On Zendesk’s push into India

It’s late September and Morten Primdahl, Zendesk’s CTO, has flown into India for a week of conferences and meetings with journalists to roll out the opening of the company’s office in the country.

He explains that India is the customer service software company’s biggest focus for 2017. Why? Because of its businesses of many sizes, fast-growing economy, and an increasing awareness of why good customer service is necessary.

“India is our top priority for 2017,” Morten says.

The new office will be led by KT Prasad, who is also Zendesk’s country sales director in India. Sandie Overtveld, Zendesk’s vice president of sales for APAC, has arrived from Singapore and also joins us at the meeting.

Small start

Zendesk had its beginnings in a loft in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007.

“It started off with a year-and-a-half of building our product,” Morten says. “Customer service was rudimentary before that – it was really terrible.”

Startups were new to Denmark and there wasn’t much support for those building companies – much less investors. “Funding in Denmark was nonexistent,” Morten says. “We lived off nothing for two years. We didn’t know much about project organization either – how do you structure managers? Vice presidents? And still give them freedom to be creative?”

“If something doesn’t work, you should throw it out and start over.

But with good feedback from early customers, the team was able to finetune their product. Soon, Zendesk was being propositioned by investors from Silicon Valley. When they got the opportunity in 2009, the team shifted over there.

Morten explains that the depth of experience that Silicon Valley managed to tightly pack into one space was an integral part of Zendesk’s growth.

He points out a few things, like the Valley’s focus on creating excellent products, adding that product development was a new idea in Denmark at the time.

Another was an important piece of advice: kill your darlings.

“If something doesn’t work, you should throw it out and start over. Sometimes things are just broken and you need to scrap them,” says Morten. “That’s a Silicon Valley mindset that we really embraced.”

Finding talent

Not all was rosy working out of Silicon Valley, of course. Engineering talent was hard to find. “When you’re competing against Google or Facebook, it can be tough,” says Morten.

Local competitors

India-specific