This startup poached a key Apple engineer to make the Apple Watch a work thing
One company, BetterWorks, isn't waiting. On Wednesday it revealed two bits of its own Apple Watch news:
- It has a new Apple Watch app that puts its main product, an employee review and goal-setting app, on your wrist.
- It poached Apple engineer Jonathan Cheyer, who helped his brother Adam Cheyer build a company called Siri, and moved to Apple after Apple bought Siri in 2010. At Apple, Jonathan was an engineering manager for the Siri team before he moved on to lead a software team for iTunes Radio. Jonathan Cheyer is now BetterWorks' head of engineering.
BetterWorks is one of those Silicon Valley insider companies, filled with a who's-who of backers and founders. Its CEO cofounder is Kris Duggan, who was previously cofounder of Badgeville, the company that turned employee review systems into a "game" where employees can earn badges as they complete goals.
BetterWorks' major financial backer is legendary VC John Doerr, who was so excited about this company that he personally called up Business Insider to talk to us about it when the product launched in late 2014.
That's because BetterWorks is an app version of an employee review system called "objective key results" (OKR) pioneered by Intel's famed early CEO Andy Grove, and used by Google thanks to Doerr. (Doerr was an early investor in Google who has been on Google's board since 1999.)
OKR allows a company to take a "big hairy goal" and break it into parts for every employee, and track how well everyone does, as Doerr described it to us.
This Apple Watch app allows those employee goals to show up on your wrist as you go about your workday.
Here's a demo of this app in action:
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