Arthur van Hoff was part of the Java development team at Sun Microsystems
when he left in 1996 to found Marimba, a software distribution company.
Joining him as cofounders were two fellow developers from the Java team, Sami
Shaio and Jonathan Payne, and Kim Polese, Java’s product manager.
Marimba received lots of attention from the press and venture capitalists
early on. The company grew from a 4-person startup to a company with more
than 300 employees at the time of its IPO in 1999. van Hoff left the company in
2002...

hard. Anybody can have good ideas.
Over the years, I’ve learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It’s just
a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what’s wrong with it and
you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a
better idea and the second idea is always the important one.
After Marimba, when I started Strangeberry with Jonathan, we had no plan
whatsoever. We just put in some money and decided to spend a year brainstorming.
We built all sorts of...

software, you subscribe to it and you get updates automatically.
That was an interesting idea, but it’s only now that it’s really popular. These
days, a Windows computer updates automatically and so everybody expects
that—but at the time this was a very new concept.
By the time we announced that we were doing software distribution,
PointCast had come out. PointCast did push technology, which had some similarities
to what we were doing, but we were immediately filed under “push.”
And that became a real problem, because for years we had to explain to...

But that’s the problem: it’s so much easier to write an article about Kim than
it is to write an article about the company. It’s not very interesting to write about
mediocrity. You have to write about the extreme, because that is what people
want to hear about. So when companies are all about selling product, traveling
and working hard, it’s all really boring stuff.
Arthur van Hoff 155
Livingston: Did you ever suggest to Kim that she stop talking to the press?
van Hoff: Yes, we did, but she ignored it. Kim...

A lot of the decision-making is very emotional. There’s no formula that identifies
good business plans versus bad business plans. So I think it’s not really a fair
question to ask “Did you execute on your business plan?” because every business
plan is just a wild guess, right? You could easily add a couple of zeros
everywhere and sell the same thing to people. Instead of 10 percent market
growth you make 20 percent market growth, and suddenly you make $200 million
more in the fifth year, but so what? They’re marketing tools.
...