Title: Lead Product Architect/Lead Developer
Joined Arc90 in: January 2007
If I could meet anybody: Leonardo da Vinci, the classic polymath. He was motivated in different fields and prolific. I would like to ask him how he did it.
During the summer of 2006, Chris Dary visited New York City for the first time. He walked around Manhattan, discovering what the city had to offer. He also interviewed with Arc90 at the company’s Midtown office.
Prior to his interview with Arc90, the Kenosha, WI (population: 96,845) native was one person who didn’t dream about living in New York City.
“I could never see myself here,” the 24-year-old recalled. “I expected that I’d head out to California or stick in Chicago.”
Dary applied for the Web application developer position at Arc90 after seeing a posting on 37 Signals.
“It seemed like such a cool job so I thought maybe it could work,” he added. “I was willing to adapt and move to New York.”
At that time, he was finishing up the Computer Science program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and working as a Web developer at Kenosha’s Carthage College.
“I wasn’t looking for a job,” Dary said. “Arc90 was the first and only place that I applied to. It was everything I wanted in a company. Everybody was really casual and also very smart and approachable.”
Four months later, on New Year’s Day 2007, the then 22-year-old moved to New York City; he started working at Arc90 the following day.
“I moved here with two suitcases and I was homeless,” Dary remembered. “I brought just the basics, my clothes and my laptop.”
Dary lived at the Vanderbilt YMCA on 47th Street, around the block from Arc90′s office, for two weeks before finding roommates on a month-to-month contract on Craig’s List. He eventually moved to his own apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and currently resides in Gramercy, Manhattan.
Since Dary previously spent over an hour on the train to and from Brooklyn, he loves his current commute.
“I can walk to work within twenty minutes,” he said of his Manhattan address. “I’m much closer to good stuff in the neighborhood.”
Dary is the mastermind behind Kindling, Arc90′s first product. Kindling is a web-based application that cultivates and manages the ideas of people in a company or organization.
Dary attributes the conception and launch of Kindling to his time at Arc90.
“The democratic vibe is displayed in Kindling,” he explained. “It brings the small company feel to larger companies.”
For Dary, a key part of the small company atmosphere-and the concept of Kindling-includes the ability to share and critique ideas.
“I really like that we don’t have any sort of hierarchy at Arc90,” Dary noted, “I think it is really beneficial for a small company like us because it makes it easy to bring things up to people. You can criticize something to make the company better.”
While Arc90 has grown in size since Dary was hired in 2007, the company has also increased its talent pool.
“You can see the different skill sets as a result of the heterogeneity of Arc90,” Dary noted. “We have a whole group of PHP developers doing great stuff with the Zend framework.”
It also helps that Arc90 fosters a learning environment where co-workers can turn to each other for advice.
“If I have a question or problem, there’s always somebody here who has an answer for it,” Dary said.
Dary considers himself lucky to be working at a place where he can call his co-workers his friends.
Last summer, he traveled with a group of people from Arc90 to see The Killers at the Borgata in Atlantic City, NJ.
“It was an amazing night because it’s a rare trait to have your co-workers be such close friends,” Dary recalled. “We were with the bosses. I really like that, at Arc90, the word boss means somebody who runs the company but we are also friends.
“At Arc90, work and play aren’t mutually exclusive,” Dary commented. “I genuinely love coming into work every day, and I think that’s rare. I count myself as pretty fortunate for that.”
When Dary isn’t listening to Okkervil River or going to the movies, he spends his weekends visiting friends in Kenosha.
“I go back once a month,” he said. “I had really strong ties with my friends before I left and that’s not going to go away.”
Dary is also a strong supporter of the Kiva, a charitable micro-lending website.
“I think it’s an incredible way to help the working poor improve their quality of life,” he said. “Someday, I will probably end up creating a charitable endeavor like Kiva.”