Kris Duggan

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Kris Duggan (born July 10, 1974) is an Australian-born entrepreneur, advisor, investor, and educator.

During his career, Kris Duggan has advised and invested in a variety of Silicon Valley-based companies, including Palantir Technologies, RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce.com), Addepar, Blend Labs, Turo, and Gusto.

In 2010, Duggan co-founded and was the founding CEO of Badgeville. Badgeville grew to over 100 employees and 300 customers prior to be being acquired by publicly traded CallidusCloud in 2016.

In 2013, Duggan co-founded and was the founding CEO of BetterWorks, an enterprise software company. BetterWorks is funded by Kleiner Perkins (board member John Doerr) and Emergence Capital (board member Jason Green). BetterWorks has almost 100 employees and serves over 250 customers.

Additionally, Duggan is an advisory chair to the Alchemist Accelerator, an organization which facilitates enterprise startups and advises new entrepreneurs.^{[citation needed]} He previously served as an adjunct faculty for Singularity University, and is a frequent speaker on the topics of scaling startups, customer loyalty, gamification, employee engagement, and performance management.^{[citation needed]}

Life and education[]

Kris Duggan was born in Sydney, and grew up in Houston, Texas and then Southern California. He graduated with an MBA in Information Technology from University of California, Irvine. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1999 and resides in Palo Alto with his wife and two sons.

Career[]

WebEx

From 2003 until 2006, Duggan held senior sales management positions with WebEx prior to its acquisition by Cisco for $3.2 billion.^[1][2] The company is currently known as Cisco WebEx, and provides a host of virtual, on-demand collaboration software including web conferencing and videoconferencing.

Socialtext

From 2006 until founding Badgeville, Duggan served as vice president of sales for Socialtext.^[1]

Palantir

From 2009 until 2013, Duggan served as an advisor to Palantir Technologies, assisting with go-to-market strategy and execution.^[1] He developed the company in a number of ways, including expansion into the federal government.^[3]

Badgeville

Kris Duggan co-founded Badgeville in 2010.^[4] During his three-year tenure as CEO, the company raised $40M in capital, including $25M in a third round of funding from InterWest Partners. During this time, the company grew to over 100 employees, and secured over 300 customers.^[5] Known as the Behavior Platform, Badgeville helped business leaders measure and influence behavior in both customer- and employee-facing user experiences.^[6]

Badgeville's customers included Deloitte, EMC, Oracle, Dell, AOL, Samsung, NBC, The Active Network, Recyclebank and Universal Music. The company received numerous awards including TechCrunch Disrupt's Audience Choice 2010,^[7] Forbes America's Most Promising New Companies,^[8] LeWeb's Startup Finalist,^[9] Twiistup's Showoff finalist,^[10] Forrester's Groundswell B2B and B2C,^[11] and Gartner's Cool Vendor in Social CRM.^[12] In its first three years, Badgeville was featured in more than 300 major media publications and outlets including features in the NY Times^[13] and Wall Street Journal.^[14] Publicly traded CallidusCloud acquired the company in 2016, and SAP acquired Callidus in 2018.

Addepar

From 2012 until 2014, Duggan served as an advisor to Addepar, assisting with go-to-market strategy and execution.^[1] During this period, Addepar launched a campaign targeting Registered Investment advisers. Addepar has since gone to raise over $140M in funding.^[15]

BetterWorks

In 2013, Duggan co-founded BetterWorks, a Silicon Valley-based company that provides a cloud-based continuous performance management platform for enterprise companies. BetterWorks is funded by Kleiner Perkins (board member John Doerr) and Emergence Capital (board member Jason Green) and has raised $40M in capital. In 2015, Duggan created the BetterWorks performance tracker smartphone app for the Apple watch.^[16][17] During Duggan’s tenure, BetterWorks raised $15.5M from a group of investors in 2014^[18] and another $20M in Series B funding in 2016.^[19] Duggan and the company made national news in 2015 for switching from typical annual reviews and pay raises to other incentives.^[20][21] In 2017, Duggan commissioned Wakefield Research to conduct a national survey, finding that 87 percent of employees were distracted by reading political social media posts during work.^[22][23][24] Duggan resigned as CEO of BetterWorks in July 2017, and as of February 2018, Duggan was an active board member.

Teaching[]

Kris Duggan is an advisory chair to the Alchemist Accelerator, an organization which facilitates enterprise startups and advises new entrepreneurs. He was also an adjunct faculty member for Singularity University.^[25]

Controversy[]

On July 11, 2017, Beatrice Kim, a former employee of BetterWorks, filed a civil lawsuit in Superior Court in San Francisco against the company, Duggan, and two other employees accusing them of sexual harassment and discrimination.^[26][27][28] Kim's accusations against Duggan in particular included battery and assault.^[26] Duggan denied the allegations. He resigned his position as CEO of BetterWorks on July 26, 2017.^[29] The lawsuit was settled for around $1 million.^[30][31] The claims of sexual misconduct and the controversy surrounding them led to the delayed publication of a book co-written by Duggan; it was later published without his name.^[32]

References[]

External links[]

• Duggan, Kris; Shoup, Kate (23 January 2013). Business Gamification For Dummies. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-46694-0.