Startupland. Svane Mikkel

Startupland - Svane Mikkel


Скачать книгу
>

      Mikkel Svane

      Startupland

      Startupland

      HOW THREE GUYS RISKED

      EVERYTHING TO TURN AN IDEA

      INTO A GLOBAL BUSINESS

      Mikkel Svane

      Carlye Adler

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

      Copyright © 2015 by Zendesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

      Published by Jossey-Bass

      A Wiley Brand

      One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594 —

      www.josseybass.com

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of~the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

      Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.

      Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact~Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002.

      Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

      ISBN 978-1-118-98081-1 (hardcover),

      ISBN 978-1-118-98085-9 (epdf),

      ISBN 978-1-118-98086-6 (epub)

      For the citizens of Startupland.

      Foreword

      By Alexia Tsotsis

      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 idea – essentially a more streamlined version of Materna's offerings – he got a similar response: “The most boring thing ever.”

      Svane distills these reactions as an actual green light for a good startup idea – pick 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


Скачать книгу