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.
Livingston: What big turning points occurred in the first year?
van Hoff: We did a first release of the software, which was a really important
thing. We hired some executives and lots of great people. We hired some really
bad people too—we had to fire somebody in the first year.We had our first lawsuit
filed.
Livingston: Was there any time when you wanted to quit?
van Hoff: Marimba is an unfair case because we were willed on like crazy by
the investors. We really had an unfair opportunity because when we got funding,
the VCs were calling us. They all wanted to invest because they had heard
about us and wanted to find out what we were doing.
So we got a really good first round of funding—$4 million from Kleiner
Perkins. Though I thought they wired the money in these situations, they actually
gave us a check. So we had two checks—from the Kleiner fund and the Java
fund—and Sami goes, “Let’s go to Kinko’s and make copies!” So he takes the
checks to Kinko’s and comes back with the photocopies, and he forgot to take
the checks out of the copy machine! Luckily they were still there.
Another story I remember from our first round of funding was when they
gave us the checks—the lawyers were there, Kleiner was there, and I said, “Oh
great, now I can buy that espresso machine!” and they all jumped me and said,
“No, you’re not going to buy an espresso machine with this money. This is to
start the company.”
And it became a sticking point. We were very frugal and we didn’t spend
money on frills, but after the IPO there was a really bad time for Marimba
when it was very difficult to hire people, and all the early people that had been
there 3 to 4 years were starting to leave. Morale was very low, and so I went to
the CFO and said, “Look, I want to buy an espresso machine.” And he said,
“No, we can’t do that, it’s too expensive.”
A few weeks later, when another senior engineer quit, I said, “Screw it, let’s
go buy an espresso machine.” So Jonathan and I went online and bought this