PalmPilot

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

by Jimmy Soni  · 22 Feb 2022  · 505pp  · 161,581 words

said. “Okay. Interesting,” Thiel replied. Sensing Thiel’s muted reaction, Levchin moved to his next concept. During college, he had built an application for the PalmPilot—then the world’s hottest handheld device—to solve a problem for friends who ran big computer systems. These system administrators relied on credit-card

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it turned the password generation of multiple key cards into a single application on a handheld device. “I basically emulated the whole thing on a PalmPilot so my friends were able to throw out their stupid devices,” Levchin said. This was no small feat. The key cards did complex cryptography

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and produced codes quickly. SecurePilot had to keep up to avoid annoying users, but the PalmPilot’s weak processor made speed a technical challenge. “There is some art involved in how you speed [the program] up—both from the user

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modest success hinted at something bigger—a business opportunity at the intersection of handheld devices and mobile security. He prophesied a future in which the PalmPilot and similar handheld devices would become indispensable. Thiel was skeptical. “I’ve seen these devices,” he said, “but what are they good for?” “Well,

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supercomputer in their pockets. Thiel pressed further. “So what’s the point?” “The point is right now there’s no encryption. If someone steals my PalmPilot and knows my PIN, I’m screwed. They’d get everything,” Levchin explained. “You need to encrypt this stuff.” Thiel began to see the

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potential. But he had a question, a core challenge in the field: It was one thing to generate single-use passwords, but could the PalmPilot’s processor handle encrypting emails, documents, and other files? Did Levchin’s ideas outstrip the technology at hand? “That’s exactly my point,” replied

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decade ahead of his time.” Powers had come to the conference because of his interest in mobile computing. The first generation of mobile devices—the PalmPilot, the Apple Newton, the Casio Cassiopeia, the Sharp Wizard, and so on—had just burst onto the scene. When he met Levchin, Powers had

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sell: In 1998, many businesses had only just begun to swap paper-and-pencil for keyboards-and-mice, and low-power, handheld devices like the PalmPilot felt like an even bigger leap—untried, unworkable, and potentially unsafe. “We were kind of naïve,” Powers admitted. Though their pitches amounted to nothing,

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an attempt to obsolete physical wallets. Mobile Wallet would secure financial information and allow users to send currency and conduct e-commerce—all from a PalmPilot. As a blueprint for the mobile future, Confinity’s February 1999 business plan holds up surprisingly well. The company planned on riding the growth of

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a doctorate, but too defiant to replace worn footwear. He had time on his hands. And he tolerated the team’s notions about world-beating PalmPilot wallets. Brilliance, nonconformity, availability, and the willing suspension of disbelief—these qualities defined Confinity’s first hires and formed the foundation of its culture. * * *

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, reflecting on their creations and considering alternative use cases. The question was less technical than it was logical—what information was better stored inside a PalmPilot than a normal wallet? One idea: passwords. Passwords on paper slips tucked into a real wallet were vulnerable to theft. “If you store them

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in your PalmPilot, you could secure it further with a secondary passphrase that protects it,” Levchin said. This was a promising concept and, indeed, a forerunner of today

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’s password managers. But at the time, the handheld device market was still small and the market for PalmPilot password managers even smaller. Compounding the challenge for Confinity, passwords lacked glamour. The era’s dot-coms were busily pitching technological revolution—promising to do

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I would say, ‘I owe you $10,’ and put in my passphrase,” Levchin recalled. The digital IOUs would be stored until the user docked their PalmPilot to a computer, at which point the payments would clear. Essentially, Confinity had created primitive digital checks, marrying handheld devices and finance. But as with

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the earlier ideas, PalmPilot-based IOUs didn’t represent a stop-the-presses breakthrough. That is, until the team tweaked the product yet again. For its 1998 generation of

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to beam information, but even as IR-bearing PalmPilots shipped, it wasn’t exactly clear what users would beam. “Not all applications can use the beaming feature. Even the built-in programs, such as Palm Mail and Expense, can’t beam items,” Palm Pilot for Dummies noted. “But more and more Palm

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lunch in Palo Alto. The check arrives, and the onerous task of dividing up the bill begins. One diner reminds the group that they have PalmPilots, which include a calculator and Confinity’s money-beaming software. Presto: debts beamed, tab divided. Confinity would reorient the company, its software, and its

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pitch around beaming money from PalmPilot to PalmPilot. This idea had two virtues. First, it leveraged the thousands of lines of cryptographic handheld device code they’d already written. Second, it was a

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“I remember thinking, This is a really weird idea. Like, I don’t know that people are going to go for this because all that [PalmPilot] technology was new,” Schultheis said. She dutifully filed the company’s incorporation papers, even as she wondered about their prospects. (Later, Schultheis left the law

