feature phones do. We don't want to retrain our salespeople on how your phone does it differently. And it was just the most frustrating experience to try to get the carriers to realize that you had to really reimagine these devices, given the ability of the networks to carry the data volume, not just the voice volume.

and we didn't have the market power to do that. Steve totally redefined that relationship, and that enabled him to do things in the iPhone eventually that, you know, we had found very, very difficult to do. Wow, so you guys, as you progressed, though, to handspring eventually in that, because I think of the trio, right, you guys created that phone. Is that accurate? Yes.

Yeah, because that's one I personally used in, and really enjoyed. But you mentioned, too, so I love these stories. I just get, it's almost why it leaves me speechless here briefly, which does not happen very often in this podcast, but the stories, I'm just like, wow, this is incredible, hearing somebody who was actually there. But what you guys are currently doing now,

you mentioned it, and I was digging into your current company, and I wanted to learn more. So could you describe exactly what you guys are doing? And you said you're on the forefront of another, you know, innovation that's happening as we speak. Could you go more deeper into that topic? Yes, I find it amusing when people walk around a day and say, oh, the future is mobile. The future is mobile.

You know, the hard part was saying that the future was mobile 20 years ago. That's, you know, that's the past. And we're iterating on it. There'll be better and better things to do. But that's no longer what is the big news for the future. The hard part about these things is seeing. it before it's obvious. So the future, as far as I'm concerned, the next big generation of computing is going to be built on intelligent machines, learning machines. We haven't

had these before. We've had various things in the general field of artificial intelligence, but none of them really learn per se. They are more programmed than they are learning machines. And my partner Jeff, he started as a young man and trying to understand the brain and how the brain learns, and we're building technology that's modeled after the brain's learning mechanism. So it's a set of technology and algorithms. We've decided not to build solutions and applications ourselves, so we partner with other companies who build out those solutions, but our underlying technology does what your brain does, which is it finds patterns in streaming data. And it's different than big data, and that big data is fundamentally,

spatial. It's databases. It finds correlations, things that happen at the same time, whereas we and your brain find patterns in data flowing through time, temporally structured data. So it's about sequences. A happens, then B happens, then C happens. And we learn those sequences, and it enables us to do predictions. If we know A, B, C happen, we can predict D, and we can find anomalies. So if D doesn't happen, we know it's an anomaly. So that's basically what we do. We apply it to a wide range of problems. We have an app your listeners can download that tracks the stock market to just, it's free. It just shows off how it works on stock volume, Twitter volume, and stock prices.

It's kind of fun to play with. We have it on Android and iPhone. It's called HTML for stocks. You can look it up in the app stores. HTML for stocks? Yes. Okay. And so you'll see in that app, you'll see the data streaming.

and then we highlight for you anything that we see as an anomaly, a little bit different to the normal. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean bad. It just means different. Something good might have happened as well. So then you have to go and dig in to see what has happened beyond that. And we've applied this to monitoring servers. We've applied this to prediction for energy companies. We're working with a team now that's working on like Apple Watch data and trying to apply this to disease and getting early problems with disease. We've applied this to predictive maintenance in heavy machinery.

We have a partner that's doing fascinating work in language and trying to understand language using this technology and being able to search on meaning instead of search on keyword. So a huge amount of interesting work going on. I expect in 10 years when we look back, there'll be lots of applications that we've never thought of, just as there were with handheld computing. and that there'll be many, many new businesses that can be created based on people figuring out how to apply this technology to many different problem domains.

From a practical perspective, like I'm trying to, maybe the best way to put this is dumb it down a little bit. How could this affect my life and our life or my children's life in 10 to 15 years? I mean, could this have an effect on cars, planes? I'm thinking of like, or computing, or how could it affect us directly that the everyday person who doesn't understand technology that well, but they would understand if their car, if you can punch an address in their car and it would drive them somewhere. Just using that as an example, because obviously I'm thinking of Elon Musk and Google and things like that. Well, one way I think about it is close to the sensor. I mean, sensors capture streaming data. So anywhere you have a sensor, you have an opportunity to be able to monitor something automatically,

which today, the way they do this is with, you know, setting thresholds and having benchmarks and data scientists and all the stuff. So the person who's got a pacemaker now could be monitored continually to know whether there's something that's maybe going a little wrong. Or you think of all the sensors in the hospital where there's false alarms going on. and then the nurses don't even listen to them anymore. They just don't because of all the false positives. So, you know, anywhere there's a sensor, now there will be an opportunity to understand that data and act on it. So that could be in the transportation domain.

