Kim Polese

Technology executive and entrepreneur

• Born: November 13, 1961
• Place of Birth: Berkeley, California

Primary Company/Organization: Marimba

Introduction

Kim Polese was product manager for one of the most influential languages in computing, Java. She also cofounded the systems management company Marimba; served as chief executive officer of open-source software support SpikeSource; became chair of the financial wellness company ClearStreet; and served as chair of the seed investment firm CrowdSmart. As one of the most visible women involved in the rise of Silicon Valley in the 1990s, she became a champion for encouraging more young women to consider careers in computing, information technology, and entrepreneurship.

Early Life

Kim Karin Polese grew up in Berkeley, California, and was interested in science from a young age. In elementary school she entered science fairs and familiarized herself with the computers at the Lords Hall of Science museum. She earned her bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984, with a concentration in biophysics. She also studied computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Life's Work

Polese began working as an applications engineer IntelliCorp in 1985. She then held several marketing positions at Sun Microsystems from 1989 to 1996. She was the project manager for the object-oriented language C++, and in 1993 she became project manager for Oak, a programming language better known under the name Polese suggested for it: Java. The language would go on to become hugely influential and brought much recognition to the entire team involved in developing it.

In 2000 Polese articulated her vision for the internet as a way to provide everyone with universally accessible information and services. She cited this vision as an important motivation for her work on Java, a language designed to be used on any computer and that Polese says she convinced Sun to distribute over the internet for free. She also predicted that the internet would increasingly facilitate commercial transactions and that other software distributors would develop ways to provide their services (for example, accounting) over the internet.

Polese founded Marimba, Inc., in 1996 with Arthur van Hoff, Jonathan Payne, and Sami Shaio. All four had been colleagues at Sun Microsystems, and all had worked on Java: Polese as the product manager, and Shaio, Payne, and van Hoff as developers. Polese served as president, CEO, and chair of Marimba. The company began without a specific product in mind and first tried developing an internet user interface; they abandoned that plan after a similar product was acquired by Netscape. They decided to focus on software distribution and developed the concept of "push" technology, a method of distributing software and performing maintenance tasks over the internet. This technology was particularly focused on businesses, allowing them to keep many computers identically configured and upgraded with a minimum of effort; with push technology, rather than requiring each user to visit a website and download and install files in order to upgrade the software he or she used, the company could subscribe to a "channel" and the upgrades would be delivered automatically.

Marimba attracted much attention in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and Polese was named on Time magazine's list of the twenty-five most influential Americans in 1997. Her relatively unusual position as a female CEO in Silicon Valley itself became the subject of considerable media coverage. In 1998, Anne Klein photographed Polese for an advertisement that appeared in high-circulation magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

The media attention was at least partially the product of a public relations campaign for Marimba that focused on the company's founders rather than its product. Although this strategy garnered media attention and positive reporting, it also fostered backlash when Marimba was not as successful as expected. However, the cycle of products receiving extreme amounts of publicity only to prove less successful than predicted was not unique to Marimba. Moreover, the news media's focus on stories that will attract readers (including stories about attractive and successful young women)—even if they are not particularly newsworthy—is also nothing new. One could interpret Marimba's strategy as savvy manipulation of existing tendencies in the media. Marimba cofounder van Hoff recalled being surprised at the amount of publicity Marimba got almost from its founding, long before it had a product to sell, but also recalls that the publicity was partially helpful to the young company, because it facilitated connections with other companies and with venture capitalists. On the other hand, he also noted that the extreme focus on Polese might have detracted from the company's credibility, although he understood that it was easier to write and sell a story about a personality than it was to focus on the software itself.

While ultimately Marimba did not prove to be quite as influential as many predicted, this was largely due to the burst of the dot-com bubble. Under Polese's leadership the company still became profitable and reached almost $50 million in annual revenue before it was sold to BMC in 2004.

In 2004 Polese became CEO of SpikeSource, a company founded in 2003 by Murugan Pal. Originally the company provided maintenance and support for open source software to businesses. In 2005 it began collaborating with Intel and Carnegie Mellon University on a rating system, called Business Readiness Ratings, to evaluate the reliability of open source software products. This system rated products in twelve categories, including technical support, documentation, security, usability, and functionality, using a scale from 1 to 5 for each category. In 2008 the company shifted its focus to providing automated testing and support services, including an automated system for patching security problems; the same year, Intel invested $10 million in the company. Polese resigned as CEO of SpikeSource in May 2010, and that November the company's assets were acquired by Black Duck Software, a company specializing in application development using open source software.

Polese next took the chair role at ClearStreet, a company focused on helping individuals manage their money. She also became the chair of the seed investment firm CrowdSmart, which used technological prediction methods to evaluate startup companies seeking capital.

In addition to her business roles, in September 2011 Polese became a member of the board of directors for the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank dedicated to improving public policy in California through nonpartisan research. She also became a member of the Executive Council of Technet, an organization of leaders in technology industries that seeks to shape public policy in ways favorable to innovation. In 2010 Polese received the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Symons Innovator Award for her achievements with SpikeSource; the award is given annually to a woman who has built and funded an information technology company. The award noted that it was particularly unusual for women to work in open source technology—only about 1.5 percent of those who work in open source technology at the time were female, much lower than the percentage of all information technology (about 25 percent). Also in 2011, Polese received an honorary doctorate in business and economics from California State University. In 2012 Polese was honored by the National Italian American Foundation with the NIAF Special Achievement Award in Technology.In 2020, Polese co-founded an artificial intelligence business platform known as CrowdSmart.ai.

Personal Life

Polese pursued jazz dance as a hobby. Her interest in music was reflected in the company name Marimba (Salsa and Tango were also considered as names for the company, but they were not available), as well as its principal product, Castanet.

Bibliography

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"Kim Polese." LinkedIn, 2024, www.linkedin.com/in/kimpolese/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

"Kim Polese." WITI Hall of Fame, WITI, 2019, www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/328000/Kim-Polese-Chairman-ClearStreet/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.

Livingston, Jessica. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. New York: Apress, 2008. Print.

Rezvani, Selena. The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Print.

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Expanded edition. New York: Portfolio Trade, 2008. Print.

Warner, Melanie. "The Beauty of Hype." Fortune 139.4 (1999): 140–48. Print.