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’t go very far, especially as they staffed up. So, the team prepared a PowerPoint pitch deck, focused on this product evolution. Beaming money via PalmPilot, the deck boasted, was a billion-dollar opportunity—“better than cash,” “better than checks,” and “better than credit cards.” More importantly, Confinity would “capture

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billion. Thiel and Levchin envisioned a cashless mobile world, with Confinity linking central banks, credit card companies, and retail banks. The company hoped to turn PalmPilots into the default form of payment and money transfer, replacing cash and checks. By 2002, if all went according to plan, Confinity projected $25 million

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of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin—was among the attendees.) At the conference, Levchin wanted to test the waters for his idea of a cashless, all-digital, PalmPilot-based money system. The academics were unimpressed—they had been thinking about this problem for a long time. “It is hard to understate the degree

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-be investors asked sensible questions: Would people really beam money from handheld devices? What were the odds that four separate lunchtime companions would all own PalmPilots and have Mobile Wallet installed? Also, what exactly was seigniorage, and could Confinity really make money, as Thiel put it, “off the float”? As

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have Peter, this super smart business guy. Max, the allegedly super smart technical guy. And then Luke, the ideas guy.” Malloy anticipated that Confinity’s PalmPilot ideas wouldn’t work out as pitched, but that the team possesed the raw material to find something that would. Buhl and Malloy signaled their

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Levchin mainlined mobile knowledge. When they finally met face-to-face, Ala-Pietilä dove in with technical questions—including how Levchin could get low-power PalmPilots to perform highly complex calculations. A well-prepared Levchin summarized the differences between different cryptographic standards—the algorithms used to secure systems—and explained how

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cryptography while X.com went about building its financial services superstore. Each company thought the other was misguided. Musk was unreserved in his criticism of PalmPilot money beaming. “I’m like, That’s a dumb idea. They’re doomed,” he remembered thinking. Meanwhile, Confinity expected X.com to sink in

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hastily create his own security protocols and update the app’s user interface, including its buttons. He copied most of the buttons from a different PalmPilot calculator application and frantically coded a brand-new “Send” button for the demo. Soon, the team faced a more harrowing problem than hastily built

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Nokia Ventures. Thiel had managed to attract several local television stations to cover the event, and their satellite trucks idled nearby. Levchin had prepared two PalmPilots for the transaction. He handed one to Buhl and the other to Thiel. Standing before the cameras, Buhl took his device and used the stylus

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. Despite the attention, the event didn’t succeed in winning users—no one was calling the Confinity office asking how to beam money from their PalmPilots. “This was one of the lessons we had about PR early on,” Nosek remembered. “It was much more important for recruiting and for perception

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actual money. Because you’re just syncing on the desktop, right?’ ” She was right, of course, as technically a transaction only took place once a PalmPilot was nestled into its desktop cradle. “I thought I was missing something,” Lee recalled. Sacks confessed that Lee wasn’t missing anything and that her

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Sistine Chapel ceiling? Instead of God sending the spark of life to Adam through his fingertips, the Almighty could instead send him money through a PalmPilot. As the years passed, this T-shirt featuring Hurley’s Michelangelo remix became a treasured team memento. With the addition of Hurley and several others

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new offices, and new employees—it all looked like progress. But an old, central question still bedeviled the company: How exactly would people discover the PalmPilot beaming product? And more importantly, would they use it? At some level, the team assumed demand would exist—if they built it, the beamers would

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beaming, and by the summer of 1999, advisors and friends of the company probed the product’s viability. “We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots,” observed Reid Hoffman, a Stanford friend of Thiel’s and early Confinity board member, “and we could walk into every single restaurant and go

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of many late-night product debates that summer, Reid Hoffman raised another critical stumbling block: What if one of these hypothetical PayPal users forgot their PalmPilot and needed to execute a transaction? Levchin proposed a workaround, suggesting the PayPal.com website be set up to send money via a user’s

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to download the PayPal software for syncing their handheld devices to their computers. The site could have an email system as a backup to the PalmPilot money-beaming option. When emailing money was first suggested, few recognized it as a eureka moment. Quite the opposite: Levchin intended it to be

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hadn’t predicted. Before the emailing money demo, he’d perform an elaborate ritual to test PayPal’s plumbing: He’d beam money from one PalmPilot to another, sync both devices in their cradles, and then check two dummy accounts to confirm a funds transfer. The email money demo dramatically simplified

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assurance was unknown to most of the rest of the team—who still thought beaming was the priority. When Sacks arrived and began deprioritizing the PalmPilot product, the engineers were surprised—and incensed. “[Levchin] knew, but no one else on the team knew,” Sacks said, “so I think their perception

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And then we had to write the software four weeks before we went live.” It was one thing to beam money between two Confinity-owned PalmPilots for television cameras; it would be another when real users began crowding the airwaves with real dollars. “It’s kind of funny in retrospect

