Zendesk started in a Copenhagen loft, where three friends wrote help-desk software while paying their bills with consulting work. Customer service tools of the day were heavy, costly, and hard to set up. Zendesk ran in the browser and took minutes to start. By 2014 the company had moved to San Francisco and signed up businesses across the world. It filed to go public as one of the friendliest names in a crowded field of cloud software.

Three Friends, One Loft

Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander Aghassipour founded Zendesk in Copenhagen in 2007. They built the first version in Svane's loft and paid for it themselves. Within a few months of launch it had about 1,000 trial customers. The bet was that support software should feel light. Any team could sign up online, pay by the month, and turn every customer email into a ticket it could track. The founders later moved the company to San Francisco to raise money and grow.

Nine Dollars, Then a Buyout

Zendesk priced its IPO at $9 a share in May 2014 and raised $100 million. The stock opened at $11.40 on the New York Stock Exchange and closed its first day near $13.50. Zendesk kept growing for years. In 2022 it turned down a $17 billion bid, then faced pressure from the activist investor Jana Partners. That November a group led by Hellman & Friedman and Permira took Zendesk private in a $10.2 billion deal, at $77.50 a share.

Cover: Hotei Smoking his Pipe, from The Picture Book of Realistic Paintings of Hokusai, Katsushika Hokusai. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a calm Hotei, the laughing Buddha (zen).