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 to start another startup, Strangeberry. Marimba was acquired by BMC
Software in 2004.
Livingston: At what point did the four of you start talking about leaving Sun
and starting your own company?
van Hoff: Jonathan had left Sun, and, when I tried to convince him to come
back, he said, “Well I don’t know if I’ll ever come back to Sun, but I’ll do a
startup with you.”
So we decided to do a startup, though we literally had no idea what we were
going to make. The first thing that we did was drive around and find office
space, which was getting pretty hard at the time. We found a little office above
a flower shop on California Avenue in Palo Alto, and we went to a second-hand
office furniture store and bought these heavy metal desks—$25 apiece. They
weighed a million pounds, but we somehow carried them up the stairs.
Livingston: How did you fund your company at first?
van Hoff: Initially we all put in a little bit of money, I think $25,000 each. If you
don’t take a salary, that can last you a long time. Because starting a company is
free, right, if you have a friend who is a lawyer. The law firm that we used,
Gunderson Dettmer, will basically not take payment until you get funding.
Silicon Valley is that way; everything is geared toward getting you started, and
then you pay.

We spent about $1,400 to furnish the entire office, including equipment
like a fax machine and printer. We all used cell phones at first, and we had no
Internet access for the first couple of weeks, just the whiteboard.
Livingston: You took a pretty big risk to decide to start a company without an
idea. You must have known that the four of you were pretty compatible?
van Hoff: You know, in a hot market like that, you saw a lot of people with crazy
business ideas that were never going to work but they were getting funded. We
were coming out of the Java project and felt that it was a pretty safe bet that if
you are part of a core team and you leave together, getting an idea is not that

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