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often comically—critical. One commenter wrote an “Extract From Galactic Encyclopedia, May 2010,” describing robberies of the future “And from that point on, robbers had PalmPilots in their equipment, along with switchblades and guns. When they robbed somebody, their usual words were: ‘point your Pilot to mine and beam all your

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the iPhone,” Boneh joked. He and his Stanford colleagues had even taken a page out of Nosek and the UIUC ACM book: They connected a PalmPilot wallet to a Stanford vending machine. “There was a cryptographic protocol between the two,” Boneh remembered, “Money would transfer between the two.” Expert in

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securely expanding PalmPilots to the world of vending machines and elsewhere, Boneh was the person that Levchin turned to when he wanted a speedy code check that fall

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without. When he saw, for instance, that an early iteration of the PayPal sign-up process forced new users through seven web pages and two PalmPilot syncs, he was horrified. On the office whiteboard, he outlined a new, single-page sign-up form, and after getting approval from Thiel and

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said. He flirted with blocking the eBay URL from Confinity’s servers outright. Part of Levchin’s reluctance stemmed from his attachment to Confinity’s PalmPilot technology—which he thought should remain center stage. Now, instead, the afterthought email product was advancing rapidly, raising unanswered questions that he had little

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approached him to be COO in January 2000, Hoffman had been serving on Confinity’s board and seen the product evolve from beaming money via PalmPilots—of which he was skeptical—to a quickly growing email payments platform. SocialNet, in contrast, was flailing, and Hoffman’s board was moving in

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systems, X.com still had its investment and banking products to fall back on. Confinity, meanwhile, would be reduced to the questionable prospects of its PalmPilot application. In addition to sparring on eBay, Confinity and X.com had also begun competing for business development deals. Confinity would offer to partner with

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Courtesy of Russel Simmons At Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside, Confinity launched its inaugural product: a service to beam money between the infrared ports on PalmPilots. The product helped them secure venture funding from Nokia Ventures in mid-1999 and put the company on the path to creating PayPal—an email

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cutout of Star Trek’s “Scotty” character, the remnants of a failed “Beam Me Up, Scotty!” marketing campaign, devised when the company was promoting its PalmPilot money-beaming technology. Courtesy of Russel Simmons PayPal could be an unforgivingly intense place to work, and employees sought sleep when and where they could

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Livingston, “Max Levchin,” Founders at Work (New York: Apress, 2001), 3. “Not all applications”… “inches or so”: Bill Dyzel, “Beaming Items with Your Palm Device,” PalmPilot for Dummies, October 1, 1998, https://www.dummies.com/consumer-electronics/smartphones/blackberry/beaming-an-item-from-your-palm/. “While the port is not powerful

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath and Dan Heath  · 26 Mar 2013  · 316pp  · 94,886 words

for handheld devices. In college, Levchin had grown fascinated with software and cryptography, and purely as a hobby, he had created some security software for PalmPilots, making it available for free download. After thousands of people downloaded the software, it occurred to him that he might have a business on his

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hands. Levchin’s freeware had solved an incredibly complex problem. Implementing cryptographic algorithms on a PalmPilot, with its hamster-league 16 MHz processor, was kind of like restocking a large warehouse using men on unicycles—conceptually possible, certainly, but difficult to

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Levchin’s innovations into a commercial product, and eventually they hit upon the idea of developing software that allowed people to store money on their PalmPilots and exchange it wirelessly. Financial transactions clearly needed the kind of security that Levchin’s code provided. When Thiel and Levchin began to talk up

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to close, the PayPal team met its investors at a restaurant called Buck’s, and the $4.5 million investment was transferred, live, from one PalmPilot to another. Millions of dollars were sailing around the restaurant on infrared beams. The future had come to Buck’s. (Levchin had coded around the

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and woke up hours later next to his partially eaten omelet. Everyone else had left, figuring he could use the rest.) PayPal’s application for PalmPilots became popular, attracting about 300 users a day. To boost interest, Levchin’s team built a Web site that showcased a demo version of the

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of potential customers. They spent a year developing and refining the Web product, and by the end of 2000, they had given up on the PalmPilot product entirely. It had peaked at 12,000 users. On the Web, meanwhile, their customer base was well over a million strong. “It was an

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’t give in now! We’ll be sacrificing our lead in the handheld market! What if two years from now, the whole world runs on Palm Pilots? We’ll feel like idiots having sacrificed our strength. Shouldn’t you stick with your original gut instinct that handheld devices are the wave of

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, even though five minutes earlier they wouldn’t have paid more than $2.87! 5. Loss aversion + mere exposure = status-quo bias. • PayPal: Ditching the PalmPilot product was a no-brainer—but it didn’t feel that way. 6. We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 29 Sep 2013  · 464pp  · 127,283 words

affectionately calls “kids.” Crowley moved on to a new job at Vindigo, a start-up whose Palm Pilot app was one of the first city guides for a mobile device. Before do-it-all smartphones, PalmPilots—wireless-less handheld computers known as “personal digital assistants”—stood in as digital replacements for paper-based

