After an inspirational trip to San Francisco in 1995 Mikkel launched what was one of Denmark’s first horizontal community portals. Less than a year later the portal was acquired by a Danish newspaper and Mikkel founded Caput, a software company specializing in standard software components for community building and social networks. Serving as its CEO until 2002 he became General Manager for the German service management consulting group Materna. His tenure there reunited him with former friends and colleagues Morten Primdahl and Alexander Aghassipour with whom he founded Zendesk and launched it in October 2007. Mikkel holds a BSc(Econ) in Market Economics from Denmark, is a frequent Twitter user and loves spending time with his wife and kids when not working with his awesome team and Zendesk customers.
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Prior to Zendesk, Alan served as CEO of Intelliden, Inc., a technology company that he successfully sold to IBM in 2010. Previously, Alan was Managing Director for EMEA Operations in London for Openwave Systems, Inc., a company he took public as CFO in a highly successful initial public offering in 1999. Alan holds a bachelor’s degree in business and a post-graduate diploma in public accountancy from McGill University. An avid sports participant and fan, Alan has been actively involved as a volunteer coach, referee, and executive volunteer for the American Youth Soccer Organization.

Rick has more than 20 years of high-tech financial experience, with both public and venture-backed companies. Prior to joining Zendesk, he was CFO at Brix Networks, sold to EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering in 2008 and VP of Finance and Administration of Yantra Corporation, sold to Sterling Commerce in 2005. Rick earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and accounting from the College of the Holy Cross. He is a member of both the American Institute and Massachusetts Society of CPAs.

Adrian leads Zendesk’s Product Management, Engineering and Operations teams. Prior to Zendesk he was CTO at Attributor and, as general manager, ran the video compliance business from first customer sales to business unit acquisition. Previously he was the VP of Engineering for Plumtree/BEA where he started as the first engineer hired by Plumtree and worked through the Plumtree IPO and subsequent acquisition by BEA. Prior to Plumtree Adrian worked as an itinerant software consultant in London, Hong Kong, Sydney and Guam. He has a 1st Class Honours Degree in Computer Science from De Montfort University.

Bill leads up our global marketing efforts and brings a focus of data driven, hyper-growth strategies. Prior to Zendesk, Bill served as SVP of Online Marketing & Operations for Salesforce.com where he helped grow revenues from $1B to $3B. Much of Bill’s 18 year online career has been spent sharpening his marketing craft on the B2C side. At IGN Entertainment, he grew revenues from $11M to $100M which led to IGN being acquired by News Corp for $650M. Bill went on to serve as SVP of Online Marketing for Fox Interactive Media where he ran a centralized online marketing team for IGN, RottenTomatoes, Askmen, MySpace, Foxsports, American Idol and Foxnews generating over 171M monthly unique visitors.

Morten brings to Zendesk a refined focus on the technical details. He’s involved on all technical levels – from the application to the infrastructure components and databases. Prior to co-founding Zendesk, Morten consulted on a number of technology projects, ranging from helping startups establish a technical platform, to doing heavy duty consulting for online banking systems. Morten earned a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Copenhagen.

Alexander leads our efforts to keep clean and elegant design a top priority for product strategy at Zendesk. Prior to founding Zendesk, he consulted with global corporations about design, global strategy, and recruiting. Alex also co-founded Araneum A/S, the largest Danish-owned digital media agency. Alex earned a master’s degree in information technology from the Technical University of Denmark.

As head of our Creative Department, Toke is constantly developing and building the Zendesk brand with his team and keeping our product shiny and Zen. Prior to Zendesk, he was a founding partner of one of the largest pioneering design communities, K10k. Toke was also co-founder and Creative Director at Cuban Council, the design agency responsible for the Facebook identity as well as clients such as NASA, Apple, Top Gear, Lifetime Channel, BBC and Francis Coppola. Having designed digital experiences for more than 17 years, Toke’s quiet ambition is to build the greatest SaaS brand of all time.

Before Zendesk, Mindy headed the IT Applications group at Salesforce, building out technology solutions to support internal business units. Mindy has also served as VP of Operations and Engineering at Edgenuity, a SaaS start-up providing analytics for K-12 education, and had spent over 9 years in various technology and management roles in Cisco. Mindy is a champion for delivering quality and for employing Agile development methodologies. She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, and a bachelors from The Cooper Union.

Amanda’s first interview with Zendesk took place in a bakery. There was no office yet. Soon after, she became Zendesk’s first marketing hire. Since 2009, Amanda has helped grow the marketing team from one to more than 30 employees and the company from 1,000 to 30,000 customers. Prior to Zendesk, she worked on the marketing team for Google’s Enterprise SaaS businesses and led an international IT support team at Agilent Technologies. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and her MBA from Yale School of Management. Online acquisition models, funnel metrics, and user experience top her list of fave conversation starters.

