Startups are some of the most amazing organizations on earth. You come together with a group of people to create something from nothing. It’s stressful, insanely difficult and it consumes you completely. Maintaining momentum and focus, as well as keeping it all together during the good and the bad, is the role of culture at your company.
I’ve worked at a lot of different companies over the years and have seen a lot that has worked and quite a bit that hasn’t. I wanted to take a chance to talk a little bit about the culture we’ve created at Urban Airship.
In the Beginning
When Adam, Michael, Steven and I started Urban Airship we knew we wanted to build a company that promoted transparency. Where people worked hard because they love what they do and they have a fantastic time doing it. Our first office was a shared space with other startups and we occupied two desks. Yeah, that’s four people and two desks. To this day we don’t have any private offices and it’s one of the reasons we moved into the wide-open space of our current office last year.
Urban Airship founders Steven Osborn, Scott Kveton, Adam Lowry and Michael Richardson
Meetings: Stand and Deliver
I hate meetings just for the sake of meeting, but they are necessary. We have a couple of standing meetings but my favorite ones are the weekly Monday morning stand-up and the Friday Happy Hour.
On Monday morning at 10am the entire company gathers together for a five minute stand-up meeting. We talk about the week ahead, introduce new people, mention guests visiting the office, etc. This is a great way to set the tone for the week.
An engineering standup meeting at Urban Airship
On Fridays at 4pm we have Happy Hour (you have a keg at your office, right?!). Friday is a chance to look back at the week. We do this with ad hoc presentations from different parts of the company with video conferencing linking our PDX and San Francisco offices. Engineering might share how they are scaling push on iOS. Sales will talk about a specific deal and what it took to get it closed. Marketing might preview the latest campaign to drive new leads. It’s also a great time to talk about any general issues that might be surfacing. There isn’t a better time to share with each other than over a good Portland beer…or a PBR, as is often the case.
Open house party at our new San Francisco office
Transparency…for Real
I’m going to say it even though I realize it’s beyond cliche. We’re pretty damn transparent. Tell me this, do the people at your company know about the different parts of the business and how they work together? Do they understand how leads fill the pipeline? The relationship between marketing and sales? The challenges with scaling infrastructure? Current revenue? Burn? Cash on hand? Outstanding shares? From day one we worked hard to do just that and I share all of this and more during our weekly Happy Hour meetings.
There is No Fence
I’m sure you’ve worked at companies before that have a fence. Maybe it’s a fence between product and Q/A. Sales and marketing. Finance and the rest of the company. Yeah, we don’t really do that here. A really good company knows that all of those parts of the business have to work together in order to be successful. There’s no “well, that’s not my job” attitude at UA. You roll up your sleeves and get done what needs to get done. If something is broken like a process or we have an outage, we address it in a way so as to learn from the mistake.
How do we accomplish this? I think we make it clear across the board that we’re working as a team here. While I may be the CEO, I still take direction from the board, our advisors and the rest of the team. Same goes for product, marketing, sales, business development, ops, admin and finance. A well-oiled team that collaborates effectively and move mountains and we do everything we can to continue that trend.
Free Friday
Once a quarter we do something called “Free Friday.” Steven saw Atlassian’s success and we decided to mimic it.
Free Friday starts on Thursday at 4pm and employees are encouraged to work on anything they want. Seriously. Anything. The only requirement is that you have to be prepared to share what you worked on starting at 4pm the next day (and yes, this maps conveniently to Happy Hour). You can work individually or in groups. The entire company is invited to participate and we witness everything from building games to building out new features for the platform. Some of our best new ideas for features came because of a coding spike done to prototype something. My personal favorite was what I worked on during the last Free Friday–the Urban Airship BBQ. That totally counts.
Know the KPIs
What are the real Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business? For a long time we thought it was the number of notifications we were sending. While interesting, and certainly an indication of growth, we view the total number of pushes being sent as just one of the KPIs.
We have a big board in both of our offices (inspired by the one at Panic just down the street) that displays our real-time KPIs across the entire company. This is more than just up-time and number of notifications, but metrics like revenue, pipeline, incoming leads and average time to close that show we are on target with our plan. These are real KPIs and they live on our big board which everyone passes by several times a day.