There's been so many accidents in transportation the last few years, whether it was a guy on the metro train on the East Coast or a non-accident. I keep thinking of that German wings pilot who flew into the mountain, where there were abnormalities. and what was going on that nobody picked up because people can't automatically monitor that amount of data. It's just too much data. So the ability to automatically monitor things to be able to get things, highlight problems before they happen, I think will have a huge impact, whether it's transportation, whether it's health, whether it's energy usage, many different ways.

And things will just start being able to be acted on before they become problematic. As the CEO and co-founder of the company, what is your life like on a day-to-day basis? What specifically are the day-to-day actions of you as a CEO? I'm a little bit of an unusual CEO because I actually do this part-time. Since we are really a technology company, not so much a product company. We don't have a big sales force. We don't have a ton of customers who we're out talking to and servicing. and I'm not the technologist doing the research part, so I tend to work with people as they approach us,

where they want to work with our technology, then I'm the ones that figures out the licensing, that figures out how to support them. But a lot of the work related to advancing the technology is more under the direction of Jeff than it is under me, and our VP of Research, Subitai Amin. So I tend to work at it when I need to, as opposed to the same kind of pace that I did earlier in my life. And I tend to work on the most important things, you know, whether they're structuring the company, figuring out the people aspects, figuring out our business strategy, our licensing strategy, and so on. What do you, if you could envision your, like you set, let's say you set long-term strategic goals five years from now for the company. Are you still there? Are you still leading it? How big is it? What's happening in five years with your company?

Everything's taken a bit longer than we would have liked. So I think I would have answered that question each time that, oh, in five years, we're going to see this deployed in a whole bunch of places. And every five years sort of rolls around and it isn't. So I'm hesitant to make predictions anymore. But I think we are going to see this seeping out into all sorts of applications. just many different ways. And I do think, you know, maybe a 10-year time horizon, you'll look back and ultimately, I think this technology will be pervasive. It's just there's going to be no other way to take all this data from all these sensors and all these devices and make sense of it. You know, you just, there's no automated way to learn from the data. So I think that's, that's what we're doing. And it's going to be, it's going to, we're going to find it ubiquitous. I gotcha. One more question, Donna. And that's around the topic of my show.

When you hear the phrase learning leader, and I first reach out to you, you know, you saw that in my email, I'm curious, what's the first thing you think of when you hear the phrase learning leader? It's interesting to me because I think about learning a lot because our technology is a machine learning technology pattern after human brain. And you have to learn a bit about how we learn in order to help make machines that can learn. and there's a lot of, you know, interesting gleanings you get from that process in terms of what does it mean to be a learning leader. One of them, for example, is the way a lot of kind of learning, machine learning technology works today is that you have this batch process.

You get a bunch of samples of data saying you're trying to learn the differences between cats and dogs and images. You need a labeled data set of a million cats and dogs. you do a batch process of you learn what's a cat versus a dog and then you can classify it when you get a new image. Our technology doesn't work that way at all. First, you don't need label data sets. You just learn from the stream of data as it comes in. You learn from the data itself. And then secondly, you learn from each data point.

So every new data point you continually learn. So it's not a batch process. It's not that you learn once and then deploy. It's that you are continually learning. And that's the way your brain works. And I think that's the way a learning leader needs to be, that you need to be continually learning. And the world is changing all the time. People are changing around you.

You need to be taking each new data point and saying, I got something to learn from this. Each new interesting person, I have something to learn from them. And not proceeding in kind of a batch fashion and say, okay, I've learned what there is to learn. And now I'm going to deploy it. So I really feel that the brain and our technology at Numenta are great metaphors for what it is to be a learning leader. Wow, that's awesome. I love it. Thank you, Donna, so much for being. I really appreciate your investment of your time, the most valuable resource you have for the show and for my listeners. Where would you send everyone to find more about you and your company online?

Well, to learn more about our company, you can go to www.newmenta.com, N-U-M-E-N-T-A. For those of you who are more technically inclined, we have all of our code is in an open source project. That's at numenta.org. So you can also go there to get information, more in-depth technical information. We also have on the numenta.com, we have plenty of non-technical information that explains it for people who are not interested in the code part. So you can go either way. And we've just published, for those who are more biologically or neuroscience inclined,

We've just published a major new paper that I think is going to be a seminal paper in the field about neurons and the brain and how the neurons work. So for those who are interested in that level of the technical detail, you can search for that paper. I'm sure we have links to it on our website as well. Yeah, and I can link all that up in the show notes at learningleader.com for everybody. Donna, thanks again for being here. I really appreciate it, and this was a lot of fun. Okay, Ryan. Thank you.

All right. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learning Leadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world-class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leader Show.