Phillip Goldman, a Silicon Valley engineer and entrepreneur who was a co-founder of the Internet service WebTV and more recently of a company that provides a service to block junk e-mail messages, died Dec. 26. He was 39.
The cause of death, at his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif., had not been determined, the Santa Clara County medical examiner-coroner’s office said.
WebTV was Mr. Goldman’s best-known venture. Its products allowed people to surf the Internet from their televisions without owning a personal computer. He and the other founders, Steve Perlman and Bruce Leak, sold that company to Microsoft in 1997 for $503 million.
His latest company, Mailblocks Inc., helps customer deal with the rising flood of unwanted e-mail.
Mr. Goldman, whom friends described as quirky and inspiring, began his technology career at Apple Computer, where he helped develop Multifinder, a program that paved the way for modern personal computing by allowing the Macintosh computer to run more than one program at the same time.
In the early 1990s, he was an executive at General Magic, a communications products company formed by Apple and other high-technology companies that was a playground for some of the most innovative thinkers in the industry. Mr. Goldman’s dwarf rabbit, Bowser, which he took with him everywhere, became the company’s official mascot and was portrayed on the company’s T-shirts springing out of a magician’s top hat
In 1995, Perlman recruited Mr. Goldman to WebTV. The secretive founders set up the company under a fictitious name, Artemis Research. A bare-bones Web site stated that “The team at Artemis is committed to studying the results of sleep deprivation, poor diet and no social life for extended periods of time on humans and dwarf rabbits.”
After Microsoft bought WebTV, Mr. Goldman and the other founders went to work for the company. But as the product stalled within Microsoft, he left in 2001 and founded Mailblocks in 2002.
Mr. Goldman graduated first in his class from Princeton University’s school of engineering in 1986. Eleven years later, he became the youngest Princeton graduate to create an endowed professorship with a $2 million gift to the university’s department of computer science.
He also served on the board of Brave Kids, a non-profit organization that provided information and Internet technology to children with serious illnesses and their families.
One of his brothers, Tyler Goldman, said his brother was “obsessed with technology” from childhood, and filled page after page with lines of hand-written computer code.
He also is survived by his wife, Susan Goldman, and two daughters, and by his parents, and another brother, Colin.
