My teenage daughter recently discovered the song “Toxic” by Britney Spears. While I’ve got to admit it’s tough not to sing along (even if I’ve now heard it for the 200th time in the last week), it started to get me thinking about the word “toxic” in general. We know the concept to be potentially horrific in relationships, but it’s arguably just as damaging in a work setting.

In an era where so many companies are working hard to create and scale healthy cultures, here are five signs to detect if your workplace is causing you to “slip under.”

LACK OF TRANSPARENCY

You might understand what your individual role is, but there isn’t clarity about what your team is trying to accomplish, or worse - you don’t have a grasp of the company’s goals. It’s one thing for you not to understand; but if you probe for clarity and it’s not provided, you’re set up to fail.  

Key Indicator: If there is no or limited communication and transparency about objectives and goals throughout your company, it’s almost impossible for trust to exist, and for strong relationships to be built.

NEGATIVITY FROM PEERS

The last time we searched for additional office space, I did tours of a variety of companies. I was struck by the environments I walked into. Almost immediately, you could get a vibe from how colleagues engaged in the office. Were people chatting with each other? Did they look up and smile when we walked by? Or were they sitting side by side, wired into headphones and you could hear a pin drop? Worse, when I asked one person I knew who worked in one of these companies for insight into her environment, she offered that it might appear quiet... but that people spent much of their day on Slack and chat sites talking smack about the company and its management. Yikes!  

Key Indicator: Whether it’s online or in person, when team members gather to commiserate together, it’s creating a really negative dynamic. It’s not so much that they are doing it; it’s concerning why they are doing it in the first place.

LACK OF CONSISTENCY & FAIRNESS

Almost nothing is as frustrating as watching one colleague get promoted while another gets ignored for seemingly the exact same results.  When there is a lack of understanding and even consistency in what skills and behaviors are rewards for career progressions, a sense of politics, resentment, and lack of trust ensues. In growing companies, it’s completely normal not to have formal processes or roadmaps sketched out yet; but good leaders will navigate this by rewarding actions that align to what the organization outlines as being important.  

Key Indicator:  if your company has core values, and there isn’t an active effort to “practice what you preach,” toxicity might be brewing.

DO AS I SAY...

Everyone who works wants to feel like their opinions and ideas are valued. When you see managers acting with a “my way” attitude, or colleagues out for themselves rather than building on the strength of the team, consider it a red flag. Obviously business can’t run by committee, and managers need to make tough and final decisions sometimes.

Key Indicator: If you find your manager and other leaders driving every decision from the top down, with little input or ideas from the team, you’re likely to become creatively and innovatively stunted.  And worse, morale and productivity will plummet over time.

GHOST TOWN

One of the most tell-tale signs a company is toxic?  People find reasons not to be there. Whether people are calling in sick, starting to roll in later and leave earlier, etc, When people start finding ways to avoid the workplace - or worse, people are actually getting sick from fatigue, stress, etc. - there is a strong likelihood your corporate culture is a negative contributing factor.

Key Indicator: A consistent pattern, within or across teams, of employees taking unexpected time off, cutting out early, or all of a sudden rolling in ‘just in time’.

Building a business is a stressful, incredibly hard thing to do. Remember, however, your people are not “human resources.” They are the lifeblood of your company. Engage them, inspire them, and treat them as if your company’s health depends on it. Toxic environments can tank even the most innovative of ideas.

DraftKings is a behemoth.

Since its founding in 2012, the sports-tech and entertainment company has become a household name as the leader in daily fantasy sports. While fantasy sports have been around for decades, DraftKings has been a key innovator in this industry, which gives sports fans another way to engage with their favorite sports and athletes.

To build a platform as successful as DraftKings’, you need a highly capable and reliable engineering team, and no one knows that better than Chief Technology Officer Travis Dunn, who joined in early 2014 when the engineering team comprised only six people. Today, that same team—the largest at the company—is over 100 strong, and makes up ¼ of the employee count.

Dunn, a Salt Lake City native, joined DraftKings as Senior Director of Engineering in November 2013, before taking on his current role as CTO this past February. Prior to joining DraftKings, Dunn spent five years at Vistaprint, where he initially met DraftKings’ Co-Founders Jason Robins, Paul Liberman, and Matthew Kalish.

In the months before he joined DraftKings, Dunn was at a point in his life where he wanted to work at an early stage startup, and in late 2013, Jason MacInnes—former CTO and now Head of R&D at DraftKings—invited Dunn out for a drink.

“Jason reached out for us to get together, and once he started talking, I got excited. I knew that if I was going to join a startup, it was going to be in the early stages. And at DraftKings, I knew the people and felt passionate about what they were doing, and I knew I could add value.”

