Mike Arnesen

Optimize the Planet!

Startups

Snow Day! Everyone work from home!

Company Culture

It’s  8am on a Thursday and what’s normally a busy intersection at this time of day is nearly empty, covered in white. My name is Mike Arnesen, and I’m one of the survivors of the PDX Snowpocalypse.

PDX Snow Plow
Almost 8 years in Portland and this is the first time I’ve ever seen a snow plow. We have one of those?!

I have no big insights to share today. No witty commentary (is my commentary ever that witty, though?). I’m just feeling appreciative that I don’t have to leave the house to go to work today. And I didn’t yesterday. I work from home, everyday.

Every time it snows here [Read more…] about Snow Day! Everyone work from home!

Thanksgiving

Startups

Of course Thanksgiving has a bit of a dark side to it (historically speaking), but while I used to eschew the holiday (or, at least, do so on an internal and philosophical level) it’s become a important day for me in the past decade or so. I’ve been fortunate enough to consistently spend my Thanksgivings with friends, family, or sometimes both and, in addition to the happiness that those gatherings bring into my life, I’ve really come to enjoy using the day to reflect on what I have and practice gratitude. Fortunately, I fell into a habit of doing this type of reflection on a fairly regular basis (must me my old age) but Thanksgiving remains the quintessential time for it.

So I’m using today’s blog post to reflect on what I’m thankful for.  [Read more…] about Thanksgiving

Aligning My After-Hours Emails with Office Hours

Lost & Founder, Startups

After-hours emails are something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I can remember being on the receiving end of after-hours emails at my last job that totally threw off my night, and oftentimes my ability to even sleep. Even if it wasn’t bad news, it successfully got me into “work mode” at a time where I should’ve been switched off. Overtime, I found myself checking work email all weekend long just in case my boss, a co-worker, or client had sent something important. After all, it wasn’t uncommon and that was the expectation that was set: important emails can come in at any time and responses are expected ASAP.

When I read Your Late-Night Emails Are Hurting Your Team on HBR last year, it really struck a chord. It could really relate to it. All of it. When I started UpBuild, I really wanted to use it as an opportunity to build a company I would have wanted to work for. Avoiding sending emails at crazy hours was certainly a part of that.

However, now that I’m on the road living the digital nomad life, it’s more of a challenge than it used to be. I work pretty regular hours during the week, but I also use the weekends to catch up. If my wife and I are driving on a Sunday (we’re currently on an 8-hour journey from Austin, TX to New Orleans right now), I use that “down time” to catch up on email. That means I need to be careful about how that catch up might impact my team. [Read more…] about Aligning My After-Hours Emails with Office Hours

Why I’m Sold on HipChat

Company Culture

Lately, I’ve found myself giving the “HipChat pitch” over and over again to new UpBuild team memembers. We use a few tools in the office that parallel HipChat’s features, but I’ve been experimenting with a beta run of using HipChat to replace a few of those. I began with my immediate team, then expanded to our account management team, and I’m planning to give the “HipChat pitch” to the paid media team and executive teams. Since I’m writing out the merits of the tool so often, I figured I might as well re-purpose it as a blog post and give HipChat some well-deserved props.

hipchat logoHipChat is a multi-platform messaging tool. Plain and simple. Before we go any further, why don’t I just lay out why I think HipChat is awesome?

  • It’s multi-platform and runs on all my devices flawlessly.
  • It nails both 1-to-1 messaging and group chats.
  • It has awesome emoticons and inline images (+ GIFs!).
  • It stores a completely searchable chat history, available on any of your devices.
  • For the team at UpBuild, it can potentially replace multiple apps.

Sound good? Well, that’s because it is!

All Devices. All Platforms.

My team works in the office. We work in conferences rooms. We work on couches. We work from home. We work from airplanes, on trains, and in Ubers. We need a messaging tool that can be just as useful on our mobile devices as it is on our desktops. We also need a tool that’s not just a web app that we need to keep in an open browser tab.

HipChat has become the answer for me. I have their Android app installed on my phone. I have their OSX app installed on my desktop. If I need to, I can run the web app from another computer. The Android app even integrates with my Moto 360 smart watch!

Before HipChat, I used Google Chat/Hangouts/Messages/whatever-it’s-called. It was okay, but it was never a great experience. Even though I could get it on my phone, and use it through gmail, and integrate it with a desktop client like Adium, it was just always lacking. It felt “hacky”. Plus, the chat history never reliably made it back anywhere where I could search for it later. Even message sent from within Gmail were never adequately searchable within the Gmail interface.

HipChat, on the other hand, does all of this flawless. The experience and feature richness are the same no matter what platform I’m on, and EVERYTHING I send is archived and searchable from ANY of my devices.

1-to-1 or 1-to-many

If anyone reading this has tried using group chat through Adium…you poor soul. I know that pain.

At my previous company, SwellPath, we’d been using GroupMe for our group chat needs and it worked…okay. We have a lot of fun in our general chat, but it’s mostly for LOLs and GIF-sharing. We’ve never had much luck in the way of having truly productive topical chats.