As a joke back in 2010 I got a custom engraved bell that hung near the sales team. It says “Urban Airship – ring in case of sale.” We put it up and rang it from time-to-time but then it actually became something that we did for big deals. It was about closure for a sometimes hard-fought deal or one that was really going to move the needle. Now when people hear the bell ring the ENTIRE company knows that we just won a significant deal that will continue to move the ball forward.
Don’t Skimp on your Office Manager
We have Barb. Barb kicks ass. Barb joined the company early on (employee #7, I believe) and she came in to handle all of the little things. That’s pretty early considering it was me, one inside sales guy and a handful of engineers. I know people that wait much longer to make this hire but I’d never recommend that.
Akasha and Barb keep the airship flying high
A good chunk of the executive team travels and having someone that is there every single day with their finger on the pulse of the team is critical. There are countless times when Barb has said “the boys look a little stressed out, we should do something nice,” which then leads to an off-site, a scavenger hunt, impromptu parties and a general continuity that is so important to stress-heavy startups.
When we acquired SimpleGeo, Barb migrated to SF for two months to get the office in order and to help integrate the new team members into our culture.
DO NOT SKIMP ON YOUR OFFICE MANAGER. Sure, you could get somebody cheap, fresh out of college to help with AR/AP, keep the fridge stocked with drinks and greet people at the door, but don’t bother. Go the extra mile and pay a little extra to get someone that knows how to run an office. Your office manager should be the right-hand person to whoever is running Ops or to the CEO.
Perks Don’t Cost You All that Much
We started catering lunches over a year ago. We did two days a week to start and now do three days a week in the office, which still leaves time for our team to explore their love for the PDX food cart scene. Meals are healthy, diverse and always include a vegetarian/vegan option. Sales mingles with marketing, who mingles with engineering. This is a good thing, and while it costs us $10/head/meal it’s well worth it. Let’s do a little math.
In our Portland office we have 53 people. Lunch is served promptly at Noon and people are usually back at their desks by 12:40pm at the latest, and they aren’t rushed at all. Twenty minutes x 53 people is 17 hours of saved time a day. The cost for that meal? $530. For the week we get:
$530/day x 3 days = $1590/week 20 minutes x 53 people x 3 days = 53 hours saved/week (or 1 hour saved per employee per week)
That adds up and while this is a “perk” for the team it happens to turn a fantastic ROI for the company, both in real dollars and especially culturally.
We don’t have a vacation policy. It’s something we borrowed from Netflix. You take the time that you need when you need to take it and you put it on the shared calendar for the entire company to see. People know when you’re going to be gone and we can plan accordingly around gaps and releases. If people abuse this policy (and no one has) then there are bigger issues to be dealt with.
Play Just as Hard as You Work
Luau party. The People of Walmart party. The all-day scavenger hunt scouring Portland for all things geeky or otherwise. Hiring a choreographer to come in and teach the team the Thriller dance to do during our Halloween party. Getting a REAL Santa to come in for the kids of the company. They are fun, they create culture and they bind the team together.
You’re going to spend a full third of your life working. Why not do it at a place that challenges you with hard problems, let’s you have an insane amount of fun and has a real business model in a burgeoning space? While these are the tactical elements that make up the Urban Airship culture I think the ethos of “work hard, play hard” is at the root of who we are. If you get a chance to stop by the UA offices in SF or PDX I’d be happy to show you what it looks like in practice and you’ll see for yourself that Urban Airship really is a special place to work.
The crew is on the ready, the flight plan is set and the blueprint for a SXSW experience you won’t soon forget is coming to life. Over the next month you’ll be able to follow along in our journey as we bring Urban Airship’s Mobile Roundtable to the streets of Austin for SXSW; it’s beginning to take shape.
Last week you learned that we really are planning a mobile, mobile leadership event. With round-trips jumping off from The Screen Porch at W Austin, and a secret, ultra-cool way station, a few of you will have the opportunity to mix and mingle in small group discussions led by mobile, marketing and developer luminaries.
People like Andrew Mager, Chief Listening Officer at Spotify, and Chris Messina, Developer Advocate at Google, will spark a wide variety of discussions, from how mobile is changing content, marketing and consumer behavior, to how industries can adapt to seize new opportunities.
Head on over to our event site and submit your email address to get updates on how you may be able to hitch a ride with us in Austin.
On the front-lines of mobile app engagement and monetization, Airshippers spend a lot of time evangelizing the future of things to mobile and marketing pundits, journalists and industry analysts. On Friday, we played host to a crowd of college students from University of Oregon’s Ad Society, which, while decidedly less jaded than industry veterans, were just as enthusiastic.
