Remembering Dr. Russell Smith, 20 years on

I don’t know where the time goes. It seems impossible, yet the calendar doesn’t lie. 20 years ago, Dr. Russell Smith MNZM, CEO of HumanWare, my friend, my mentor, my then boss, and a man who made the world a better place for blind people, died tragically aged 61 in a light plane crash alongside his wife, Marian D’Eve.

They call them “flashbulb moments”, those moments in your life that are so impactful, you can relive them, play them back, in vivid detail. When I got the news, I was in the United Sates. The company we had just recently started calling HumanWare following Pulse Data International’s acquisition of VisuAide was riding an incredible wave of popularity. Just a little over a month before, we had stunned the industry by unveiling BrailleNote mPower without any leaks or build-up. The day we announced it, we were shipping it, which was and is very rare in the access tech industry. And then, in the middle of the night, I received that phone call from back in New Zealand telling me, “Russell and Marian are both dead”.

You do what you have to at times like that. As a senior member of HumanWare staff, and someone who had many mutual friends with Russell, I was tasked with making my share of phone calls to people who ought to hear the news directly. Somehow, you get it done despite the numbness.

So, who was Russell, and why do many of us still miss him so much, 20 years on?

Born in 1944, Dr. Russell Smith was educated as an electrical engineer, and earned his Ph.D. in underwater sonar technology from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. That may seem like an interesting way to get into blindness products, but the person we have to thank for that is his professor, Leslie Kay, who I got to know as a boy. Professor Kay conceived the groundbreaking idea that sonar technology could be adapted to help blind people navigate our environment. I was one of the kids chosen for experiments with Professor Kay’s gadgets, the most useful of which to me was a sonic headband. I believe it may have been through this work that I first met Russell.

Following his academic pursuits, the company Russell was working for, Wormald International, recognized the potential of his work and formed a new division specifically dedicated to access technology, called Wormald International Sensory Aids, with Russell at its helm. While its initial focus was sonic technology including the venerable Mowat Sensor, a handheld device that vibrated to signal nearby objects, Russell had even bigger dreams.

In 1986, he was responsible for the release of Keynote, a revolutionary talking computer for blind people. I was one of its first users, meaning I have been using KeySoft since its very first release.

 

Russell was an incredibly smart man, a deep and clear thinker who could understand and get to the core of a problem. He was also smart enough to surround himself with brilliant people. Russell hired an exceptional software developer, Jonathan Sharp, who was one of the best UI designers for blind people in the history of blindness technology. In consultation with the initial handful of blind people who were Keynote early adopters, Russell and Jonathan built an intuitive but powerful user interface, evolving quickly and packed with context sensitive help. I was a high school kid then, and used to bother both Russell and Jonathan a lot, telling them all the things I thought they should do with the Keynote to make it better. They were both incredibly patient with me, and I never felt like I was being dismissed or talked down to. It was pretty special to come home from school and find a floppy disk waiting for me in the mail with an update for my Keynote, with some of my suggestions implemented.

Russell wasn’t only a thinker and an innovator, he had exceptional entrepreneurial and risk taking instincts. In 1988, he spearheaded a management buyout of Wormald’s Sensory Aids Division, which led directly to the founding of Pulse Data International. He had a vision for blindness technology, and believed in his ability to execute on it, so much so that he mortgaged his home to finance the company.

The Keynote software eventually made its way to a commercial Toshiba laptop, allowing users to run KeySoft on top of DOS, then shell out to a DOS screen reader to get other work done. Ultimately, Pulse Data even developed its own screen reader, MasterTouch. It offered the option of an innovative touch tablet, allowing you to feel your screen layout. It also was able to speak in some applications where other screen readers struggled.

I think it’s fair to say that the Keynote Gold text-to-speech engine was an acquired taste, but I certainly acquired it. It was responsive and intelligible at very fast speeds.

But what sent this little company from New Zealand, Pulse Data International, into the stratosphere, was a product called the BrailleNote, the first version of which was launched in April 2000. It was intuitive, attractive, and based on a modern foundation, Windows CE. Microsoft was delighted to see its operating system deployed on such a device, and at the official BrailleNote launch, Russell even got to demonstrate the device to Bill Gates.

