Last year it was a difficult one for Zendesk, with several months of uncertainty. But the company appears to have emerged from that instability, no worse, with a new private equity owner and a new CEO to lead it into its next phase.
The customer service software company started in 2007 and raised more than $85 million along the way. for crispy base. It went public seven years later and grew to more than $1 billion in revenue. Everything was pretty quiet until last year.
The avalanche of worrying news began innocently enough in February 2022, when Zendesk rejected a $17 billion takeover offer. He thought the offer was too light, and in a TechCrunch+ analysis, we agreed it was the right decision. It seemed to be worth much more.
Later that month, Zendesk’s own investors rejected a $4.1 billion offer to buy SurveyMonkey, a deal that was supposed to not only generate more revenue but also help it advance the adjacent field of customer experience. Investors were not convinced.
After two failed deals in less than a month, it didn’t take long for activist investor Jana Partners to start snooping around and They were not happy, not a bit. By June, investors were criticizing the stock, upset with the company’s direction. While it defiantly promised to remain private, by the end of the month it had agreed to be sold to an investment group led by Permira and Hellman & Friedman for $10.2 billion—considerably less, as will be noted, than the deal it rejected the previous year. February.
Veteran CEO and co-founder Mikkel Svane resigned in November and is a veteran of the customer service software industry. Tom Eggemeier was brought replace him, first as interim CEO and eventually permanently.
After all that turbulence, it would be easy to think that overall financial performance had suffered as a result, but as you’ll see, that wasn’t really the case. We sat down with Eggemeier to find out how he steadied the ship and got the company back on track.
Stand up and deliver
Let’s start by examining Zendesk’s market share numbers. According to Gartner, the company is firmly in fourth place in the customer service market, the same place it held the previous year. So even after all that drama, its market position did not change, proving that even in times of economic and business instability, Zendesk was able to maintain its position and, more importantly, its customers.