Our own Jamie Burton, a recent UofO graduate, played host to event, joined by Brent Hieggelke, CMO; Dylan Boyd, VP of growth; Scott Townsend, director of marketing; and Corey Gault, director of communications.
Airshipper Jamie Burton with the University of Oregon's Ad Society
The quality and range of questions, from advertising implications of push notifications to mobile app design and general career advice, was simply superb, and we hope that we offered a guiding light to the next generation of talent. It’s clear that the UofO is working hard to ensure its student body is on the forefront of emerging digital and mobile trends.
UO's Ad Society in Urban Airship's kitchen
Similarly, over the weekend, co-founder Michael Richardson participated in Reed College’s inaugural Working Weekend, which offered students a mix of panel discussions, workshops, one-on-ones between students and alumni, as well as the Reed Start-Up Lab—focused on helping students go from an idea to a pitch. Richardson, who graduated Reed in 2007, presented on a couple of panels and helped counsel a new crop of Start-Up Lab entrepreneurs. Congratulations to the finalists and winners!
While we in the technology industry look to define the future of things, we mustn’t forget those who will be slated to help fulfill those ambitions. Please keep an eye out for updates on Urban Airship’s summer internships.
By Brent Hieggelke • February 2nd, 2012 • Posted in Company, Events, News
Austin is beautiful in March, so this year we are taking thought leadership to the streets of SXSW. We are bringing together some of the brightest thinkers on all things mobile and we’re saving room for a few lucky guests. Are you ready to take a ride that you won’t soon forget?
On Saturday, March 10th and Sunday, March 11th, the Urban Airship Mobile Roundtable will embark on several two-hour tours through Austin. Each tour will provide a lucky few the opportunity to engage in intimate conversations with some of the mobile industry’s top executives and chief doers. By day we’ll focus on a wide range of hot topics from the post-web app-ocalyptic future, to building mobile audiences and UI design. After dark, the Mobile Roundtable will transform from an intellectual adventure to the sweetest party-to-party conveyance you’ve ever seen.
Check out our event site for emerging details on how to get your ticket to ride, and over the coming weeks we’ll continue to reveal exactly what we have in store for you.
By Scott Kveton • January 24th, 2012 • Posted in Company, Events, News
You know it was a good party when it takes a weekend of recouping to get around to the recap. Last week more than 200 people joined us for an open house at Urban Airship-San Francisco. Among the crowd were current and future employees, customers, investors and partners, as well a large contingent of entrepreneurs from Wieden + Kennedy’s Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) who had meetings in the Bay Area the next day.
For the Urban Airship flight crew, this was a great opportunity to grow relationships and find new talent to support aggressive growth plans, as well as to celebrate our work and progress towards integrating geolocation into the mobile industry’s leading cross-platform push notification system.
Conversations were richly nourished by Bacon Bacon SF and lubricated by a full top-shelf bar and kegs of Anderson Valley Boont Amber. In addition, we got to show off our ultra-cool mural by Alex Pardee that was recently featured by Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.
Courtesy of www.juxtapoz.com
If you think you have what it takes to join the Airship, don’t wait for the next party to let us know.
As many of us pack our bags for CES this week, we’re bracing for the flood of events and information popping up on our respective feeds. So whether you’re on the floor at CES, following from your office, or on-the-go but still connected, we’d love to highlight one of our customers’ apps that will make sure you won’t miss the biggest news or product releases coming from the show. Because if you’re like us (which we suspect you are), you’ll want to be the first to know.
As you wait in your hotel room or boarding gate, make sure to download CNET’s iOS app to have the top breaking stories from the week delivered to your fingertips. CNET’s editors will be picking the top daily stories that you absolutely need to know about and sending them to you as soon as they’re live. This way you’ll stay connected to the biggest news, even while your other hand is tied up clutching that Yard-Long Eiffel Tower drink.
Pick up the CNET app for iPhone and iPad at the itunes store.
By Jessica Davis • August 17th, 2011 • Posted in Events
We have been talking a lot these days about Location Aware Notifications. As we have reported, we recently teamed up with SimpleGeo to deploy smart, contextual geo-aware push notifications to individuals via their mobile device. Some of the geo stuff freaks people out – we get that. The way that many people approached it with a “you walk into this spot and you get a DEAL” kind of freaked us out as well. Relevancy and intent should drive it, along with so many other factors.
