Biography

Donna is a serial entrepreneur best known for her work as CEO of Palm Computing and then Handspring, pioneers of the first successful handheld computers and smartphones. Previously, Donna spent 10 years in a multitude of sales, sales support, and logistics functions—both at Apple and at Claris, an Apple software subsidiary. She founded Numenta with her long-time business partner, Jeff Hawkins, in 2005. Numenta has a two-pronged mission – to figure out how the brain works and then apply it to create more powerful machine intelligence.

Donna earned a B.A. from Yale University, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She currently serves on the boards of Numenta, Cortical.io (private technology company in Vienna, Austria) and Twilio (NYSE: TWLO). Donna also served on the board of Yale University from 2006-2018, including two years as Senior Fellow.