The timing couldn’t have been better from a revenue point of view. The US was, and still is, the BrailleNote’s largest market, and in 2000, the exchange rate was incredibly favorable for New Zealand companies exporting product to the US. BrailleNote more than doubled Pulse Data’s turnover. Pulse Data International won New Zealand exporter of the year twice. BrailleNote had taken Pulse Data International from an excellent niche access tech company to a multinational sensation.

I had kept in regular touch with Russell since all the way back in those early Keynote days. After always showing a genuine interest in how I was doing and how my career was developing, he’d want to chat about how I thought things were going, and whether I had any ideas for him. Sometimes he would make jokes about how I should come and put all these ideas of mine into action. At least, I thought he was joking. It came as a huge surprise when Greg Thompson, who was serving as Pulse Data International’s Product Marketing Manager, started sounding me out about coming to lead their blindness products. I had never considered product management as a career option, and the idea of taking over what was then the hottest product in blindness technology was somewhat daunting. But I’m always up for a challenge, I loved the idea of helping to influence the direction of such an iconic product, and I would get to work closely with Jonathan Sharp and Russell. So in the end, I said I’d give it a go.

I learned a lot from working so closely with Russell, and gained an appreciation of, and additional admiration for, why he was such a successful businessman. He was across every aspect of the company with tremendous attention to detail. He constantly challenged me to adapt my mindset to the commercial environment I was now in. It wasn’t sufficient for me to tell him that blind people would benefit from a particular feature. Need was not enough in a commercial entity. Understandably, he would want compelling forecasts about how spending precious engineering time on a feature would translate into increased sales.

Before every major release of KeySoft, Russell would clear out a big chunk of time in his calendar, and have me show him how to use every new feature of the software. For the avoidance of doubt, Russell was sighted. He would ask rigorous, challenging questions, and I say that as the guy who devised the spec for the product. If he thought a feature should work a particular way, and I told him the engineers said it wasn’t possible to do it that way even though I would have preferred it too, he would often respond with frustration, “how hard can it be?” I soon came to predict accurately when the next “how hard can it be” was coming.

At first I wondered whether Russell should have had bigger fish to fry. With the company now so successful and thriving, why did he, as the CEO of a multinational company, want to know every little quirk of the BrailleNote? Shouldn’t it have been enough for him to trust his team and let them deliver a quality product? When I attended my first tech conference with an exhibit hall as a Pulse Data International employee, I got my answer. Russell, the CEO, loved getting in the exhibit hall and taking his turn at the booth. It grounded him. It got him away from the numbers and the hassle, and connected him to the blind people who were the meaning of it all. He would love hearing how his products were helping people succeed, and where people identified weaknesses, he’d write it all down and make sure I was aware of every comment. Sometimes, I would watch him chatting to customers, explaining excitedly the latest features. He never misremembered anything from our briefings, and he rarely needed my assistance. What he never did was introduce himself as the CEO, the owner of the company. I’m sure if someone asked him what he did, he would have told them, but he was just happy to be Russell, a guy showing a blind person in the exhibit hall the latest cool things. I’m sure there are countless people from that era who were shown the BrailleNote by the CEO, and never even knew.

One convention attendee came up to me and said, “you should give that guy Russell a bonus, he really knows what he’s talking about”.

I loved travelling with Russell. He always worked hard on the plane, I seldom saw him sleep on those 12 or 13 hour flights, but he was also a fun and easy-going companion. Several of us who were frequent international travelers for Pulse Data remember how Russell used to use his considerable influence due to being such a frequent flyer to organize seat reassignments so members of his team could sit next to him.

We would regularly travel between New Zealand and the United States, and Russell’s disappearances into Fry’s Electronics were legendary. He’d always come out of there with the most extraordinary gadgets, he really was a gadget guy.

Each month, he would get the team in New Zealand together and tell us about the numbers. There were regular gifts. Pulse Data deckchairs, backpacks, one of which I gave to one of my children and I learned is still in regular use today, all kinds of merch. Sometimes, he would just give you a personal gift. He might have been in a store somewhere, saw an item that made him think of you, and purchased it. His kindness and generosity in that way was incredibly touching and rare.

