Mikkel Svane

Zendesk early SaaS playbook, "Startupland"

Mikkel Svane co-founded Zendesk in Copenhagen in 2007 and served as its CEO, guiding it from a bootstrapped start-up to a NYSE-listed company before its 2022 private-equity acquisition. He wrote 'Startupland' (2015), a candid account of building a global SaaS business from Denmark. He is closely associated with the playbook of product-led, low-friction customer-support software that defined the first wave of B2B SaaS.