Dunn joined that January as the 30th employee at the company.

“It was very much a startup environment. We were all crammed into this 2,000 sq. ft. office next to the Park Street train station. My interview was actually in the kitchen sitting on a pile of soda water, and I just sat there and met all of the people at DraftKings, which was pretty fun.”

That said, it wasn’t the stereotypical, laid-back startup environment seen in popular media. “Some people think that startups are kind of frivolous, with people joking around,” Dunn said. “That sort of thing was not the DraftKings I walked in to. It was very intense and very business focused, but that’s because everyone was and continues to be so passionate. You felt how hard each employee was working and it’s because of this that I knew it could, and would, succeed.”

It Takes a Special Kind of Team

Being an engineer for DraftKings is something that brings with it many unique challenges.

For instance, DraftKings operates like a bank on the backend because the company’s contests involve real money, so the rules and regulations for playing can differ between states. As a result, the platform’s technology needs to be sophistically built and scalable so that it can determine where a customer is and whether they’re following the rules. “In New Hampshire, you can play at 18, but in Massachusetts the age is 21,” Dunn said. “Because of that, how you interact with the app has to change depending on where you are, so we’ve made sure to have the best possible consumer protections in place as well.”

The specialized engineering challenges go well beyond this. For instance, on game days, traffic can increase drastically and spike at many different times of the day. Take the first Sunday of football season, which Dunn called “our Black Friday and Cyber Monday all rolled up into one.”

“We essentially add 6X the customers on that day compared to the rest of the year, with a massive increase in the number of active users. Doing a lot of load testing and performance engineering going into the summer is super important to us so that, when we go into that first NFL Sunday, we're comfortable that we can handle it. That said, although the start of NFL is particularly busy, our team manages massive traffic spikes and monitors customer engagement daily. There are almost always multiple games being played across multiple sports at any given time, and we need to be prepared for that level of activity on an international scale.”

Customer engagement, he added, is nothing short of “crazy,” and changes moment-to-moment.

The huge traffic changes extend even to the company’s contests, which can range in scale from a head-to-head contest with two people to competitions with 2 million entries.

“Every time a player scores on the field, we have to recompute everyone's relative position in that contest. When you’re sorting a list of 2 million entries, what that means is that the slower we are to update, the more times people press refresh on their phone, which makes spikes bigger and more intense. And that can crash the system, so being able to calculate and adjust quickly is important when you have two million entries.”

He continued, “Normal sorting isn't fast enough. We had to build a custom sorting algorithm for the contest that takes advantage of what we know about the scoring distribution of our customers. Doing that has been huge, and it cut sorting time down to a couple of seconds from what was almost a minute previously.”

Hiring, and What’s Next

One of the largest changes for the engineering team, Dunn said, came from the company’s transition into a multi-product strategy.  

“Until very recently, we were pretty much a single product company. As we continue to grow and innovate our product, we introduce different sport categories, ways to play and products. For example, we launched our Leagues product in August 2016 that lets customers play against their friends or family in a private contest; we introduced our stand-alone app, DK Live in September 2016 that offers customers a one-stop destination to get all of their information on their lineups and favorite athletes in one place with updates in real-time; we launched in 5 different countries in the past year and a half, and created multiple ways to play a sport on our platform over the past year.”

This has resulted in significant expansion across the department, and as this continues, Dunn said that the engineering team will likely double in the next 18 months. As part of this expansion, the company plans to move into a new Boston-based office at 500 Boylston Street in Q1 2019.

“We’re hiring at every level, from Director of Engineering all the way down to college hires. We're looking for software engineers, data engineers, and pretty much all roles across engineering. The company’s transformation into this multi-product universe is a big thing for us.”

During our conversation, Dunn laid out a few key attributes he looks for when interviewing someone to ensure they’ll be a good fit. Primarily, strong design skills and the ability to effectively produce code.

What’s not necessary, he said, is being a sports fan. “I would say the passionate sports fan is an actual minority in our engineering team. You're more likely to bond with an engineering person over the board games they play or sci-fi shows or a video game they've been playing, more so than how the Patriots are doing.”

During the interview process, aspiring DraftKings’ engineers can expect a technical deep dive into one’s background.

“What we're looking for is whether you can explain the systems you worked on, and whether you learned them in-depth. We look for curiosity and being able to see the big picture, and how you fit into something. We're also looking for people who can tell stories of working with teams. Working here is super collaborative, and not every company is. People who do well are leaning over the shoulder, giving feedback, offering code reviews, and going up to the whiteboard for design.”

