Mikkel Svane From Zendesk On Industry Megatrends And Practical Startup Advice
Here is a story and startup advice from Zendesk, a “startup” from Denmark that has over 25 000 enterprise customers, serving over 100 million people which has raised over $85 million dollars in VC money and has possible plans for IPO this year.
At this years Arctic15, organized by ArcticStartup, Mikkel Svane shared an amazing story of how the company was started over wine and cigarettes The presentation is filled with inspiration from the Zendesk journey that also aims to provide you with some insight of how to build your own startup. Svane also shares his thoughts on the megatrends in the industry as well as the key principles that you can apply to your startup. Without further adieu here is the video:
Zendesk Raises €46.4 Million To Prepare For IPO
Zendesk has raised $60 million (€46.4m) in financing led by Redpoint Ventures, and is joined by Index Ventures, GGV Capital, Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Parnters. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Mikkel Svane said the new round will be used for continuing international expansion and preparing the company for an IPO.
The Danish company calls itself is "the epicenter of a customer service revolution," with more than 15,000 organizations worldwide using Zendesk to support customer relationships. Notable tech customers include Hulu, Yammer, Tumblr, and Groupon.
Check Out This Year's Arctic15 Program And Speakers!
Here we go! We have 12 hot keynote speakers from around the world coming to Arctic15 this October to share their advice in growing scaling businesses. Furthermore, we're only half way there. We'll be seeing 10+ more panelists in August, but we wanted to give you a sneak of the upcoming speakers and our program for this year. In addition to awesome talks, we're going to be hosting the Oohack Open 1, which is Open Ocean Capital's data hackathon on Tuesday th 16th. Lucky developers from the hackathon will get to showcase their hacks on the main stage.
As for the new speakers announced today, we have in no particular order Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, Mikkel Svane, the Founder and CEO of Zendesk, Kristjan Hiiemaa, Founder and CEO of Erply, Nicolai Wadstrom, Founder and CEO BootstrapLabs, Edial Dekker, Co-Founder and CEO of Gidsy as well as Niklas Adalberth, Founder and Deputy CEO of Klarna.
The Zendesk Story, A Moment With Mikkel Svane
I managed to grab 20 minutes of Mikkel Svane's time in LeWeb to interview him on the evolution of Zendesk and some of the thinking they had behind building a world class company in just a few years. Zendesk isn't just your usual startup, if there really even is one. Zendesk very early decided to move its headquarters to the States after raising their second round in 2008. The company focuses in providing the very best help desk solutions online, which only aren't extremely easy to use and integrate, but also beautiful.
Zendesk Gives Back To The Community
We often hear that once you succeed in something or achieve a goal, it's important to give back to the community that helped you get there. But how can you do that in practice? Zendesk, a start-up from Denmark that provides cloud-based help desk software, found their answer: they are opening a new development center in Denmark and are offering a year-long free subscription to their service for start-ups affiliated with certain incubators like Seedcamp, Startupbootcamp, HackFwd, TechStars, Startup Weekend and more. As Mikkel Svane, CEO, commented: 'Having been a small startup ourselves in Denmark, we recognize and are thankful for everyone who helped us along the way'.