 

We kept working away. A mutually beneficial partnership with Baum in Germany allowed us to launch BrailleNote PK, a robust and portable 18-cell device. Some of those dinners with the Baum team and ours were legendary.

And the mPower took a lot of careful planning. This was going to be the company’s next flagship product. Russell trusted my market knowledge, but he wasn’t afraid to test my assumptions and pose alternative scenarios.

Thanks to a partnership with the Sendero group, GPS technology came for the first time to a truly portable blindness-specific computer. Russell completely got Mike May’s vision for portable GPS technology, and he backed it unreservedly.

While I was at Pulse Data International, which sported a good chunk of available cash, we explored several mergers and acquisitions, some of which, had they happened, would have created a very different blindness technology industry from the one we now know. But the big one that did make it was of course the acquisition of the Canadian company VisuAide. We finally completed this in January 2005, just seven months before Russell died. Looking for a new name for the company, it was finally determined that since we owned the US company HumanWare, why didn’t we just call the new company HumanWare. We did, and of course that name continues into the present.

I remember enjoying a bottle of wine with Russell just after the acquisition closed, reflecting on how far he had come since he took that risk and bought out Wormald International Sensory Aids. I told him he must feel very proud. Russell didn’t spend a lot of time talking himself up, but he paused for a while and finally said, “yeah, yeah I am actually”. He deserved to be proud. He had created one of the largest blindness tech companies in the world, just five years after venture capitalists concluded that Pulse Data International wasn’t sufficiently consequential to buy.

In July 2005, BrailleNote mPower was out, people were getting used to the new HumanWare brand, and we were enjoying the juggernaut. It’s an incredible feeling to be part of that kind of momentum. I worked with some very smart, dedicated people, all exceptional at what they did, all thriving under Russell’s leadership. We were good, and we knew we were just getting started. I was speaking at the ACB convention, while Russell was on-stage to massive applause at the National Federation of the Blind in what would be the last speech he would give at a blindness convention. He was brimming with ideas for the future, and he stated that he looked forward to being back at the NFB convention in 2006. It felt like we were unstoppable.

Pulse Data, and then HumanWare, was a New Zealand-based company then. New Zealand is not a particularly hierarchical country, and Russell had few airs and graces even by New Zealand standards. So, despite him being the CEO, if I thought Russell was being foolish, or stubborn, or annoying, I would tell him so, but in good old colloquial New Zealand language that would get me fired in many other parts of the world. Russell gave as good as he got.

One day, me working in the US and Russell back in New Zealand, Russell and I were having a very lively disagreement via email. Try as I might, I simply cannot recall what we were fighting about, but it got nicely colorful. Finally I wrote to him and told him, “Russell, mate, you’re a good bugger and I don’t want to argue with you anymore. You know I like working with you.” He wrote back and said something like, “we’re good mate. You did a good job with the mPower, people loved it at NFB. We make a good team”.

I’m glad we had that exchange, because it was our last. Please, if you have someone who you need to put something right with, do it today. We never know when we will run out of tomorrows. I am so pleased about the tenderness of our last conversation, but it could so easily have been a different story.

I miss him. 20 years on, after all this time, I still miss him. It’s not just the pioneer, the visionary that I miss. I miss the man who was never too busy to hear the ideas of a kid who was full of product ideas and absolute certainty in the way only a teenager can convey. I miss the dry, understated sense of humor. I miss the affection he would show to my kids when they were little. I miss his compassion which translated one day in him giving me a huge hug when my marriage at the time was ending, even though I hadn’t known him to be a hugger before that. Damn it, I just miss him.

But part of him lives on, because even though he was a quiet, humble, understated man, he shaped my future, and the futures of many of us, through his empowering technology. I know those still at HumanWare from Russell’s time after all these years still aspire to his values.

So, I wanted to tell you this story today, to get my feelings out there, because it is so important that we always remember Russell Smith, one of the most wonderful men I ever had the honor to know.