Founders at Work.pdf

Arthur van Hoff 155
But we then focused on software distribution, because the system that we
helped build at Sun was not really scaling very well for real applications. We
came up with the idea for subscription-based software where, rather than buying
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.
Livingston: Did all the publicity help or hurt your cause?
van Hoff: Well, all press is good press. It definitely helps. Whenever we wanted
a meeting with an executive at a big company, we’d get it because we were very
well known. Nobody had a clue what we were doing. So the mystique around
Marimba gave us a lot of inroads to companies, which is incredibly helpful to
get deals done.
In the end, it can work to your disadvantage because you always have to
reeducate the market—you have to keep explaining what you really do. And
you never have anyone coming to you saying, “I want what you have,” because
they don’t know what you have. So it can work both ways.
There were always reporters talking to Kim because she was a female CEO
of a technology company. I don’t know if that was a good thing. There was so
much focus on her and so little focus on the company. I’d go to parties and
people would ask where I worked and when I’d tell them they’d say, “Marimba?
Oh yeah, Kim Polese works there, right?” And I’d say, “Do you know what we
do?” And they’d say, “No, I have no idea.”
So if we were selling Kim Polese, we did really well. But that’s not what
you’re there for. You’re there for the product. So I think all the media hype did
not work to our advantage. I think that Kim fell into that trap early on, and it
was hard to get out of.
I remember one particularly bad article by Fortune magazine. This reporter
came and visited the company for two days while we were on a company outing.
We really opened up the kimono and spent hours with her, telling and showing
her everything. Then the article that came out was an exposé on Kim and it was
made even worse because they’d taken these photographs of her that were real
extreme close-ups. It was terrible; it just made us look very bad since it was all
about her. And all this time we spent with the reporter on our technology had
been a complete waste of time, which was incredibly unfair.
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.