Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Case Study 11

Arthur van Hoff

(Co Founder Marimba)

Arthur van Hoff founded Marimba in 1996. He was first part of the Java Development and Sun Microsystems. Marimba was a software distribution company. Sami Shiao and Jonathan Payne his two fellow developers from Java team join him to found Marimba. Marimba receives a lot of attention from the press and venture capitalists. Fro a four person startup to a company with more than 300 employees at the time IPO in1999, but van Hoff left again to start another startup which id Strangeberry. Marimba was occurred by BMC software in 2004.

Arthur van Hoff has the same idea with Netscape but there’s np way to compete with them. That’s why he focused on software distribution. Soon they come up eith an idea for subscription-based software wherein rather than buying software, you just subscribe to it and you get updates automatically. When they launched that they’re doing a software distribution, Pointcast had come out. Pointcast did push technology which had some similarities with what they’re doing. 

They have a conflict about Kim because at that time it is a big deal to have a female CEO. They were really close with the press so the center was Kim. They know where she works but they didn’t know what is the product or purpose of the company. Marimba was an unfair case because they were willed on liked crazy by the investors. They really had an unfair opportunity because when they got funding the VCs were calling them but what they really after was to find out what they were doing. But they had two funders the Java and Kleiner Perkins. It became the sticking point.

One of their frustrating things was when they got a lawsuit that just kept dragging and dragging on, that took so much time and attention.

Three things I’ve learned was first, you need to have an ability to form a team and around was good people. Second is, if you want to invent and go execute it is a fallacy because you have to be good at something or you have to have a direction that you’re interested in. third is if you got good reactions then keep doing it but if you got bad reactions then stop immediately because it’s really bad idea to sell bad plans.