Zendesk - Help Desk 2.0

Following my long-due update on Pageflakes here’s an update on what I’ve been doing since I’ve left Pageflakes. After spending some time with my family at a beautiful place in the sun, I started to look for new opportunities (to be perfectly honest I of course couldn’t resist researching new ideas while we were still on Barbados. Caribbean beaches and a DSL connection, what more can you ask for?). For various reasons I wasn’t yet ready to start my own thing again so I started to look for existing early-stage companies where I could come in as an angel investor and advisor. To some degree I “went to the dark side” (of funding) as it’s sometimes referred to but I’m really trying to be worthy of the term “angel” investor by really trying to help my companies in many different ways.

The first company I’ve made an investment in is Copenhagen-based Zendesk, founded in 2007 by a rock-star team around CEO Mikkel Asger Svane. This is no new news since it was announced last June and covered by Om Malik and others but I still wanted to blog about it here. If you don’t know Zendesk yet, the company offers a beautifully simple yet powerful on-demand help desk solution. You can buy and operate the system online and never have to worry about downtime, upgrades, security, backup or training. Setup is extremely easy and you can be up and running in hours.

Any business that serves more than a handful of customers needs a help desk solution in order to handle customer questions and support requests. Existing solutions are expensive, painfully difficult to set up and hard to use. Zendesk combines a professional-grade feature set with a beautifully simple Ajax-based user interface that resembles everyday web applications. If you want to have more productive and happier customer agents and want to save money along the way, check it out!