Title: Partner
Joined Arc90 in: September 2005
If I could meet anybody: Abe Lincoln because he had the elements of a perfect person, which he played perfectly. Or Mitochondrial Eve.
The fact is that Tim Meaney left a VP position at Credit Suisse First Boston in 2005 to work for an Internet start-up.
“People thought that I was crazy,” Tim recalled. “I was leaving a job at an investment bank to work for a guy in an apartment building with five people. Looking back on it in hindsight, it is pretty startling. Which one was the safer bet?”
The Ridgewood, NJ resident isn’t a stranger to taking risks. When he was 25-years-old and working for Sears, Roebeck and Company as a Team Lead, Tim took a hiatus from his job to travel around Europe.
“I knew ‘If I don’t do this right now, I can’t do it,” Tim remembered. “I told my boss that I was going, and needed to do it very soon else I would never be able to. I would understand if they didn’t want me back, and would respect that, but would love to be able to return. They did welcome me back.
“Spending four weeks alone in an endless number of countries, including Ireland, Germany and Spain, was a defining moment,” he added
Three months later, he was back at the Chicago office, on call to help battle the millennium bug on the last night of the 20th century.
“I was at work on New Year’s Eve, anticipating fall out fromY2K,” he said. “I was head of store systems and I was waiting to get paged about something going wrong.”
As the dot-com industry expanded, Tim realized he didn’t want to let history pass him by.
“It was like the California Gold Rush,” Tim noted. “Millions of people were being employed. Not a lot of people saw the boom but the Web drew me in. I thought, ‘I gotta be there.’ I quit Sears and went to a Web start-up because four years would have turned into 40. Now, software is what I do. I don’t have a romantic idea of writing a book in the Caribbean.”
When the Wayne, NJ native moved back to the East Coast in 2000, he had earned a Bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and a MBA from DePaul University. He did not arrive alone. His future wife, whom he met when they were co-workers at Sears, made the trip back east with him.
“I asked Lori to marry me the day we moved to New Jersey, literally,” Tim stated. “She pulled the car into our new place in Hoboken, and we went for brunch at Park Avalon in the City. I asked her to marry me there, with the whole place watching.”
The relocation to New Jersey included a position at Opus Software Solutions in Manhattan’s Union Square, where Tim worked as a project manager. Some of his new co-workers included Arc90’s founder, Rich Ziade.
“The reason I wanted Tim to join Arc90 was pretty simple,” Rich said. “There are very few people who appreciate both technology and the people variables inevitably tied to making things successful. Tim has that ‘quiet leadership’ that I lack. He can motivate, diffuse a situation, and walk people off ledges. I’ve never met anyone that does it better.”
By the time Tim joined Arc90, his family included two young children and he had their full support, particularly from Lori.
“My wife is really good at reading people so there was a better chance that it would work,” he recalled. “She said along something along the lines of ‘Rich is the only person I’d support you making this move for.”
Several months later, Lori was also partially responsible for helping Arc90 employees get health insurance.
“When Tim started, we were something like seven people,” Rich recalled. “Frankly at that point we were still getting our bearings with operations stuff and things like health insurance. Lori was having none of that. I remember nearly getting grilled at one of our first Christmas parties, only to respond with a tepid ‘Err, yeh.we’ve got health insurance all sorted out.’ Rest assured I went and did some homework soon after.”
As a partner at Arc90, Tim’s multi-tasking responsibilities include managing software, working on client relations and focusing on interactions among employees.
“What falls on me is the human dynamic and I like that,” he said. “I like worrying about the human aspect, such as who is working on what and who isn’t getting along with somebody.
“You have to pay serious attention to personal relationships, even more so than in a big company,” Tim added. “There are personal relationships that you personally have with each person in the company, but beyond that, those among others too.”
Focusing on personal relationships has created a tight-knit company that (usually) enjoys spending time together.
“We’re like a big happy family, for better or worse,” Tim noted. “What’s better than a big party? My favorite experiences are the Arc90 events, where we were singing at the picnic, heckling people at Iron Chef or participating in the talent show.”