Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

7Enter Marketing

“Chris, sales is my customer.”

—Denise Persson

I GREW UP in Sweden. My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a teacher. I didn’t grow up with people talking business around the table. But education was important to them, and I’m grateful for that. My parents urged me to do well in school and go on to college to earn a business degree. But it was my only sibling, my sister, who exposed me to the business world at a young age. She is eight years my senior and began working in marketing and advertising while I was in high school. I often went to her office after school to do homework. She subscribed to Resumé—the Swedish marketing communications news magazine. Every week I rushed to her office to read the next edition. I read it from cover to cover, learning about the different campaigns companies relied on for their success. It drew me in and inspired me to become a career marketer.

After I graduated from Stockholm University, I joined the conferencing software company Genesys in 1996. My sister had a close friend who was a sales manager there and talked me into joining when it was just a startup. It was the mid-1990s and the highly coveted jobs back then in Sweden were at large companies. Joining a startup right out of college influenced my career heavily. I spent 12 years at Genesys, bouncing from Sweden to France and then eventually settling in the United States. During that time, I ascended to my ultimate role at the company as executive ...