‘The people side of tech’
Human resources executive has advised tech founders and CEOs on how to manage their most important assets. Now, she’s fighting cancer.
After decades advising local startups, human resources executive Christina Luconi finally had to slow down last summer — just a bit. Diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare white blood cell cancer, Luconi was admitted to Mass. General Hospital for chemotherapy and was resting in her hospital bed on a Saturday when her boss, Rapid7 chief executive Corey Thomas, rolled in.
Amid slowing growth and a sinking stock price, a consultant was recommending that the Boston cybersecurity firm cut staff in what would be its first mass layoff. But Thomas wasn’t going to make the move without Luconi’s advice, cancer or not.
For Luconi, planning Rapid7’s layoff was “gut wrenching,” she said in an interview at the company’s office over the TD Garden. “My whole career has been growth stories and companies that have performed well.”
Thomas, who has run Rapid7 since 2012, brought doughnuts for the hospital staff but drew the ire of Luconi’s doctors for erasing the medical care info on her room’s whiteboard to sketch out the layoff strategy.
“I probably could have done without Corey and I whiteboarding how we’re going to do the layoff in my hospital gown,” Luconi said.
“That’s when you know you’ve known someone for too long.”
In the end, the company cut almost 500 people, or 18 percent of its workforce. Employees were notified by email within minutes of the layoff announcement, and Thomas held a series of town hall meetings with Rapid7’s offices around the world. HR staff reached out to laid-off employees that day.
Still, there were glitches. Some laid-off workers said they did not get a personal call, and email and Slack access were cut off immediately, leaving no time to hand off customer projects. “I understood what was going on and followed their prescribed process and then moved on,” said Jeff Foresman, a former vice president in Rapid7’s advice and consulting business.
Luconi, 55, has been a fixture on the Boston startup scene for more than two decades, advising CEOs, sitting on boards, and influencing
what she prefers to call “the people side” of corporate culture (instead of HR). A veteran of six local startups, including two that she cofounded, Luconi has a career that is a window into the Boston tech scene’s evolution.
“I can’t say enough about her — she’s phenomenal,” Jason Ray, cofounder and CEO of Boston software startup Paperless Parts, said. Luconi has advised Ray on everything from establishing a positive culture and attracting a diverse workforce to navigating his company’s first layoffs. And she’s not afraid to deliver tough advice.
Thomas and Luconi have been close since she joined Rapid7, when Thomas was chief operating officer and the company had only about 75 employees. She hadn’t stayed at a company for more than four years before joining Rapid7 in 2011. And she tried to quit when the company went public in 2015. But Thomas appealed to her competitive streak (”get us to a couple of thousand people and then you can claim victory and leave,” she recalled him saying) and got her to stay.
Rapid7 was Luconi’s second stint at a cybersecurity firm, reflecting that sector’s growing influence on the Boston tech scene. Back when Luconi graduated from George Washington University in the 1990s, Boston was awash with consulting firms. Arthur D. Little was helping clients invent new tech, while Bain & Co and Boston Consulting Group were conquering the Fortune 500.
She started at CSC Index, a tech consulting firm her father had helped start in the 1960s, as a recruiter. After four years, she wanted to run her own HR department and connected with Jerry Greenberg and Stuart Moore, a pair of consultants at Cambridge Technology Partners who had started their own firm called Sapient.
They hired Luconi in 1996 and she helped the firm grow from 150 people to almost 3,500. But, again after four years, she was ready to move on, this time to start a family.
Luconi had never overseen a layoff before last year, in part because she stepped back from full-time work at Sapient in 2000, just as the internet bubble was about to burst. Taking time off to have children (she has two adult daughters now), Luconi mainly did consulting for startups for the next few years. Back at Sapient, amid the internet downturn, three rounds of layoffs hit hard.
One of the startups Luconi encountered while consulting was a cybersecurity firm called @Stake. The firm was a pioneer in hiring nontraditional hackers who wouldn’t usually be found doing corporate cybersecurity work. Among the staff was Peiter Zatko, better known as the hacker Mudge, who later worked for Twitter and blew the whistle on weak security at the social network in 2022 after being let go.
Luconi’s first encounter with the @Stake staff was in a warehouse-like office in Watertown. Venture capital firm Battery Ventures hired Luconi to assess the startup’s viability for investing. “I walked in and they were drinking beer and watching porn at, like, 10 o’clock in the morning, and I thought, what in the hell am I doing here,” she recalled.
But the hackers impressed her with brilliant cybersecurity tactics and a vision for growing the company. She recommended Battery invest — and took a job as the startup’s chief people officer.
In 2004 the firm was bought by Symantec, the California cybersecurity giant, and Luconi decided not to stick around. She went back to consulting and raising her kids, and also tried her hand at e-commerce for a few years.
She started a company called Pinkloops and Poochie, after imaginary friends she dreamed up as a child; the online business sold children’s furniture that she hand-painted.
In 2011, a former @Stake colleague working at Rapid7 reached out. She met then-CEO Mike Tuchen, but was more impressed with Thomas, then the chief operating officer. At first she was hesitant to join another cybersecurity company (“trying to explain to my mother what our company did was brutal,” she said) but Thomas won her over.
Immediately, they set to work building a supportive corporate culture. One tactic to encourage collaboration was the awarding of Rapid7-branded guitar picks. Any employee could give another employee a guitar pick with a short explanation of why. At the end of every quarter, the company selected a few of the most outstanding pick recipients for larger recognition, and a small stuffed animal moose, Rapid7’s adopted mascot.
Another innovation was dubbed the “insight coffee.” Any Rapid7 employee can ask another employee, right up to the CEO, to step out for a 30-minute coffee break. Afterward, employees post selfies and takeaways in a dedicated “insight coffee” Slack channel that the whole company can see. New hires have to set up a coffee as part of their first week’s activities.
Prioritizing a diverse workforce was also a must. In 2018, Rapid7 committed to reach 50 percent women and people of color by 2020. Though they got to 49.7 percent, Luconi and Thomas chose not to round up and say the goal had been met.
“We could have claimed victory but didn’t, because we thought, we don’t want this to be a project,” Luconi explained. “This is part of our culture. This is part of who we are. And we’ll never be done.”
Since getting her cancer diagnosis over the summer, Luconi has taken time off for chemotherapy sessions but continued in her role.
Cancer hasn’t stopped Luconi’s other work around Boston, either. On the board of nonprofit Hack. Diversity, which helps train Black and Latino workers for tech jobs, Luconi chaired the search committee for a new CEO, eventually recruiting former Topeka, Kan., mayor Michelle De La Isla.
“She somehow balanced caring for herself while continuing the work, helping lead us to finding a new, amazing leader for this important Boston institution,” fellow board member and Boston VC Jeff Bussgang said.
After multiple rounds of chemotherapy and an upcoming bone marrow transplant, Luconi’s prognosis is good.
“I have a purpose,” Luconi said. “I have a company that I care deeply about . ... I have an amazing set of doctors and nurses, and I live two miles from the hospital. If I’m going to get cancer, it’s about as good as it can get.”