If Startupland was a love letter to the opportunity and energy of building from nothing, Startupland Redux is a ransom note revealing the price.

Ten years after taking Zendesk public, Mikkel Svane had created $10 billion in wealth. In this brutally honest and oddly funny sequel, Svane reveals the hidden cost of building at scale: the addiction to power, the loneliness at the top, and the forces—activist investors, private equity, ego—that dismantle everything. He exposes what nobody tells you about leading a public company and why the hardest parts aren’t about building the business but losing what you thought you had. A dark reckoning for anyone who’s chased success and discovered it wasn’t built to last.