CHAPTER 11Arthur van HoffCofounder, Marimba

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 ...

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