An interview
with Kim Polese, CEO and co-founder of Marimba Inc.
In 1998, it
had been three years since Kim Polese (pronounced Po-lay-zee) found herself
overseeing an intense week-long development meeting for Marimba Inc. Since that
time, the former Sun Microsystems product manager, who was part of the team
that developed the much-ballyhooed Java programming language, has been forced
to pull double duty of sorts. First, as CEO and co-founder of Marimba, she has
developed a profitable company that specializes in a controversial technology.
Also, as a high-profile Silicon Valley veteran and a woman in a position
typically held by males, she has found herself deflecting both intense media scrutiny
and criticism from her peers.
In April
1998, Time magazine saw Polese's new business
as well as her role in the big-time computer software industry as enough to
name her one of its 25 Most Influential Americans, grouping her with the likes
of Rosie O'Donnell, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Tiger Woods and Dilbert. At the
same time, media outlets across the country were ripping apart the concept of
"push" technology -- computer software that delivers content to
workstation users, rather than waiting for users to come and get information
over the Internet -- in which Marimba was being touted as the leader.
"[The
media attention] really surprised me," admits the 35-year-old Polese.
"I did not expect it, and I didn't seek it. So when it happened, it was a
little unsettling because I've always been a very private person. I could have
never imagined this visibility happening."
But it did.
And Polese persevered just as she has done through most of her career.
In case you
missed it, her story is one that involves patience, skill, opportunity and a
little luck. The software industry's "It" girl always knew she wanted
to run her own company, even as a young girl growing up in California, but she
didn't know it would be like this.
Her road to
success began at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a
Bachelor of Science degree in biophysics. After graduation, she landed a job
with the then upstart Sun Microsystems as a project manager for the programming
language C++ in SunPro. In 1993 her skill at developing upstart technologies
led to a move to First-Person, a Sun spinoff, to manage a project code-named
"Oak." And that's where the story encounters a twist of fate that
would launch Polese to new heights.
Working on
Oak, the future CEO met her future business partners, engineers
Arthur van
Hoff, Jonathon Payne and Sami Shaio. The group found themselves working
together on the revolutionary Java project, which would eventually become the
hit of all hits on the Internet and put Sun Microsystems in the top hierarchy
of the increasingly influential software industry. Java, which was released in
May 1995, allows browsers of any platform to run mini-applications (called
applets) that add true interactivity to the Internet, intranets and other
distributed networks. The Java project garnered Polese and her colleagues
worldwide attention.
The
experience provided her with an epiphany that would finally lead her into the
entrepreneurial world. She realized, she says, that with the Java platform
established, the tools and applications for the platform still needed to be
built. She thought, whom better to take the next step than her and her three
colleagues? The quad toyed with the idea of breaking out on their own to build
their own solution.
In 1995 the
team of "techies" held a series of all-day meetings during the
holiday break between Christmas and New Year's to analyze the validity of their
idea. What they came up with was a product they called Bongo, a visual tool for
designing Java applications. Bongo and Marimba were both launched in April
1996. Eventually the company developed Castanet, a Java-based multimedia
information delivery application that allows businesses to push their own
information to clients across the Internet or intranets -- as opposed to the
traditional pull method of downloading data from the Web. With Castanet,
Marimba unexpectedly entered the "push wars."
Push
technology was a hot topic last year in the technology press, and the
first-time CEO found herself in the eye of the storm. Naysayers claimed that
push wasn't going anywhere, and that Marimba had become the leader of a useless
pack. But Polese and her colleagues don't consider themselves a push company.
"We
sort of got lumped into the category even though we've never described
ourselves in a proactive way as a 'push' company," Polese says. "The
reason that we don't is that push has become a meaningless word because so many
different kinds of products and companies were lumped into it. Everything from
streaming medias, in other words, automatic delivery of audio and video over
the Internet, to something like Pointcast, which is news, weather, sports and
that sort of thing, to what we do, which is enabling companies to build and
deliver real applications on the Net."
Polese believes
that push received bad press in its early days because some of the initial
programs were "solutions in search of problems." She cites programs that needlessly send
horoscopes to users every 15 minutes as one of the biggest culprits. But
Castanet, she says, has a legitimate business function, and she won't allow it
to be used for anything but to provide business solutions.
"A bank
delivering a home banking application over the Net is very different than
pushing stock quotes and weather reports out," she explains. "Another
example is one of our customers, Federal Express. They're delivering a very
comprehensive package tracking system for their corporate customers. That's not
what you think of when you think of push. The only common thread is it's automatic
delivery of software and content."