Bio coming soon.

Michael’s responsible for strategic growth in the Asia Pacific region. An IT sales veteran, Michael has more than 20 years experience in a variety of sales and marketing roles spanning the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. Prior to becoming Zendesk’s first employee, Michael was selling help desk projects in Australia. Michael is an army officer who has studied at the Danish Technical University. He tends to be a fan favorite at Zendesk meetups, enjoys scuba diving all over the world, and loves his Ducatis.
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Matt is responsible for growing and supporting the Zendesk customer community in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Since starting his career on the Borland tools helpdesk, Matt has held executive positions in sales, marketing and product in the US and Europe at high-growth software companies such as ATG, Wily Technology and Troux Technologies. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Reading.
Matt is successfully using Zendesk to support his two teenage children: managing tickets for IT support, transport, funding and handling complaints on his dress sense.
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Jim has more than 15 years’ experience building marketing and sales functions at six separate start-ups, including the sales organization at Zendesk. He currently oversees customer acquisition and relationships, including account management, sales operations, account executives, lead qualification, and sales engineering, in North and South America. Jim holds a BS in mechanical engineering with high honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A 15 year veteran of Silicon Valley, JD leads Product, Content, and Event Marketing efforts for Zendesk. Prior to Zendesk, JD held senior management roles in Marketing and Product Management for companies such as ViewCentral, Lyris, and most recently as Vice President of Products at Marketo. Zendesk’s focus on Customer Service reminds him of his days managing customer service efforts at Hotmail, and later Microsoft. When not working, JD can likely be found playing with his daughters or cheering for the Hoosiers of Indiana University, his alma mater where he received a bachelor’s degree.
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Sam leads a team that combines interaction design, product management and analytics to improve the overall product experience at Zendesk. Sam has spearheaded the creation of the Zendesk Benchmark, which enables support teams to compare their key performance with their Zendesk customer peers across industries, countries and sizes. Prior to Zendesk, Sam was VP of Products and Marketing at GoodData, a leading SaaS business intelligence provider, and has spent the last fifteen years guiding innovative technologies to market in startups and bigcos alike: in product leadership positions at Cisco, Blue Titan Software, AT&T and Microsoft.

Conan is responsible for building our ecosystem of technology, delivery and channel partners. Immediately prior to Zendesk, he ran corporate business development for LogMeIn, helping to lead the company to a successful IPO in 2009. Before that, he ran business development for IMlogic and enjoyed a brief stint at its eventual acquirer, Symantec. He started his software career at Plumtree Software as the first BD employee, growing with the company through IPO in 2002. Conan is a Seattle native and a graduate of the University of Washington. He lives in Boston with his wife and two daughters.

John is responsible for managing all legal affairs. Prior to joining Zendesk, John was the General Counsel at Norwest Venture Partners, a venture capital and growth equity firm managing over $3.7 billion in capital. John also practiced law for nearly 14 years at Cooley LLP where as a Partner he focused on the representation of emerging technology companies with respect to corporate governance, public market finance, intellectual property strategy, mergers and acquisitions. John holds an A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

As a partner at Charles River Ventures since 2008, Devdutt Yellurkar’s investment interests include Cloud applications and infrastructure. Previously he was Venture Partner at Rho Ventures and CEO and Co-Founder at Yantra Corporation, which was acquired by Sterling Commerce, a division of AT&T, in 2005.

Peter Fenton joined Benchmark Capital in 2006 after spending seven years as a partner with Accel Partners, where his investment interests included software, digital media, and technology enabled services. Prior to joining the venture capital community, he spent several years working with Silicon Valley software and high-technology companies as an entrepreneur and strategy consultant.

Dana Stalder is a Silicon Valley based general partner at Matrix Partners, where he invests in early stage software and internet companies. Dana joined Matrix in 2008 from PayPal, where he was a senior vice president and managed all business operations, including product, sales, marketing and technology.

Matt Cohler has extensive experience working with great entrepreneurs to build lasting consumer Internet companies, having served in senior management roles at Facebook and LinkedIn. Before LinkedIn, he was a consultant in McKinsey & Company’s Silicon Valley office and worked in Beijing for AsiaInfo, the telecom solutions provider that built China’s Internet infrastructure, prior to the company’s initial public offering.

Christoph Janz, who recently joined early-stage venture capital firm Point Nine Capital as a partner, was Zendesk’s first outside investor. Besides Zendesk, Christoph has invested in a number of other successful SaaS companies such as FreeAgent Central, Clio and Propertybase. Christoph previously co-founded several software and Internet startups, including comparison shopping engine DealPilot and personalized startpage Pageflakes.