Mikkel Svane

Svane moved the company to California in 2009. Svane led the company's ongoing expansion and its initial public offering in 2014. In 2014, Svane published a book about his life and starting Zendesk called "Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business." The book details Svane's early work creating the company and raising venture capital. In June 2022, Zendesk was acquired by a group of investment firms including Hellman & Friedman and Permira, in a deal that valued Zendesk at $10.2 billion. On November 28, 2022, Svane stepped down as CEO of Zendesk.

The Forum.dk software became the basis of Caput A/S, a startup Svane created in 1996 that sold software to run the websites of media companies. Caput went out of business as a result of the crash following the dot-com bubble. In 2002, Svane got his first traditional job when he was recruited as General Manager at a German business consulting firm called Materna. He left that position in the Summer of 2005 and started doing his own freelance consulting work.

Svane was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1971. He became interested in computer programming when he was 11 years-old. As a child, he created basic computer games. He served in the Danish military and earned a degree in economics in the early 1990s.