SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to this venture. SS: I grew up in New Delhi, India and my dad was a senior military officer. We had a lot of change every two years as we moved from place to place. This taught me how to make
SM: You were losing market position at this point. Did you ever consider selling to Apple? EB: There might have been an opportunity to do that before the iTune/iPod product division was too far along, but I do not think this became a real opportunity in the timeframe that would have interested us. Had we
SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model? UM: One way to calculate TAM is by the money available to spend today on sales intelligence. This includes licenses to database information, such as Hoover’s. There’s about $5-10 billion spent today on this in the US market alone.
SM: What is Ed Colligan’s area of expertise? EB: He contributed a lot in the marketing front of the company. That was his main contribution. Ed was a first time CEO. The board felt he could preserve the innovation skills that had characterized the success of the early Palm days as well as Handspring, while
One of the things I did when I designed the Intarka product was that I went and interviewed tons of really good sales people to understand the various kinds of tactics they use to prospect. To this day, this experience has always helped me in my various business development activities, and has today become second
SM: I want to ask about some of these aspects. I think operationally you managed to turn the company around, but where was the marketing vision, the juice, coming from? Who was the visionary? EB: We still had Jeff, who had envisioned the Treo. It was his brainchild, just like the initial PalmPilot. He was
SM. What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? Competition? Competitive Positioning? UM: The market landscape did not include any “true” competitors at that time and still do not today. InsideView represents a unique technology that uses Web 3.0-type features to address sales issues in the enterprise. Although they aren’t true competitors,
SM: Was there was a lot of vision overlap between Palm and Handspring at the time of the acquisition? EB: Yes, this meant that essentially we were buying them back to have access to the smartphone product which was the Treo. The first Treo was an interesting product, but not a great product. It was