Because of their interviewing process, Dunn said that the company has had very few misfires in hiring, which has more than likely contributed to DraftKings’ world class engineering team.

“It’s among the best engineering teams I've ever interacted with,” Dunn said. “I'm really proud of the group we have here.”

With each passing day, it feels like there’s a new story about a company whose data got breached, or about how a company’s cybersecurity infrastructure was compromised by an outside threat. There’s no escaping it: every company is at risk.

You almost wish that there was some way to get ahead of it all and detect threats before they become a big problem, or even some way to predict the future. It sounds too wild to be true, but there’s a company in Somerville that’s providing that very service to cybersecurity teams.

That company is Recorded Future. Founded in 2009, they’re a cybersecurity company that’s using the power of cyber analytics and data visualization to detect potential threats and stay ahead of them before they have the chance to become real ones.

Recorded Future was Co-Founded by CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a Swedish native who founded another analytics company in 1996 called Spotfire. When Spotfire was established, Ahlberg said, it helped lay down the foundation for the category of data visualization as we know it today. The company was ultimately acquired by TIBCO in 2007, for $195M.

After the company was sold, Ahlberg began to think about what he wanted to do next, and one day while on the treadmill, an idea struck him: What if he could take the power of an analytics engine and apply it to the Internet in order to make reliable predictions about the future? This aha moment became the genesis of Recorded Future.

But before becoming a cybersecurity company, Recorded Future focused on intelligence—specifically government intelligence. The original platform used its analytical power to predict world events, primarily by digging through thousands of web sources and presenting curated information to the end user.

They raised venture capital funding from firms like GV (formerly Google Ventures), In-Q-Tel, and others. They saw success in this area, but a few years ago, they found a new, perfect market for their technology.

“The cybersecurity industry at the time was a $50-60B market,” Ahlberg said. “Yet the success rate, despite the investments, was not stellar. Companies were still constantly getting hit.”

Four years after this transition, Recorded Future’s move into the cybersecurity industry has been a smart one, as it’s grown to what Ahlberg called a $75-80B market. The reason for this, of course, is that cybersecurity problems continue to mount, and cybercrime keeps getting worse.

“Back then, we used to be worried about hacktivists and maybe some criminals, but now, the criminals have stepped up their game dramatically, and it just seems impossible to squash them. In addition, the world’s intelligence agencies have largely gone amok. They used to stay in the background and make no noise, but nowadays they’re anything but subtle.”

The company’s platform works by using machine learning to analyze hundreds of thousands of sources—both internally as well as externally on the Internet—before presenting the relevant information to cybersecurity teams in an accessible format. Said team can use this information to identify potential predators, the tactics said predators will most likely use, and the system weaknesses they’re most likely to exploit.

Ahlberg compares Recorded Future’s offering to the Bloomberg Terminal, which financial traders use in order to analyze real-time market data. “It’s the premier analytical tool that a trader needs to be the best. Our mission is to do the same—to provide a cybersecurity toolset that allows a trader to be his best by giving him access to top-tier intelligence.”

These top-tier intelligence tools are, as Ahlberg explained, not something professionals have always had access to.

“Originally, governments were the only ones who could defend themselves, as they had access to special toolsets. But now, what we’re seeing is that companies have to defend themselves too. So we’re seeing this massive market opportunity to provide companies with intelligence tools to help them defend themselves.”

Their platform currently has almost 3,000 users, which accounts for 250 customers across 20+ countries, making Recorded Future, as Ahlberg said, the “largest independent intel threat company in the world, and probably soon, the largest intel provider to cybersecurity altogether.”

The Somerville-based company currently has over 200 employees, and they’ve raised over $50M through multiple rounds of funding. Moreover, they’ve been hiring across multiple functions over the past year, including sales, pre-sales, customer success, and marketing.

“We like to think that we found the right product-market fit. We have some real momentum in the company.”

Between ransomware, international incidents, and more, it’s clear that Recorded Future has found itself in a high-opportunity industry. And they couldn’t come at a better time, because as Ahlberg said to me during our interview, “every day you wake up and there’s something new.”

Years ago, an incredibly bright, talented colleague wandered into my office. She looked haggard; she had spent all morning trying to solve a complex legal matter she had been working through for a customer. “Do you ever feel like a fraud?” she asked. “Every day,” I responded.  

She wasn’t speaking of ethics, but rather the knowledge that no matter how wonderfully your career might be going, if you are a person with any humility, you realize far too often that you will never have all the answers. Every day, you face the knowledge that you are just doing the best you can, and that more often than not, you are making things up as you go; hoping you’re trending in a positive direction, and knowing how to course correct when you aren’t.

