Thank you, Chip


It is with great sadness that I share that my friend and marketing industry colleague Chip House has passed away. He left this world Saturday morning with his family by his side. Chip was suffering from ALS, a diagnosis received less than a year ago. (More info from Andrew Ecklund here.)

I hate it when memorials become more about the author than the person we love and respect and want to pay tribute to. So I apologize in advance for where that seeps in here. Because this should be about Chip.

Chip House was pretty darn good at at least three things in this world -- marketing, deliverability, and drums. I know he was also pretty amazing at that whole family thing, too, with his loving wife Teresa and their two children. Chip made it very clear to me that he loved his wife and family. So, four things. Maybe more.


Chip and I first encountered each other at Minneapolis e-commerce provider Digital River, where I was hired on as “consumer privacy manager” in October, 2000. Chip pre-dated me at Digital River, being their first marketing hire, and I later listened raptly to the stories he would tell me about the wild west of internet marketing that Digital River was riding the wave of (and his time at Fingerhut, prior to that). (Find more on that here in the May 2024 interview where Chip and I talked.)

Chip left Digital River and moved on to ExactTarget. He was an early hire for this email marketing platform. He did a lot of … marketing stuff. These are things in areas that I was not then well versed in (and am only barely smarter about now). But he did do something that uniquely captured my attention: He took the policies and practices that I was implementing at Digital River, in my role of consumer privacy manager, later email marketing operations manager -- what eventually came to be called email deliverability -- and he was applying them at ExactTarget. This was fantastic. I didn’t feel like I was being ripped off, that somebody was trying to unfairly copy what I was doing. It felt, and it feels like now, like somebody saw what I was doing and thought it was good and useful and wanted to implement it elsewhere. I was and am still so tickled by that.

Deliverability nerds, take note. You might not have known Chip, but he was knee deep in that muck, long before most of you. (Don't believe me? Here's his 2004-2006 deliverability blog.)

I reached out to Chip in 2006, after having met my (now) wife, looking for a new job opportunity as my job at Digital River wasn’t guaranteed to transfer from Minneapolis to Chicago. What if you came to work for me, he asked? But ExactTarget is in Indianapolis, I replied. Who cares? He’s in Minneapolis, I can work from Chicago, and we’ll travel down to Indy as needed. I took that job and was promoted to leading a deliverability/deliverability operations practice for ExactTarget, later Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a role I handled in some form or another for the next fifteen years. Chip was there for most of it, moving on in 2015. (I made it through to 2021.)

I put Chip through hell sometimes. Often. I was an absolute pain in the ass. You think I’m annoying now? I had fewer filters then. There were at least a few times that I know I poked too hard, and he could have probably legally and ethically gotten away with dumping me into the nearest wood chipper, but he ultimately was kind and helpful and spent a lot of effort helping me, both in the day-to-day of dealing with deliverability problems, putting the smackdown on spamming clients, and helping school me on how to be a better communicator, or at least keep me from punching myself in the face too hard while I figured out how to improve.

He actually hired me twice. Because I got mad and quit at one point. It was not just an offhand comment, but instead it was: here’s my two week notice, and then I ran out the two weeks, and I went somewhere else for a month (a story I’d love to tell in more detail but is probably blocked by an NDA), and then he hired me back. He was literally kind enough to rehire me after being that big of a pain in the ass. Sure, on some level, my ego swells because I guess I was worth rehiring. But no, my “fantastically indispensable skills” didn’t get me rehired -- Chip’s willingness to look past the stupid, insulting brusqueness of my walking away, is what allowed me to get rehired. (I know of at least one company exec who was not as eager to let me back in the fold and Chip took yet another bullet for me, smoothing that over.) After my five week break, maybe a few people thought “oh, this guy is nuts” but realistically, it had broken my “grass is always greener” fever, and I (I think? I hope?) calmed down a bit. Thank you. I owe you, friend.

Again, I feel like this has somehow turned into a story about me. Ugh. But I want it to be about Chip.

Other people can tell you more about Chip’s marketing expertise. I don’t have the vocabulary. I just knew that he was smart and reasonable and I was happy to help him out any way I can and every once in a while if he reached out to me for guidance or feedback. When somebody kind and quite possibly smarter than me reaches out for a touch base, it warms my heart.

We connected perhaps a few times a year, to catch up, comparing notes on memories of who pissed us off or deserved a gold star back in the day, talking about our career plans, and sharing things that were annoying us, whether it be career roadblocks or personal annoyances. At one point, Chip reached out to me looking for help with a webinar for his then-current company. There was not really a job opp or revenue opp there, they were not positioned to really start investing in deliverability. I didn't care about that. I was happy to help. It’s fun to connect and let’s do it, was my attitude.

Chip was kind enough to sit for an interview with me for my blog back in May, 2024. We talked a lot about deliverability and marketing history and music and drumming. He told me that he was having nerve trouble all down his left arm. It was interfering with his playing, and he had just had surgery to try to improve things. I, too, was having nerve trouble all down my left arm. We were comparing notes and talking about vertebrae and noodling how it might get better. I had pinched a nerve thanks to tripping over an invisible crack in the sidewalk the past year and when I wrenched my neck trying not to fall down, I did a bit of damage to the C5-C6 section of my spine. Annoying as hell. But I was slowly getting better. Chip, though ... this ended up being an early indicator of his ALS, I am pretty sure. Not good.

Chip was a great drummer. Do I get to judge? I worked with and spent 4-5 nights a week at a Minnesota jazz club for more than five years, run by a fantastic jazz drummer, and I’m a huge music fan, of many genres, and I have loud and obnoxious opinions about musicians and musicianship. I don’t know if it’s fair, but I’m judging Chip to be a great drummer. I got to see him play with multiple bands, and music and drumming were topics we connected on in conversation. And occasionally the topic was Neil Peart, because there are few drummers who do not idolize this Canadian rock drum idol from the band Rush, who himself passed away a few years ago. If you have a friend who is a drummer, you've talked about Neil Peart. (Alas, we never talked about Steve Gadd.)

I am sad today. Ugh, here I am again, making it all about me. But I wanted to write a story sharing some of my interactions with Chip, because I hope it will help you to understand what a great person he was and how the universe is slightly diminished today because Chip is no longer in it.

Please join me in remembering and celebrating the life and memory of Chip House.

Here find Andrew Ecklund’s announcement on Linkedin of Chip’s passing.

(Chip's not smiling in the photo above, taken years ago at ExactTarget world headquarters in Indianapolis -- he was probably annoyed at me for taking his picture without warning, and probably said something funny and sarcastic right afterward.)
5 Comments

Comments

  1. Wonderful tribute and capture of Chip Al. My condolences on your loss of such a beautiful friend!

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  2. Thanks Al. It was a beautiful tribute to an awesome human being.

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  3. Thanks so much for sharing…loved working with such a complete person

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  4. Great story about Chip. Very sad to hear of his passing!

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  5. Great tribute Al.. You cannot write the greatness of another without adding in some about you, that is what makes them great.. they make you great..

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