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Foreword
By Alexia Tsotsis
For the citizens of today's Startupland, anything is possible: You can order a car, a sandwich, and even a drone from your phone. You can even subscribe to an on-demand service that manages all of your other on-demand services.
As incumbent companies across all sectors continue to value immediate financial returns over innovation, our VC-backed pocket of the universe continues to throw money at small startups trying to solve big problems, or small problems. Silicon Valley can at times seem like an entirely different planet: Startupland.
While the back of the napkin statistic is that 90 percent of startups never make it out of Startupland, we're all struggling in overpriced housing and office buildings hoping to be in the narrow part of the bell curve. “It's only a bubble if it bursts,” we whisper to ourselves while we click away at our keyboards.
Chronicling his entrepreneurial journey from the first Internet bubble to the current period of exuberance, Mikkel Svane's Startupland is a unique tale of a Dane who just wanted to demystify enterprise software with his accessible, design-savvy help desk in the cloud.
I most likely met Svane at one of the multitudes of startup launch parties or at a ubiquitous conference cocktail hour. But I got to know him the best as the subject of an onstage interview I conducted at Le Web 2012, a full year after I had written a post describing the $3.4 billion SAP/SuccessFactors acquisition as “boring.”
What impressed me the most about Svane was his reluctance to show fear when asked about Salesforce's ‘Assistly’ buy, which within a month would be turned into the Salesforce Zendesk competitor Desk.com. He also indicated in the interview that Zendesk had had an acquisition offer for 100 million dollars, which he turned down. Bold. Svane later told me that he believed I was “the voice of a generation” when I called the SAP acquisition by SuccessFactors “boring.” Ha!
But in a way it makes sense. Svane is a big proponent of adjusting the branding of enterprise software when you're selling direct to consumers. Also, he understood what I was getting at artistically in that pretty controversial post: You cannot build a successful next-generation enterprise company without appealing to the people doing the buying nowadays, the
