Paranoia might have made Kaplan wary of accepting three venture capital infusions from Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, which pressured the company to turn out a product before it was humanly possible. The 200 employees who worked overtime for six years with the hopes that their stock options would make them richĪre working elsewhere, some still harboring resentment toward Kaplan and AT&T.ĭuring an interview this week, Kaplan said his major mistake was "not being sufficiently paranoid." The money EO had raised - $40 million from venture capitalists and large corporations - is spent. Less than 10,000 units of the company's product were ever shipped. Today, everything from GO is gone, with the exception of a few thousand EOs that are gathering dust in AT&T's closets and a couple that Kaplan has kept for note taking. In 1987, Kaplan formed GO, whose major product was the EO (Latin for go) Personal Communicator, a thin, tablet-shaped portable computer. Instead of typing, a user would write on the screen. Working at Lotus Development Corp., Kaplan got the idea that the next generation of computers would be hand-held digital notepads.
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