Polese
continues to defend Marimba as a high-quality technology company. And she also
believes that Castanet is far and away superior to similar products. Castanet
is a success story. Now on its third version (released this spring), it is
being used by large companies such as The Ford Motor Co., which uses the
software for delivering information on inventories to their dealerships. And
the push rap has finally started to become a lesser charge as companies begin
to tailor their products to legitimate business uses, a process that Marimba
began with the introduction of their new technology.
"I
think that the push companies that survive will be the ones that find real
business applications," Polese theorizes.
Of her
tenure as a new CEO, Polese says, "It's been a lot of fun."
Admittedly, she has endured a great many storms to get to the point she's at
now, and the negative attention hasn't come solely from the media. In fact, she
has encountered equal criticism from the Silicon Valley grapevine. But she has
steadfastly fended off critics that imply that her role as CEO is largely as a
public relations front person who was installed for her ability to attract
press.
Polese was,
in fact, appointed CEO of Marimba as an experiment, since none of the partners
were qualified for the role, and she is the first to admit that she had never
before managed people or a business. But she has been learning as she goes and
has proven herself to the company. One of her most noteworthy coups was
conceiving the initial crack marketing strategy that differentiated Castanet
from useless push applications by positioning it as a true business solution.
But that
still doesn't really explain the media's fascination with her. Polese has her
own philosophy that "technology, specifically the Internet, is the new
Hollywood," and her particular fame has been a combination of the
attention she garnered at Sun, coupled with the fact that she's a young woman
CEO -- still a rarity in most industries.
"I was
part of the original [Java] team, and I was the product manager, so I was the
external face," she recalls. "I was the person responsible for
marketing and business development of Java. Because of that, I came out of Sun
with a lot of visibility and it just grew."
But being
under the media microscope hasn't interfered with Polese's performance or
Marimba's growth. While Polese won't discuss the numbers for the still-private
company, she will discuss her own growth as an executive. What she's learned is
that she has a natural flair for the job, and she couldn't have dreamed it any
better when she was a child.
"It's
been more than I could have expected, bigger, faster," she says excitedly,
"just in
terms of
everything."
Quickly, she
points out that the main lessons she's learned are to surround herself with the
right people and to maintain the company's original plans and values, which,
she believes, is another element that sets Marimba apart from other push
companies.
"I've
learned the value of saying 'no' and the value of focusing," she admits.
"We've built a technology that is capable of being applied in many
different areas. One of the hardest things is to say, 'We're not going into
that space' -- whatever 'that' was -- even though we know we can, and, in fact,
there's probably a wonderful market that we could exploit and build
there."
Polese
believes that Marimba, which earned Upside Magazine's honors for 1998's Hottest
Net Infrastructure Company (they tied with SilverStream Software Inc.), is on a
fast-growth curve that will continue into the future because they have
developed a product that can be used across a broad range of applications. She
believes that Marimba is already one up on the rest of the field because she
sees technologies such as Pointcast moving away from generic content to
marketing to vertical corporations.
At the
one-year anniversary mark for the release of Castanet UpdateNow, which can be
used on non-Java platforms, and just a few months after the release of Castanet
3.0, Polese appears happy with the products' performance and believes they are
the basis upon which the company can increase its reach.
"Actually,
I think we're ahead of what I expected in terms of functionality," she
says. "The reaction that I get from customers is extremely positive. I
mean, we get fan mail from customers, you know, the kind of stuff you don't
expect when you're shipping software.
"That's
one of our strong points," she continues. "We've got the best
technology, and we always win when it comes to any kind of comparison. And
that's because we've got a great engineering team, and I'm really proud of
that."
Marimba's
other strong suit has been its ability to form strategic alliances to leverage
product sales growth. Marimba has already partnered with Netscape and Tivoli, a
subsidiary of IBM, both of which have become resellers of Marimba products.
Relationships such as these have become crucial because the relative newcomer
Marimba has a comparatively small sales staff.
As for
following in the successful footsteps of other software developers who have
made public stock offerings, Polese says Marimba eventually plans to hit the
market but will wait until the time is right.
"We
want to build a very strong base to the business and establish a very solid
balance sheet and a large set of customers," she reveals. "Then
that's the time we'll go public -- that's the old-fashioned way. We've always
been very serious about delivering on promises and executing and building substance
rather than flash. So we're not rushing out to go public."
In the
meantime, Polese will continue to work on building her new company and living
out the dream she set out to accomplish all those years ago when she was merely
a child.