The fact is that it is a little crazy, a tad awesome and a whole lot here right now. And most of the time people just like you are using it to engage in new ways with people, brands, and even things that aren’t there (AR).
But, as we’re hoping to present at the 2012 SXSW Interactive Conference, the combination of mobile + social + local is a powerful, yet misunderstood, communication channel. When people hear about it, they often conjure up a “Minority Report” world where companies track their every move to inundate them with marketing. And so they resist. The next-generation of SoMoLo, however, will delight people by providing highly targeted, context-rich communications that keeps the control in their hands. New technologies will leverage newly accessible data gleaned from user app usage, local search results, social streams and location to speak with people on their own terms, in ways that add meaning and convenience. Panelists will share their experiences with and advice on how to leverage SoMoLo data to engage mobile users in ways that personalize content to keep consumers coming back time after time.
We have assembled a kick-ass team of experts – some of the smartest people in the business, including Matt Galligan from SimpleGeo, Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget and Chris Messina from Google (he invented the hashtag too) – to discuss in depth how companies can balance convenience + privacy concerns to help people appreciate the value in contextual mobile experiences.
Please vote for our panel. We are already planning some good stuff for our trip to Austin. This conversation is just beginning….
By Jessica Davis • July 13th, 2011 • Posted in Events•2 Comments
OSCON is one of our favorite events, not just because it’s hosted in our hometown. The speakers are great, the OS community is vibrant and the conference is well organized.
Urban Airship is happy to be one of the sponsors of the show this year, and we are especially honored to have several team members on stage with some killer presentations:
As our friend, we are able to extend a 20% discount off any registration package with code OS11UA.
Events at Urban Airship
We’re opening up our event space at the Airship for some neat-o hack-y events. Come on by.
Celebrate everything PhoneGap at the first-ever PhoneGap Dayon Friday, July 29. We’ll have phones, apps, js frameworks, tools and delicious beers for all to enjoy. In addition to some hacking with other PhoneGap addicts, there will be a few afternoon talks on getting started with PhoneGap, high-speed demos, and short presentations from PhoneGap developers including folks from Dojo and IBM. All of this is followed by a PhoneGap party! There’s no ticket charge, but we’re asking folks to register ahead of time as we’re expecting a full house. Whether you can make it for the whole day or just the morning, we want to see you there! Register here.
API Hackday PDX On Saturday (following OSCON)from 8am-8pm, join us for an all-day coding fest focused on building apps and mashups with APIs. Hear from some of the country’s top API-focused companies on tips, tricks, and tools for building the next big app. At the end of the day, teams and/or individuals get a chance to present their work to a panel of judges and win kickass prizes. Also joining us in sponsoring this free event are SimpleGeo, Twilio, SendGrid, Apigee, PHPFog, LinkedIn & Mashery. Over $2K in prizes! Register here.
Visiting Portlandia
If you haven’t been, Portland is a wonderful place to live and work, with a vibrant, eclectic, talented, and diverse population. There is much to inspire the mind and spirit. You may find you love it here and want to call Portland home. Good news: Urban Airship is looking for a few good mates to join the ship. Check out our openings. Stay a while.
If you haven’t visited, let us show you around our fine city. We’d love to chat about python, clouds, data, mobile, airships, coffee, cats or whatever. Contact us at @urbanairship to set something up, even if you just need directions, we locals are here to help.
Food carts
Carts are the business when it comes to quick, tasty and cheap eats. Portland is home to more than 200 – look for the carts pods, where you can keep your options open.
Team Favorites:
Ziba’s Pita’s: At the corner of SW Alder and SW 9th is a wonderful cart that serves Bosnian pitas—delicious fillings baked inside curls of flaky crust. Try the spinach & feta full plate, with a cucumber salad and ajvar on the side.
DC Vegetarian: Sometimes fake meat is what you want. Vegetarians and vegans should head over to DC on SW 3rd between SW Stark and Washington. The steak & peppers is great; also try the BLT sub w/ avocado.
The Frying Scotsman: Pretty awesome source of fish & chips. Find it in the mega-pod at SW 9th and Alder.
The downtown carts are an easy MAX ride. This site maps the carts and pods as well as provide reviews. Come hungry.
