I grabbed a quick coffee with Zendesk founder CEO Mikkel Svane and his Australian manager Michael Hansen in Sydney yesterday where they told me about the company’s story to date.
While I’ll be writing in the interview up in depth in the next few days one thing that stood out was Mikkel’s comment about Zendesk being a good internet citizen.
Those traits of being a good online corporate citizen include open APIs, a transparent culture and giving customers full access to their data.
Online companies have to embrace those principles if they are going to succeed and it’s the key to the fast growth of businesses like Zendesk and other cloud based services.
These principles have been the underpinning of the success of companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google.
What’s interesting with those companies is how they’ve moved away from those principles as they’ve grown and the pressures to ‘monetize’ have increased.
Abandoning those principles opens opportunities for many new players to disrupt the businesses of what have become the market incumbents.
With the pace of business accelerating, the assumption that companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter will retain their positions might be tested as the market moves to providers they can trust.
Those principles of being a good internet citizen may prove to be more important to online businesses than many of their managers and investors believe.