Kris Duggan (born July 10, 1974) is an Australian-born entrepreneur, advisor, investor, who co-founded and was the founding CEO of

Badgeville Badgeville, Inc. was a privately held technology company founded in 2010 with headquarters in Redwood City, California, and an additional office in New York City, New York. The firm provided software as a service (SaaS) for web sites to measure and ...

and BetterWorks.

Life and education

Kris Duggan was born in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

, Australia and grew up in

Houston Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...

, Texas and later

Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and Cultural area, cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the second most po ...

. He graduated with an MBA in Information Technology from

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...

. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1999 and now lives in Palo Alto with his wife and two sons.

Career

From 2003 to 2006, Duggan held senior sales management positions with

WebEx Webex by Cisco is an American company that develops and sells web conferencing, videoconferencing and contact center as a service applications. It was founded as WebEx in 1995 and taken over by Cisco Systems in 2007. Its headquarters are in San ...

prior to its acquisition by

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

for $3.2 billion. The company, now known as Cisco WebEx, provides virtual, on-demand collaboration software including web conferencing and videoconferencing. Between 2009 and 2013, Duggan was an advisor to Palantir Technologies, contributing to the company's go-to-market strategy and its expansion into the federal government. Kris Duggan co-founded Badgeville in 2010. Badgeville designs game-based programs for companies to encourage social interaction and track analytics. Badgeville for Salesforce, its CRM gamification application, was launched in September 2012. During his three-year tenure as CEO, the company raised $40 million in capital, including $25 million in a third round of funding from InterWest Partners. In 2013, Duggan co-founded BetterWorks, a Silicon Valley-based company offering a cloud-based continuous performance management platform for enterprise companies. BetterWorks integrates with existing management software to track goals and progress. BetterWorks is funded by Kleiner Perkins (board member John Doerr) and Emergence Capital (board member Jason Green) and has raised $40 million in capital. During Duggan's leadership, BetterWorks raised $15.5 million from a group of investors in 2014 and another $20 million in Series B funding in 2016. In 2015, Duggan developed the BetterWorks performance tracker smartphone app for the Apple Watch. Duggan and the company made national news in 2015 for switching from typical annual reviews and pay raises to other incentives. Duggan resigned as CEO of BetterWorks in July 2017 following allegations of sexual misconduct and battery by an ex-employee. As of February 2018, Duggan was an active board member. Prior to

and BetterWorks, Duggan co-founded Medsphere, a government open-source medical platform, and OzNetwork, an Internet media company. Kris Duggan is an advisory chair to the Alchemist Accelerator, an organization that facilitates enterprise startups and advises new entrepreneurs. He was also an adjunct faculty member for

Singularity University Singularity Education Group (using the public names Singularity Group, Singularity University or SingularityU) is an American company that offers executive educational programs, a business incubator, and business consultancy services. Although ...

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

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Duggan, Kris 1974 births Living people Australian businesspeople Gamification University of California, Irvine alumni