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Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a segment where you were finding traction from a size point of view or any other segmentation parameter?

Kris Duggan: I would say that initially when I first started the company, I thought this might be for companies that are not too big. Maybe if you’re a thousand or ten thousand people, you need Workday or SuccessFactors. What I found was that even these large enterprises have real, major challenges around driving adoption around goals.

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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you highlight what was different in the commercial product versus the open source product? From a product positioning point of view, why would somebody who was interested in the open source product buy this one?

Mikko Valimaki: I would say there are three reasons. Some of our biggest customers were very hesitant to use open source. When we said that this software is no longer open source, there was more demand for it from big companies who didn’t actually want to share all the source code of their own product. We didn’t know about this kind of stuff. Then of course, we started to develop all the new features. It was technically much better. >>>

Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to Badgeville?

Kris Duggan: It’s still going on. It’s growing and moving forward. Once you have a founding CEO replacement, there’s a lot of turmoil brought in by the CEO that was brought in. Now, they’re on to their third CEO. Those kind of challenges can be very disruptive to a company’s growth.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept of Betterworks?

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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were they willing to pay if you had a good website and if you had a company?

Mikko Valimaki: We were able to get some of our very first money just by basically consulting and helping some of the first commercial users. For that, we improved the website a little bit. We tried to make it look like it was a company.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a very different question. There are certain things that customers are willing to pay for and certain things that customers are not willing to pay for. The question I’m asking you is were you able to pick up that these customers were willing to pay if you were set up to look and act professional like a real business. >>>

Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after WebEx? Did you stay until when WebEx was acquired by Cisco?

Kris Duggan: I left right around that time – a little after the IPO until right after the acquisition. After that, I was invited to join a DFJ-funded company to run sales globally. It was called Social Tech. It was an early stage company that had about 20 people. That was my first sales leadership role. I did that for three years. I had a really good run with the company but I really wanted to get more involved in starting something and that’s what drove me to Badgeville.

During my transition, I actually ended up getting involved with a company called Palantir. Palantir, obviously, has a very successful track record and is probably one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley. I joined them when they were quite young and was involved in helping them think about their go-to-market and sales strategy. All of that helped me prepare to start my own company, which was Badgeville. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this happening?

Mikko Valimaki: This happened in 2008.

Sramana Mitra: The first order of business was to get an open source product going right?

Mikko Valimaki: We thought this whole thing through and we figured out that it cannot be a big enough business for us to grow this company really big. One of the first things we did was figuring out a company name. This current name Tuxera was launched in 2009. At the same time, we did two other things. After spending several months with Microsoft, we finally made this background IP license with Microsoft so that we could legally develop Microsoft filesystems. >>>

Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Kleiner invested $15 million in Bettelworks on a concept. It’s an unusual financing that only experienced entrepreneurs can pull off. Read how Kris is building the company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Kris Duggan: I was born in Australia. My parents are Australian. When I was five, we moved to Texas because my dad had an opportunity to relocate with the chemical company that he worked for. I grew up in Houston and actually went back to Australia for a year but then, ultimately, moved to California for most of high school and college. That was in Southern California. About 15 years ago, I moved up to Northern California. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

In our effort to bring you stories from the global startup ecosystem, here we introduce you to a wonderful success story from Finland.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Mikko Valimaki: I’m a 39-year-old guy from Finland. I did my schooling in Finland. I did, however, study in Berkeley in the United States and was exposed to the American culture. I’ve never worked for any big company. I always started my own stuff. I had already developed my own computer games back in the 1990s while at high school. I tried to sell those.

After university, I tried to found my own company. I tried several things. We had one database startup back in 2001. The product is still selling but that broke up perhaps because of personal issues with the other founders. That was one of my first success stories. There were some other companies as >>>