Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Zendesk, Growing Like Mad, Adds a COO

Zendesk, the Web-based help desk outfit, says its revenue has grown 300 percent in the last year (though it didn’t disclose an amount). It has also tripled its number of business customers, who use it to keep track of help desk calls, to 5,000. Add in iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps, as well as integration with Salesforce.com and Twitter, and Zendesk has touched some 22 million end users, the company says.

No surprise then that it’s beefing up its executive team. Zendesk named Zack Urlocker chief operating officer. Urlocker is currently a former executive in residence at Scale Venture Partners. Before that he was an executive vice president at MySQL, and helped boost its sales to $100 million before it was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

Among the new Zendesk customers are Groupon, OpenTable and Zappos Insights, as well as established brands like Adobe and Sony Music. This news comes on the heels of its $19 million round of funding led by Matrix Partners late last year, along with Charles River Ventures and Benchmark Capital.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik