Buce Marjorie C

BSIM – OOA

SYSANAL

Case study

Arthur Van Hoff

Cofounder, Marimba

Arthur Van Hoff was the cofounder of Marimba, a software distribution company. His two fellow cofounder was Sami Shaio and Jonathan Payne from Java team and Kim Polese the java product manager.

They were working at Sun Microsystems as part of java development team when Jonathan decided to left Sun and start a company together with Arthur. They find an office space and they also brought heavy metal desks. They had a bit of money which they used to fund their company.

One of the things they want to do was to build a user interface. They want Java for it but they don’t have any tools for it. The first month was used for making an interface. Some people visited them to show their product and it was the same thing that they were doing. But they now focused on software distribution. They came up from the idea of subscription based software. You just need to subscribe on it then you can update in automatically.

Then they announced it to the public but Point Cash came out and it became a problem because they doing similar thing but the press help them in advertising and press also help them to get a deal with other.

Marimba went from 0 to 40 people in the 1^st year and grew to 300 people during the IPO. They had a power balance in the company where they had a strong VP sales and CFO.

A business plan is a tool to sell ideas to VC’s. They released the software and hired people in the first year.

Marimba receives a lot of attention from the press and from the Venture capitals. Van Hoff left Marimba in 2002 to start a new company which is Strangeberry. Marimba was being acquired by BMC software in 2004.

Things that I learned:

I learned that experience can help us in starting up a company and some people join start up in the hope of getting rich and also for fun. But not all succeed. In starting a company you should be intelligent and have good intuition.