Mikkel Svane
Danish author and entrepreneur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mikkel Svane is the co-founder and former CEO of the software company Zendesk. He has written Startupland,[2] documenting his experiences of starting his company.
Early life and education
Career
After college, Svane started a business creating stereograms.[2]: 8 He authored a book and created software to help others make stereograms themselves.[2]: 8–9 Svane also created a website for free news and event listings called Forum.dk.[2]: 11 Forum.dk was purchased by a newspaper, but Svane retained ownership of the software that ran it.[2]: 12–13
The Forum.dk software became the basis of Caput A/S, a startup Svane created in 1996 that sold software to run the websites of media companies.[2]: 12–13 [4] Caput went out of business as a result of the crash following the dot-com bubble.[2]: 15 In 2002, Svane got his first traditional job when he was recruited as General Manager at a German business consulting firm called Materna.[2]: 17 [4] He left that position in the Summer of 2005 and started doing his own freelance consulting work.[2]: 20
Svane was in his mid-30s when he founded Zendesk with two of his friends, Alexander Aghassipour and Morten Primdahl.[3][5] Initially, the founders funded the company themselves, while working consulting gigs on the side.[3][5] They developed the software in Svane's apartment in Copenhagen, Denmark, using an old door as a desk to work upon, which later hung in the Zendesk headquarters as the original 'Zen desk'.[6][7] Svane later said that he became CEO in 2007 because the other two co-founders were busy writing code.[1]
Svane moved the company to California in 2009.[4] Svane led the company's ongoing expansion[3] and its initial public offering in 2014.[4][8] In 2014, Svane published a book about his life and starting Zendesk called "Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business."[4][8] The book details Svane's early work creating the company and raising venture capital.[2] In June 2022, Zendesk was acquired by a group of investment firms including Hellman & Friedman and Permira, in a deal that valued Zendesk at $10.2 billion.[9] On November 28, 2022, Svane stepped down as CEO of Zendesk.[10]