As I have navigated my career, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work in environments where it has been safe to take risks, and I’ve been supported to learn and grown along the way. As a result, I’ve built some great experience, and though I am far from having a perfect resume, I have never felt like I’ve needed to embellish it in any way. And yet, being in my field, I’ve seen a surprising increase in the number of people who feel the need to enhance their resumes over the last several years.

I like to operate with the general sentiment that people are generally good. And yet sometimes even good people make poor choices. If you’ve ever considered padding your background or stretching the truth a little in hopes of bolstering your ability to take on a new role, let me share these common misconceptions many assume to be true in hopes of getting you to reconsider, or aiding others, in roles like mine to catch these kinds of embellishments.

Here are a few notable tip-offs:

• Your education can’t be verified.  This is one of the easiest things to catch people on, and yet it happens all the time. Claiming to have gone to a top-tier institution when you really attended a small state school, or no school at all can be easily checked with a simple phone call. And while not every company does background checks, you should make the assumption many do. Thinking of buying a diploma from the Internet to support your claim? Save your money. We can spot them a mile away.

• Your employment dates don’t make sense. Many companies will not provide any real details about your history there if contacted, but they will confirm your employment dates. While it can seem like a simple move to tweak your employment dates just a bit, this is one of the easiest things to verify. If you have a gap on your resume you are trying to fill, highlight any consulting or volunteer work you did at that time instead.

• Your skills don’t match your claims. In an effort to impress, sometimes people will embellish their backgrounds with claims of big skills developed in past jobs. Don’t be surprised if an interviewer actually asks you questions about these areas. Claiming you are an expert in something when you don’t have the substance or experience to back it up is incredibly easy to spot check. And failing a basic test of your assertions indicates perhaps you have either stretched the truth in other places on your resume or inflated your real abilities. Either way, it’s a serious red flag.

• A Google search doesn’t reveal much. With so much of our lives readily available, assume the majority of people you interview with will do a little online research on you as part of the hiring process. It doesn’t take a lot of work to connect the dots to determine your education is fabricated, or that high-profile job you had last year was actually at a company that went out of business four years ago.

Everyone feels like a ‘fraud’ at some point during their career. But there’s a major difference between feeling overwhelmed or in over your head on a certain project and actually fudging your background and skill set on a resume. You don’t need to be a full-fledged con artist or even a bad person to consider padding your resume and background a bit. Before you do, however, realize the ramifications could be significant. Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself a little plumping of your experiences isn’t nearly as bad as flat out lying on your resume. Erroneous. In addition, while not every company does formal background checks, if they do, you’ll be caught if you’re less than truthful. If you are confirmed to be lying, whether it’s big or small, you risk damaging your reputation, missing out on that amazing job offer, or even getting fired if you are discovered.

Is it worth that risk?

Think back to 2010/2011 and there is this new currency on the Internet, "magic Internet money" if you will, that seems to be all the rage with the stereotypical Deep Web user, and they are using this type of coinage to purchase illegal goods on something called the Silk Road through the Deep Web.

This is what the world of Bitcoin looked like for a period of time. No one truly understood it, except for those same sketchy people mentioned above.

Fast forward to today, and it looks completely different...especially in the Boston tech scene.

In January, we published a four-part series detailing the ins-and-outs of the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. In honor of Boston Blockchain Week, we have compiled all four parts into one feature:

• Part 1: “Something I Learned Today” - Breaking Down and Defining the Basics - crash course on what the terms in this new frontier mean.
• Part 2: “One Step At A Time” - What Do the Investors Think? - we spoke with several investors about how they are involved with Boston’s blockchain/cryptocurrency scene.
• Part 3: “What’s Going On” - The Entrepreneurs and Companies in The Space - we profiled several startups who are utilizing this type of technology.
• Part 4:  “Newest Industry” - Future Predictions - various entrepreneurs, investors, as well as others involved with the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector on gave predictions on what they think will come next. 

I’d like to give special thanks to the following people involved with this space who also helped give me the insight needed in order to write the series: Parul Singh of Founder Collective, Neha Narula of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, Richard Dulude of Underscore VC, Dave Balter of Flipside Crypto, Rob Frasca of Cosimo Ventures, Jamie Goldstein of Pillar, Jeremy Kauffman of LBRY, Ty Danco, Chet Manikantan of Tengu, Auryn Macmillan and David DiNeno of FirstBlood, Havell Rodrigues of Adjoint, Bennett Collen of Cognate, Remy Carpinito of Esprezzo, Boris Revsin of Game Theory Crypto Group, and Christine To of AirFox.

Also, if you're a punk/alternative rock fan, you'll notice each title of the series is a Husker Du song.