http://startuphistory.ru/ StartUp, бизнес ru Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:14 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/rss bookCMS Marimba http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/arthur_van_hoff_1 Arthur van Hoff 159
might have been different.” So I might rely more on my intuition if I were to do
it again.
Livingston: Were you the ringleader to start the company?
van Hoff: Well, in a way. Jonathan and I came up with the initial idea to do a
startup, but you’re talking about a difference in weeks. Very quickly it became
the four of us. Then you need to make some decisions about when do you want
to leave and how much money are you going to put in. Then once you’ve left, it
gets quite interesting. Because…

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/arthur_van_hoff_1 Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:14 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/frivolous_overall_anyway frivolous overall anyway. But if you’re at the receiving end of a lawsuit, it can
make things difficult.
One of the problems for the founders, after the IPO, is that you can’t sell for
a certain period of time and, after that, every time you sell and the stock goes
down, you’ll get personally sued—shareholder lawsuits. So every time there
was an opportunity for us to sell, our lawyers would say, “You better not because
if you lose the lawsuit then you’ll get sued. You’ll replace one lawsuit with the
other.”
So we had to see the stock go down…

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/frivolous_overall_anyway Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:14 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/software_distribution_companywhich software distribution company—which is a lot more boring than in the
early days, but there was a lot more money to be made in that market.
Livingston: What would you tell someone who wanted to start their own
company?
van Hoff: If you have the energy to do it, then you should try it yourself. But
you do need to have the ability to form a team around you with good people.
Talent attracts talent.
A lot of people get stuck on the idea. They all want to invent something and
go execute on it. I think that’s a fallacy....

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/software_distribution_companywhich Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:13 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/super_duper_italian_fully super-duper Italian, fully automatic, $15,000 espresso machine on his credit
card and submitted the expense form. The CFO almost had a baby. It was
unbelievable.
This was a beautiful piece of work, and they came and installed the espresso
machine and it was the best money we ever spent. Every morning, people
would meet and crowd around it. This thing was just it, the bee’s knees, people
loved it, they couldn’t stop talking about it. A month later, the CFO came and
said, “I’m sorry, we should have done this years ago.” And it tells you something
about where you…

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/super_duper_italian_fully Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:13 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/a_lot_of 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…

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/a_lot_of Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:13 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/but_thats_the 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 was a good CEO in the startup…

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/but_thats_the Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:13 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/software_you_subscribe 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 people
why we weren’t a push company....

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/software_you_subscribe Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:13 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/hard_anybody_can 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 things, and everything we did turned out…

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/hard_anybody_can Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:13 -0700 http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/arthur_van_hoff
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…

]]> http://startuphistory.ru/post/show/arthur_van_hoff Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:06:13 -0700