Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business

Conventional wisdom says most startups need to be in Silicon Valley, started by young engineers around a sexy new idea, and backed by VC funding. But as Mikkel Svane reveals in Startupland, the story of founding Zendesk was anything but conventional.

Founded in a Copenhagen loft by three thirty-something friends looking to break free from corporate doldrums, Zendesk Inc. is now one of the hottest enterprise software companies, still rapidly growing with customers in 150 countries. But its success was anything but predestined. With revealing stories both funny and frank, Mikkel shares how he and his friends bravely left secure jobs to start something on their own, how he almost went broke several times, how they picked up themselves and their families to travel across the world to California and the unknown, and how the three friends were miraculously still together for Zendesk's IPO and (still growing) success.

Much like Zendesk's mission itself—to remove friction, barriers, and mystery in order to make customer service easier and more approachable—Startupland removes some of the myths about startups and startup founders. Mikkel's advice, hard-won through experience, often bucks conventional wisdom and entrepreneurial tropes. He shares why failure (whether fast or slow) is awful, why a seemingly boring product or idea can be the most exciting, why giving back to the community is as important as the bottom line. From how to hire right (look for people who are not offended by swearing) to which personas generate the highest response rates, Mikkel answers the most pressing questions from the perspective of someone still in the trenches and willing to share the hard truth, warts and all.

While there are books by consultants who tell you how to build businesses, or by entrepreneurs now running billion-dollar businesses, there are few books from people still in the trenches who acutely remember the difficult daily decisions, the thrill (and fears) of the early days, the problems that scale with growing a business, and the reason why they all went on the adventure in the first place. Startupland is indispensable reading for all entrepreneurs who want to make their ideas the next big thing. The book will inspire and empower you to follow your own dream and create your own story.

About the Authors

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.

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.