Mikkel Svane | |
Birth Date: | 1971[1] |
Birth Place: | Copenhagen, Denmark |
Education: | Bachelor's in Economics |
Occupation: | Entrepreneur and author |
Employer: | Zendesk |
Notable Works: | Startupland |
Founder |
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.
Svane was born in Copenhagen, Denmark[3] in 1971. He became interested in computer programming when he was 11 years-old. As a child, he created basic computer games.[2] He served in the Danish military[4] and earned a degree in economics in the early 1990s.
After college, Svane started a business creating stereograms. He authored a book and created software to help others make stereograms themselves. Svane also created a website for free news and event listings called Forum.dk. Forum.dk was purchased by a newspaper, but Svane retained ownership of the software that ran it.
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. Caput went out of business as a result of the crash following the dot-com bubble. In 2002, Svane got his first traditional job when he was recruited as General Manager at a German business consulting firm called Materna. He left that position in the Summer of 2005 and started doing his own freelance consulting work.
Svane was in his mid-30s when he founded Zendesk with two of his friends, Alexander Aghassipour and Morten Primdahl.[5] Initially, the founders funded the company themselves, while working consulting gigs on the side. They developed the software in Svane's apartment in Copenhagen, Denmark.[6]
Svane moved the company to California in 2009. Svane led the company's ongoing expansion and its initial public offering in 2014.[7] 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." The book details Svane's early work creating the company and raising venture capital. 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.[8] On November 28, 2022, Svane stepped down as CEO of Zendesk.[9]