Mikkel Svane - Startupland: how three guys risked everything to turn an idea into a global business

Cover design by Jesse Harding, Bob Galmarini, Toke Nygaard, Paul Capili, and Jeanie Mordukhay

Copyright 2015 by Zendesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

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For the citizens of Startupland.

For the citizens of today's Startupland, anything is possible: You can order a car, a sandwich, and even a drone from your phone. You can even subscribe to an on-demand service that manages all of your other on-demand services.

As incumbent companies across all sectors continue to value immediate financial returns over innovation, our VC-backed pocket of the universe continues to throw money at small startups trying to solve big problems, or small problems. Silicon Valley can at times seem like an entirely different planet: Startupland.

While the back of the napkin statistic is that 90 percent of startups never make it out of Startupland, we're all struggling in overpriced housing and office buildings hoping to be in the narrow part of the bell curve. It's only a bubble if it bursts, we whisper to ourselves while we click away at our keyboards.

Chronicling his entrepreneurial journey from the first Internet bubble to the current period of exuberance, Mikkel Svane's Startupland is a unique tale of a Dane who just wanted to demystify enterprise software with his accessible, design-savvy help desk in the cloud.

I most likely met Svane at one of the multitudes of startup launch parties or at a ubiquitous conference cocktail hour. But I got to know him the best as the subject of an onstage interview I conducted at Le Web 2012, a full year after I had written a post describing the $3.4 billion SAP/SuccessFactors acquisition as boring.

What impressed me the most about Svane was his reluctance to show fear when asked about Salesforce's Assistly buy, which within a month would be turned into the Salesforce Zendesk competitor Desk.com. He also indicated in the interview that Zendesk had had an acquisition offer for 100 million dollars, which he turned down. Bold. Svane later told me that he believed I was the voice of a generation when I called the SAP acquisition by SuccessFactors boring. Ha!

But in a way it makes sense. Svane is a big proponent of adjusting the branding of enterprise software when you're selling direct to consumers. Also, he understood what I was getting at artistically in that pretty controversial post: You cannot build a successful next-generation enterprise company without appealing to the people doing the buying nowadays, the normals. Zendesk was a vanguard company in this regard.

Starting out in Copenhagen, Denmark, Svane has gone from running a 3D Magic Eye software startup to a forums company called Caput (yeah) to Thank You Machine, the company that eventually became Zendesk, to taking Zendesk public with its elegant NYSE symbol $ZEN.

Svane and his cofounder Morten Primdahl came up with the idea for a help desk that you'd love while working at the big German corporate conglomerate Materna. Like my characterization of the SAP SuccessFactors' buy, boring was Morten's initial response to being offered a job at the huge company. Later, when Svane tried to enlist Alexander Aghassipour along for his Zendesk ideaessentially a more streamlined version of Materna's offeringshe got a similar response: The most boring thing ever.

Svane distills these reactions as an actual green light for a good startup ideapick an overlooked industry, something that someone else would find mundane, and go all out. After all, that specific boring idea, Zendesk, is now valued at over $1 billion.

For Svane, the mundane is sexy if you can make something that looks hard seem easy. He and Box's Aaron Levie are the co-captains of the sexy enterprise.

Svane sprinkles his chronological narrative with unexpected business advice for founders, a user's guide to Startupland. He will teach you how to get over a fear of flying by watching YouTube videos on turbulence or explain why you shouldn't party hard on your IPO road show. (A pro-tip given to him by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.)

And, as a model startup citizen, Svane has been through every gritty aspect of entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurs just starting out would be wise to study his journey.

No moment is too humbling in startup life: Taking out a $50,000 line of credit with no savings in order to make payroll and lying to your family through economic instability, startups, even when successful, are not pretty.

And it's often hard to separate press-driven mythology from the reality: Many startups constantly compare their turbulent story to the success parade often featured our blog, TechCrunch. Bootstrapped in the beginning, Zendesk gets rejected from the TechCrunch20 conference and even has my former boss Michael Arrington personally telling Svane to never email us again.

The startup eventually wins a Crunchie for sexiest enterprise startup. Long story short, they eventually get covered on TC, although not exactly in the way they had hoped. Zendesk raises prices, pisses off customers, reads one headline.