Zendesk announced today that it was walking away from the proposed $4.1 billion deal to buy Momentive, the owners of SurveyMonkey, after stockholders rejected the deal. The announcement comes just two weeks after the company spurned a $17 billion takeover offer by private equity firms.
Officially the company announced it this way: “Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today announced that it has terminated the Agreement and Plan of Merger by and among Zendesk, Milky Way Acquisition Corp., and Momentive Global Inc. (NASDAQ: MNTV), after it did not receive the approval of its stockholders to adopt the proposal to issue shares of Zendesk common stock in connection with the proposed transaction at the Stockholder Meeting held on February 25, 2022.”
It had to be a tough blow to CEO and founder Mikkel Svane, who saw SurveyMonkey and the broader Momentive business as a way to push the company’s core customer service focus into a wider customer experience market. Nonetheless, he put as positive a spin as he could in a blog post announcing the result of the shareholder vote.
“We planned to acquire Momentive as a way to …
