Title: Partner

Joined Arc90 in: May 2006

Most people don’t know that: I’m colorblind.

If some of Chris LoSacco’s co-workers are still trying to figure out why he only keeps a stack of Starbucks napkins on his desk, he has a valid explanation.

“I like things to be minimal,” he said. “In college, my desk was very organized; I only had a Post-it dispenser. My roommate would throw a single Post-it into the garbage just to get to me.”

Keeping things simple is a running theme in Chris’ work life, stemming back to his first encounter with Arc90. He first heard of Arc90 during his senior year at New York University. The Downingtown, PA native decided to attend the school’s job fair, but he did his research first.

“I got the list of the companies that were going to be at the job fair,” he recalled. “I went through the list to figure out who I wanted to talk to. Out of 100 companies, there were two that were remotely worth talking to.”

After searching the Web for Arc90 and its founder, Chris discovered Information Objects, Rich Ziade’s paper about interaction design and how software should model the real world. Chris realized that Arc90 was a company worth talking to.

“The things that I was interested in and what Arc90 is all about were exactly the same,” he said.

At the job fair, Chris had the opportunity to talk with Rich and discussed Alan Cooper’s Inmates Are Running the Asylum, a book that both respected. He left a lasting impression with the people he met.

“Chris was a full-blown technologist who was interested in design and usability,” Rich recalled. “He didn’t give his resume to everybody. He knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to work. That’s great advice for anybody looking for a job.”

Chris was hired as an Interactive Designer in the spring of 2006. He wasn’t confined to the role and used the flexibility within the company to contribute to various projects.

“I wasn’t tasked to write code but I did,” he said. “Everybody was doing everything and there was the opportunity to pitch in wherever you could help.”

Chris and Rama Poola, another graduate of NYU’s Computer Science program, started at Arc90 around the same time. The company had just relocated to its Third Avenue office and the new hires used the extra space to their advantage.

“There was the junk room with a white board,” Chris recalled. “Rama and I would have an idea about something and we would IM each other ‘Junk room?’ and start sharing. A lot of good stuff came out of the impromptu sessions.”

Technology had been part of Chris’ life since childhood. He was raised around computers- his dad works for a company that builds software for nursing homes-and started tinkering with the Web at an early age.

“I was growing up just as the Internet was taking off,” the 25-year-old said. “I remember dial-up connections and when Web pages were just text. I was making my own sites at 14 just to play with the technology.”

But the Internet wasn’t Chris’ only passion. He attended NYU to focus on acting and majored in Drama. Once there, he realized he couldn’t see himself leaving New York; during his junior year, Chris added Computer Science as a double major to secure his future in the city.

“I knew I wanted to stay in New York and I wanted to be able to pay for that,” he said. “There was a strong possibility that I would become an actor and work hard but you can’t pick and choose your work. I didn’t want the ‘I’ll take anything’ lifestyle.”

After graduation, Chris acted in student films; he intended to keep movie shoots in his schedule until he realized that technology held an important role in his life.

“I was figuring I could do it on nights and weekends,” he said. “When I became more involved at Arc90, it naturally became that this was more of my life.”

Chris is the mastermind behind SVN Notifier, an Apple Dashboard widget for collaborative version control. He envisioned the tool for the Arc90 lab after finding flaws with other Subversion software.

“It’s useful because it stays out of your way until it has something meaningful to say,” Chris commented. “I wanted to be notified when other people working on the same stuff as me made a change to something. SVN Notifier seemed like an easy, unobtrusive way to do that.”

In the fall of 2007, when he was 24-years-old, Chris was promoted to the partner position at Arc90. The title came with more responsibilities, but some things stayed the same.

“Everybody asked if I was going to get a new business card,” he noted. “I still don’t have one!”

The new role also changed his perspective about work and interactions at Arc90.

“There is a different approach of looking at it,” Chris said. “It becomes a longer view, such as how does this fit into the picture of where we’re going in a year or four years. I started to think about the things I was doing and the things I was enabling the people around me to do-how they were beneficial to the company and not just to me.”

During his time at Arc90, particularly since becoming a partner, Chris has learned that discussion is an important problem-solving tool.

“Disagreement and being critical of ideas is a good thing,” Chris said. “There are very few people who will try to force things down people’s throats ‘just because.’ There is a mutual respect that just because you don’t agree on something there can be a healthy process to come up with the best idea.”

We’re big fans of Twitter here at Arc90. We use it to share choice quotes or just talk about whatever. Hell, there are even people out there wiring Twitter up to their ovens.

Of course, one of the most popular uses of Twitter is to share a link to a Web page. To that end, we wanted a tool that provided a dead simple way to share a link out via Twitter while surfing the Web.

So we got to thinking: “Wouldn’t it be cool to tweet a page in just a few clicks? Also, wouldn’t it be cool to see what others are saying about the page on Twitter?” After the success of Readability, we figured we’d dust off our mad bookmarklet skillz (Firefox extensions are nice, but we wanted everybody to join the fun) and take a crack at coming up with something cool.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and you’ve got TBUZZ:

We’ve been using TBUZZ within Arc90 for a few days now and it’s a lot of fun. We’ve found it’s the easiest way to tweet about a link you’ve come across. It’s also a really cool way to chat with others about the page you’re staring at – through Twitter. It’s sort of like dropping a comment thread onto every Web page in existence.

You can install TBUZZ in just a few seconds by visiting:

http://tbuzz.arc90.com

If you’ve got any feedback, thoughts (or glowing reviews) of TBUZZ, be sure to include them in the comments below.

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.”

The Kindling team will be presenting Kinding, our idea management and collaboration tool, at Monday’s NY Tech Meet-up.  This was originally planned for last Monday, but Mother Nature pulled the old “snowball to the face” move and it was postponed.

There are still a few tickets left if you’re interested in joining us… the crowd of 600+ will watch as Rich demos the app while walking a tightrope and juggling laptops. A sight to be seen!

Seriously though, come find us if you’re there. Love to meet you.