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daily planners. This was before 3G, and Wi-Fi was just coming to market, and just beginning its infectious spread. The PalmPilot didn’t feature a wireless connection of any kind. Each time you returned to your PC, you snapped the thing into its cradle and hit

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a button, syncing data across a serial cable. Like other PalmPilot apps, Vindigo used the daily sync as a way of keeping the guide content on your device up to date. But cleverly, it was also

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.in, 155 Owen, David, 278 Paes, Eduardo, 66–68, 223–24 Pahlka, Jennifer, 237–43, 291 Pakistan, 233 Palmisano, Sam, 62–63, 68, 223–24 PalmPilot, 121–22 Panasonic, 127 Panopticon, 13 Paris, bicycle sharing in, 11 ParkNOW!, 244–45 patents, 60–61 Path Intelligence, 271 Pattern Language, A (Alexander), 144

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by Tom Eisenmann  · 29 Mar 2021  · 387pp  · 106,753 words

as simple as a series of sketches that depict the flow of screens along a software program’s navigation path. Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot, famously started designing the device by carving a block of wood into its shape, and then trimming a chopstick that he used as a stylus

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. To get a feel for whether and how he might use a PalmPilot, he carried the prototype for weeks, pulling it out every time he needed to schedule a meeting or access contact information. Early in the solution

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a harbinger of failure. In fact, many prominent ventures were products of a pivot. For example, PayPal began as a way to beam funds between PalmPilots. When this market proved too narrow, the team introduced fund transfers via email—just as eBay was taking off. Likewise, YouTube started as a service

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Brainstorming Session,” Scott Berkun blog; and Tina Seelig, “Brainstorming—Why It Doesn’t (Always) Work,” Medium, Jan. 8, 2017. Jeff Hawkins, inventor: Alberto Savoia, “The Palm Pilot Story,” Medium, Mar. 2, 2019. Early in the solution development process: The distinction between “works like” vs. “looks like” prototypes is a widely accepted principle

Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software

by Michael Schwarz, Jeremy Anderson and Peter Curtis  · 7 May 2002

/ malsync http://www.tomw.org/malsync/ Question: Doesn't switching to Linux mean that I will have to give up my Palm computing device (or PalmPilot as most humans still call them)? Answer: Absolutely not! You have an embarassment of options for linking your Palm, Sony Clie, or Handspring Visor to

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tastes. Heck, I actually use more than one of the packages every single day. It is a lot of fun! Introduction PalmOS devices, including the PalmPilot, the Palms III, IIIx, V, Vx, VIIx, m100, and now m500, etc., the Handspring line of personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Sony Clie, and so

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, hence all the pretty pictures (so perhaps this is a bit of an apology after all). One more note: We will use the terms palm, Palm, pilot, and PDA interchangeably throughout this chapter. In every case we mean one of the PalmOS-based personal digital assistants, without regard to a particular model

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. install-todos The function complementary to the read-todos program. This will take a text file of to-do items and store them in your palm. pilot-schlep This will turn your palm into a one-file file system. You can save any disk file (that will fit in your palm's

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, ones that will synchronize your datebook with ical or netplan, and ones that will capture your pilot's ROM (for use in some of the palm pilot emulators used to develop palm applications). What we have shown you here should be enough to get you going. pilot-manager This is the first

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World

by Bruce Schneier  · 1 Jan 2000  · 470pp  · 144,455 words

Internet. A crime is no more or less of a crime if cryptography is involved. (The New York sales clerk who, in 1999, used a Palm Pilot to copy customers’ credit card numbers would be no less guilty if he used a pen and paper.) And extortion is no better or worse

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-in-themiddle attack looks like, and exactly what PKI is supposed to prevent. Example two: I visited www.palm.com to purchase something for my PalmPilot. When I went to the online checkout, I was redirected to https://palmorder.modusmedia.com/asp/store.asp. The SSL certificate was registered to Modus

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is over. She relinquishes a stuffed bear reluctantly—another daughter, this one a little spoiled. The DJ punches her contact information into another customer’s Palm Pilot for future room reservations, and everyone leaves the karaoke room together. The men, accompanied by the mami, head toward the elevator, and the girls disappear

Free as in Freedom

by Sam Williams  · 16 Nov 2015

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Working the Street: What You Need to Know About Life on Wall Street

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: relationship managers, corporate finance generalists, and industry/deal specialists. The relationship bankers are the big-big-big-picture folks who have very contact-rich Rolodexes/Palm Pilots and know how to charm and impress their clients. They can wax eloquent for hours about a lot of general business and The Right Match

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