Yu-Kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou is an author, consultant and international keynote speaker on gamification and behavioral design. He is the original creator of the design framework, Octalysis, and author of the book, “Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards”. He is the President of The Octalysis Group and has been a regular speaker and lecturer on gamification worldwide, including such organizations as Stanford University, Accenture, TEDx, SxSW, Gamified India, Huawei, the Innovation Center in Denmark, Kingdom of Bahrain, and many more.

Yu-kai was one of the earliest pioneers in gamification, starting his work in the industry in 2003. In 2014, Yu-kai was rated “#1 on the Gamification Gurus Power 100” by UK-Based Rise.Global, and was awarded “Gamification Guru of Year” in 2014 and 2015 by the World Gamification Congress based in Spain. He has helped a variety of companies, from seed stage startups to Fortune 500 companies such as LEGO, eBay, Google, Huawei, Fidelity, AIG Japan, Verizon, HP, Cisco, Wells Fargo, and more. His work has been featured in many publications such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The World Journal, Business Insider, and PBS.

Prior to The Octalysis Group, Yu-kai was a partner at the Enterprise Gamification Consultancy, where he advised Fortune 500 companies on applying gamification to the internal employee motivation strategies. He was also founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley based technology startup RewardMe, bringing gamification and digital loyalty programs into offline retail and restaurants. RewardMe was ranked one of the top ten Companies to Watch by AlwaysOn, and received a top three ranking from the first location-based service award “The Locals.”

Between 2007-2010, Yu-kai was co-founder and CEO of Viralogy, which was a social media ranking tool that aimed to rank how influential people are on the Internet. This “Leaderboard” service was enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of bloggers and social media elites. The data also helped empower social recommendation engines for large ecommerce sites to personalize experiences and optimize conversions.

Prior to Viralogy, Yu-kai Chou was the CEO of Future Delivery, which utilizes the power of gaming to help companies such as Disney recruit better talent, and help Gen-Y talent turn their career growth into a game. One of their web IPs, FDCareer, was rated on Mashable as a top ten social network for Gen-Ys. Yu-kai received a BA in International Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a specialized interest in behavioral economics.

Yu-kai is on the board of directors of Morf Media, a gamified training and learning platform. He is also a board advisor for many organizations and companies through out North America, Europe, and Asia, including BALANCE Edutainment (the creators of Pacha’s Pajamas), Loki Studios (the creators of Geomon – later sold to a Yahoo), The Catch (a gamified dating site), and Lucky Diem.

Yu-kai is a follower of Christ. His hobbies include playing and teaching chess, writing and playing string quartet pieces, writing Chinese novels, and rating high quality movies – though he rarely has time for these hobbies.