Ruth Ann S. Basnillo                                                                                           6/17/2008   SYSANAL

O0A

Arthur van Hoff

Cofounder

MARIMBA

Story:

            It was in 1996 when Arthur van Hoff left the Java Development team he was part of at Sun Microsystems to found Marimba with his former colleague Jonathan payne, who first left the team. Then very quickly, former fellow developers from the same team joined them namely Sami Shaio and Kim Polese. They started funding their company with $ 25, 000 each to furnish an office space they found with equipments like fax machine, and a printer. Initially, they were working on building a user interface builder until some time, guys from a small startup visited them and showed them their product which was really similar to what they’re working with. And then the next week, it was acquired by Netscape which stopped them from doing it since Netscape is a very big competitor that time. They moved ion quickly to building a software distribution software wherein the idea is a subscription based software that would be subscribed and automatically updated rather than bought. By the time, they announced what they’re working on, PointCast had come out to introduce a push- technology similar to what they’re doing which made them struggle to explain to people that theirs is different. The company grew from a 4 person startup to a company with more than 300 employees at the time of its IPO in 1999 which made John Olsen replace Kim from being the CEO. Many VCs heard about Marimba and wanted to invest on them to find out what they’re actually doing. The first round of funding was really good with the $4 million from Kleiner Perkins. They had a couple of successes with the subscription based software distribution they did. Over time, the company went from a consumer software distribution- push technology to an enterprise software company which made  a lot of money to be made in the market. Van Hoff left the company to start another startup, Strangeberry, and by 2004, Marimba was acquired by BMC Software.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED:

I learned from this startup that experience can help us in starting up a company. Certain backgrounds and different work experiences would supply you with ideas for the company you’ll start.

I also learned that you should avoid as much as you can lawsuits because there are many people who would just make fun of you by filing several cases against you which will affect your company.

Lastly, I learned that you have to be very careful about the intellectual property rights most especially when you’re from a certain company that is competitive in many ways.