Chapter 10Going to the Show
Becoming a public company and remembering where we came from
On May 15, 2014—seven years after we started sketching out Zendesk in my apartment in Copenhagen—the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Overnight, on paper, we reached “unicorn” status: we were officially worth more than $1 billion. At one time no one had heard of us; now we were considered the harbinger of what was to come for cloud companies and a new generation of enterprise software players.
Of course, none of this had happened overnight. And the IPO was no exception. It had been an all-consuming process for a very long time.
The IPO process is distracting. It lasts for so many months and takes up so much mental capacity you end up ...
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