Our North Star

In the 15 years since its founding, Zendesk has been a leader in product innovation and a steadfast champion of putting customers at the center of every business, including our own.

Zendesk’s original vision was to create “beautifully simple” software, enabling businesses to have easy interactions and act on customer feedback. Recalling the early days, co-founder Mikkel Svane wrote in his book Startupland: “We called every company that signed up for a new trial and asked how they were doing. We prided ourselves on being casual, not trying to sell, but trying to build a relationship.”

This focus on building customer relationships has been a mainstay over the years and continues to be.

Change, iteration, and evolution are ever-present, but the beliefs that Zendesk was founded upon remain core to the company’s DNA. This dedication to making continuous improvements, to ongoing product innovation and customer success also resonated with us, as new partners from Permira and Hellman & Friedman LLC, which lead a consortium of investors that recently acquired Zendesk.

Today, our co-founder Mikkel Svane, a visionary leader, announced that he is stepping down as CEO, but I want to assure you that our collective vision and North Star remain steady. I am honored to step in as interim CEO, in addition to serving on Zendesk’s Board of Directors, to provide continuity for our customers and Zendesk employees.

Zendesk’s commitment to our customers and the broader market is unwavering: We remain dedicated to keeping customers at the center of our business and providing an ever-growing set of powerful and easy-to-use capabilities to enable transformative customer experiences for your customers.