Other Eateries / Adult Beverages:
Produce Row (204 SE Oak St) has a fantastic back patio and happy hour until 7pm. This spot is in walking distance to the Convention Center. Get a whisky/beer pairing, like the Pale Rider (Terminal Gravity IPA and Blanton’s Single Barrel), or the Bourbon Ginger cocktail. Bonus for vegetarians: a good house-made veggie burger.
Also on the East side, Bunk Sandwiches (621 SE Morrison) serves up hearty meat-ful sandos until 3pm; after that, head to Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water St., which adds live music and a tavern-like atmosphere to the sandwiches.
Downtown, Kenny & Zuke’s is the hookup. Happy hour is from 3-6pm.
And for late-night grub, the $3 gyros+fries at Berbati’s after 11pm is a good choice. Berbati’s offers a wide array of entertainment, from monthly local art shows to pool tables, pinball and quality live music.
If you want to hold a menu at the table, please refer to this infographic from our friends over at the the Bureau of Betterment.
Hang-out and Relax
Backspace (115 NW 5th Ave) is a coffee shop, art gallery, Internet cafe, and all- ages venue. The coffee is good, the wifi is fast, the vegetarian sandwiches are excellent, and because it’s right at a Max stop in Old Town, the people watching is hard to beat.
Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade (511 NW Couch St.) is recognized as one of the best arcades in the U.S. It is known for preserving games from the Golden Age of arcade games. It also serves as a venue for djs, live bands and Rock Band events.
Quality Coffee:
For wifi action and longer-term “coffee-shopping,” check out Stumptown Coffee Roasters (multiple locations).
If coffee is the goal (and not wifi or working), head to Spella Caffé at 520 SW 5th downtown, and get some fantastic hand-pulled espresso and a nice chat with the owners. If you’ve got a sweet tooth order an affogato (gelato with a shot of espresso poured over it).
Another addictive spot is Barista, where the coffee menu changes regularly. Order a shot of whatever is on tap for the day.
If you stick around for the weekend, the annual Oregon Brew Fest is a good time.
A good round-up of goings-on is here. And here you can learn all about Portland.
Many people are measuring success by looking at their download count. Although this is a useful metric, this data point alone could be leading you to a misinformed conclusion. At CTIA this week, the focus was on repeat engagement, getting people back into apps after the initial download. As mobile marketing has become more important, so has the need to measure success with informative data.
“Download numbers are pretty deceptive… We’re looking at active and repeat users – those drive the ad impression and monetization.” Michael Scogin, vice president of mobile at MTV, New York
“We want to be one of those 10 applications that you go into and utilize and see value from overall use.” Beth Jacobs, general manager of mobile at The Washington Post, Washington
Ryan Kim over at GigaOm also brought up the deceptiveness of app downloads in his column today. ” Instead of flashy numbers, show me user loyalty. Everything else is churn. By sticking with download numbers, I wonder how many are masking the fact that most of their users don’t come back at all.” He points to data results from Localytics that show the most loyal app users (those who come back 10+ times per month) are—despite being the smaller number—are “more impressive over time and more lucrative.”
Our take: We could not agree more that engagement is the key tenet of mobile app success. Engagement drives monetization as well as brand identification. Companies that can create great in-app experiences and can get audiences back into their app will win in the next generation of app development.
One of the most effective solutions to the challenge of reengaging audiences is push notifications. There’s no trickery in this strategy: companies that use push effectively will get more users re-engaged with an app. No use of push = less engagement and poor use of push = annoyed users who opt out and / or delete the app entirely. With the right balance, push notifications remind users why they downloaded the app in the first place, offering them a reason to open it again, and creating a feedback loop with the brand behind it.
By Jessica Davis • February 11th, 2011 • Posted in Events•4 Comments
We know it’s still February, but you can’t start thinking about your SXSW strategy early enough. And because Urban Airship will be in full force at SXSW, and we wanted to give you a few tips on how you should be preparing.
And when you’re down there, make sure you come by our mobile party, the Big Bang Bordello, at Emo’s on Friday, March 11th at 8pm. It’s going to be off the hook.
Urban Airship powers the world's most successful mobile apps. The engine behind thousands of apps, Urban Airship's breakthrough technology makes mobile apps far more engaging, effective, and efficient. Top brands depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile app initiatives are scalable and profitable.
Urban Airship provides push notifications rich mobile messaging and in-app purchase services, as well as analytics and campaign management tools. Contact us if you have questions.
