At FirstRain we often get together on Fridays for happy hour, or lunch, or birthday cake – something to bring the California team together. (Note in New York it seems we meet in bars – hmmm… cultural difference there between engineering/finance and sales).

This Friday was the closest to Halloween and so we broke up into randomly assigned teams for a pumpkin carving contest; it was great fun and an eye opener. I discovered one of my brilliant architects who grew up in China had never carved a pumpkin before but he carved a mean spider. And our controller has a sense of humor! And our analytics team manager is really competitive and willing to get very sticky to carve fast.

My final challenge – before everyone feasted – was to judge and not favor my team’s result. The winner: a bull and a bear carved into the leftmost pumpkin here.