Heini Zachariassen

Who they are

Heini Zachariassen is founder of Vota — previously built Vivino from a bootstrapped Copenhagen startup into a 50M-user wine app and marketplace, and before that co-founded BullGuard, a cybersecurity company, in 2002.

Person

Heini studied economics and business administration at a Danish university, then went straight into founding — co-founding Virus112, a cybersecurity firm, in 1999 as CTO, then BullGuard, an antivirus software company, in 2002, which he ran as CEO through 2008. In 2010 he co-founded Vivino with Theis Søndergaard in Copenhagen when it was a pre-seed mobile app with negligible revenue; he built it into the world's largest wine app, reaching 50M+ users and raising over $220M in funding, serving as CEO before stepping back to Chief Evangelist and Board Member. He's now founder of Vota, a community-driven restaurant ratings platform. Alongside the employed track he ran Raw Startup, a YouTube series giving entrepreneurs practical advice. He writes actively on LinkedIn and for Entrepreneur.com — startup success and failure, fundraising, MVP thinking, and the outsider's perspective in business — and has spoken at SXSW 2018, the Global Class Podcast, the Secret Leaders Podcast, and the Italian Wine Podcast, among others. The through-line is serial founding across completely different industries: security software in the late 1990s, wine tech in the 2010s, restaurant discovery now — each time as an outsider who treated that outsider status as an advantage.

Network

Heini co-founded Vivino with Theis Søndergaard, his closest named collaborator. He also serves on the board of Smitten, a company he invested in, extending his network into early-stage Nordic consumer tech. No other named network connections surface from the available claims.

Theis Søndergaard· Co-founder of Vivino

How they likely show up

Serial founding across three distinct industries (cybersecurity, wine, restaurants) → comfortable operating in domains where he has no prior insider credentials — treats unfamiliarity as a feature, not a liability.
Built Vivino from pre-seed to 50M+ users and $220M+ raised → able to think across very long arcs, not just early-stage sprints.
Active public writing on LinkedIn and Entrepreneur.com on startup failure as well as success → likely candid about what went wrong, not just what went right; expects the same directness in conversation.
Raw Startup YouTube series on entrepreneurship advice → comfortable teaching and synthesising; probably enjoys pulling out the generalisable lesson from a specific experience.
Heavy podcast and conference circuit (SXSW, Global Class, Secret Leaders, Italian Wine Podcast) → experienced in distilling complex company stories for different audiences; won't need much warming up.
Role-type pattern is consistently founder, never hired executive → likely operates with high autonomy, sets his own agenda, and may be impatient with bureaucratic or consensus-heavy processes.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific podcast episode or article he's written — he produces a lot of content and will notice if you've actually engaged with it versus name-dropped the brand.
→ Ask about failure as readily as success — his public writing explicitly covers startup failure, and he'll engage more authentically if you don't just want the highlight reel.
→ He frames the Vivino story around being an outsider in a $400 billion industry — lean into that framing rather than treating wine-tech as an obvious idea in hindsight.
→ He's now building Vota; don't let the conversation anchor entirely on Vivino — show curiosity about what he's solving now and why restaurant ratings after wine.
→ He's Copenhagen-based and has spoken publicly about Danish startup culture — regional context lands well with him.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on Vota — he's moved from wine to restaurant ratings, and asking what made him want to apply the Vivino community-ratings playbook to restaurants is a specific, flattering, and genuinely open question.
Reference the 'outsider advantage' framing he used on the European Startup Show ('How I Built a Billion Dollar Company as an Outsider') — it's his own language and signals you've done more than skim his LinkedIn.
Mention Raw Startup, his YouTube entrepreneurship series — it's a side project most people overlook, and raising it shows you've gone beyond the Vivino headline.

Discovery questions

Vivino entered a market with 600 wine apps already — what was the specific insight that made you think the 601st would win, and does that same logic apply to what you're building at Vota?
You've founded companies across cybersecurity, wine, and now restaurant discovery — how much does domain knowledge actually matter versus the founding instinct, and does your answer change with experience?
Raw Startup was aimed at giving entrepreneurs honest advice — what's the one thing founders most consistently get wrong that you kept having to repeat?

Avoid

Don't treat Vivino as the obvious success it looks like in retrospect — he's spoken publicly about entering a crowded market as a non-expert, and framing it as inevitable will flatten the conversation immediately.

Make it yours