Before that we used Beluga. Remember that? Thanks for shutting that down, Facebook. <span style=”tone:sarcastic”>Facebook Messenger is so much better anyway.</span>

The reason that HipChat is working (so far) for having on-topic group chats is that it also works so well for 1-to-1 direct chats. We’re not using Gchat for 1-to-1 and GroupMe for 1-to-many and asking people to switch between the two; everything is in one place. You sign into one app, one experience and just go.

I’m connected to my team all day through HipChat and message folks 1-on-1 pretty frequently. If something comes up for a specific client account, I can just spin up a dedicated chat with the relevant team members who are already using HipChat. I also have a dedicated persistent chat for my team, one for myself and the leads on the Account Management team, etc. It’s pretty great.

Emoticons + Inline GIFs and Images

awwww yeah hipchatAwwww yea, fun stuff! I need a chat app that has inline images, can play GIFs, and has ridiculous emoticons. I’m not made of stone!

I guess that’s all for this point.

NEXT!

 

Persistent and Searchable

I already touched on this above, but seriously, this is a huge deal. First, the chats you start in HipChat are persistent meaning that if you start a chat on mobile, the full chat will be waiting for you when you get to your desktop machine. At the end of the day, that chat persists over on your mobile device and you can keep chatting on your train ride out to the suburbs (as I’m wont to do).

Chats are also searchable, so you can dig up your relevant conversations later or jog your memory on things. I come from using Adium for desktop chats and the Google Hangouts app for mobile. The huge issue there was that neither of those communicated with the other and stuff I sent on my phone never made it to my desktop chat history and vice versa.

All-in-One

Yep. This combines a lot for me and for my team. Before HipChat, I was using Adium for desktop chats. Google Hangouts AND IM+ on my phone for mobile chats, GroupMe for desktop and mobile for group chats, and occasionally chat from the Gmail web interface. HipChat replaces ALL of that.

Right now, however, I still using all of those tools plus HipChat; I haven’t converted the entire company to HipChat so I still have to be available for the people who aren’t using it yet. While I could have just tried to get everyone to flip the switch and start using it at the same time, I didn’t want to recommend that everyone start using an app that turned out to suck. Ha!

Integrations!

Okay, I knew HipChat featured a lot of cool integrations when I first started using it, but I didn’t really look into it much. I literally didn’t dig into this aspect until mid-way through writing this blog post, and WOW. I’ve been missing a lot!

HipChat allows for integrations with about 70 awesome tools to bring a ton of your work processes together. A few I plan to take advantage of starting now:

  • Go To Meeting: Turn on this integration to allow team members to spin up their own Go To Meeting by typing /g2m!
  • Twitter: Configure this integration to post to a chat room when a handle or topic is mentioned on Twitter!

Yeah, that’s only two, but there are a lot more to explore! You can even host HipChat on your own server if need be.

It’s Free!

I’m not made of money, so I can’t go blowing it on tools if I don’t know they’re going to be worth it. HipChat is Freemium, so you get a fully-functional tool for free. Some enhanced features (like video chat and screen sharing) are extra ($2 per user per month).

So go and try HipChat. Or don’t. What do I care? They don’t pay me.

> HipChatopotamus <

Exploring Startup Culture

Startups

What is company culture? It surprised me that I couldn’t just pull a decent answer out of my back pocket for this. For the past few years, I’ve thought of myself as an advocate of company culture, yet it wasn’t until I set out to write a blog post about SwellPath’s culture that I realized how difficult it would be to pin down what that actually meant.

Sure, I could turn to Google and figure out what “organizational culture” meant in less than .00062 seconds, but instead I waited until I was a mile up in the air to try to figure it out on my own. Something incredibly counter-instinctual for a search geek like me.

What is company culture? To me, culture is the way a startup, a company, an organization behaves. I’m not sure I like that definition…let me clarify.

20140729-085425-32065366.jpg

[Read more…] about Exploring Startup Culture

Wanna be on my team?

Startups

UpBuild is hiring! If, after your read this, you feel like you’d be a good fit for our team or you know someone who could be, go to the site and shoot an email.

Note: This post was written when I was the Director of Analytics & Optimization at SwellPath. Enjoy!

Epic High FiveOver the course of my SwellPath tenure, I saw dozens and dozens job postings go up. As we hoped, those postings led to lots of new hires; shiny new additions to our team. The folks who ended up joining our team over the years usually fell into one of three groups:

  1. Exceptional: The exceptional new hires have always been the people who were great cultural fits and had the drive to produce exceptional work. The loved being here and, as a result, we loved having them on as part of our team.
  2. Good: The good hires were able to do a good job, but SwellPath ended up not being a great long term fit for them. A stint at an agency was simply one step for them leading to what they probably wanted to do all along. So invariably, people who aren’t fantastic at working in an agency setting and aren’t perfect cultural fits end up moving onto something else.
  3. Poor Fits: Then there are people who just weren’t good fits in terms of culture and/or quality of work. Thankfully, we almost never see that.

[Read more…] about Wanna be on my team?