Mikkel Svane cofounded Zendesk in Copenhagen in 2007 with Morten Primdahl and Alexander Aghassipour. Their basic idea was to introduce an intuitive, beautiful, and simple product for the customer service industry, an industry that had been overlooked and neglected for many years. By making a product that is easily accessible and easy to use, they quickly reached a global audience of both small businesses and large enterprises and developed Zendesk's vision of bringing organizations and their customers closer together.
Today, as Zendesk's chairman and CEO, Svane leads a global publicly traded company with customers in 150 countries and products and services that reach hundreds of millions of people. It has changed the entire customer service industry and inspired a new generation of customer-focused companies.
Svane is a twenty-year veteran of the technology industry. Prior to Zendesk, as a technology consultant he became well acquainted with on-premise customer service software—both the long, expensive process it entailed for big businesses and how inaccessible it was for smaller businesses. Before that he was a tech entrepreneur. He founded Caput A/S, which created software for community building and online networking and became a hot startup in Copenhagen, before the dot-com bubble burst and its customers went out of business or stopped investing. In 1995 he launched Denmark's first horizontal community portal, later acquired by a Danish newspaper. He also wrote a book about 3D stereograms based on an algorithm he created.
Svane holds an A.P. in marketing management from Aarhus Koebmandsskole. He lives with his wife and children in San Francisco. He is a frequent Twitter user (@mikkelsvane).
For more information, please visit www.zendesk.com.
Carlye Adler is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. Her writing has been published in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, Newsweek, TIME, and Wired and has been anthologized in The Best Business Stories of the Year. Her latest book collaborations include two New York Times bestsellers: The Promise of a Pencil by Adam Braun and The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. She is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Rebooting Work with Maynard Webb and the national bestsellers Behind the Cloud and The Business of Changing the World with salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. She is also a coauthor with Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith of The Dragonfly Effect. Her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. She lives in New York.
For more information, please visit www.carlyeadler.com.