Heini Zachariassen

Who they are

Heini Zachariassen is Founder of Vota — previously co-founded Vivino, the wine scanning app that reached 50M users, and before that built BullGuard, an antivirus company, in 2002.

Person

Heini studied economics and business administration at a Danish university, then went straight into building things: Virus112, a cybersecurity firm, in 1999 as CTO, then BullGuard, an antivirus company he co-founded in 2002 and ran as CEO through 2008. The pivot from security software to wine is the headline move — in 2010 he co-founded Vivino with Theis Søndergaard from scratch, pre-seed and bootstrapped, just a mobile app with negligible revenue, and built it to 50M+ users and over $220M raised. He served as CEO through 2018, then stepped back to Chief Evangelist and Board Member before leaving to start again. His current company is Vota, a community-driven restaurant ratings platform — the same instinct applied to dining: take crowdsourced opinion and make it the product. He runs a YouTube series called Raw Startup dispensing entrepreneurship advice, writes for Entrepreneur.com and LinkedIn on startup success, failure, and outsider perspectives, and has spoken at SXSW 2018, the Global Class Podcast, and a string of wine industry events. The through-line is taking categories where gatekeepers controlled the knowledge — security, wine, now restaurants — and building the crowd-layer that routes around them.

Network

Heini's closest named collaborator is Theis Søndergaard, his co-founder at Vivino. Beyond that, the public record surfaces podcast and event hosts — Keith Newman (Liftoff), the Global Class team — rather than operational colleagues or investors. His Copenhagen base puts him in the Danish startup scene, though no specific local network names surface from the available claims.

Theis Søndergaard· Co-founder of Vivino

How they likely show up

Three companies founded across three decades (Virus112, BullGuard, Vivino, now Vota) → compulsive builder; likely gets restless inside structures he didn't create.
Went from cybersecurity to wine to restaurants — category-agnostic → bets on the pattern (crowd-sourced knowledge vs. gatekeepers), not the vertical.
Active LinkedIn writer and YouTube series host on entrepreneurship → comfortable processing and broadcasting his own lessons publicly; not a behind-the-scenes operator.
Built Vivino from pre-seed to 50M users over a multi-year arc before stepping back → capable of long-game thinking, but his exit from the CEO seat after 2018 suggests he prefers the founding phase to the scaling-and-managing phase.
Bootstrapped Vivino before raising — first significant funding came only in July 2013 → accustomed to operating lean and making early decisions without institutional backing.

Conversation tips

→ Reference the specific pattern across his companies — security, wine, restaurants — and ask what the common thread looks like from the inside; he's clearly aware of it and will have a formed view.
→ Vivino's origin story (600th wine app in the market, still won) is a set piece he's told on multiple podcasts — acknowledge it briefly, then move to what he learned that he's applying differently at Vota.
→ He writes publicly about startup failure as well as success; it's fine to ask about the hard parts — he won't deflect.
→ Don't treat wine as just a product vertical for him — it's a personal passion as well as a business, so genuine curiosity about the wine side lands better than pure tech-founder framing.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on Vota — he's taken the Vivino crowd-rating model and applied it to restaurants. Ask what's different about building community around dining versus wine; it signals you know what he's working on now, not just what he's famous for.
Mention Raw Startup, his YouTube entrepreneurship series — it's his own media property and a deliberate choice to package his founder lessons outside the VC conference circuit. Worth asking what motivated him to build it.
Reference the '600th wine app' framing from the Unmessable Podcast episode — entering a crowded market and still reaching #1 is the core of his public intellectual identity and a natural door into how he thinks about competitive positioning.

Discovery questions

At Vivino you bootstrapped for years before the first significant raise in 2013 — what did that constraint force you to get right that better-funded competitors got wrong?
Vota is applying crowd-sourced ratings to restaurants, a space Yelp and Google Maps already dominate — what's the wedge, and how does it differ from the moment Vivino entered a market with 600 other wine apps?
Your public writing covers startup failure as much as success — what's a specific thing that broke at Vivino that you've consciously built Vota to avoid?

Avoid

Don't pitch him on the idea that wine or restaurants are niche markets — he built a 50M-user global platform in wine and will have no patience for the assumption that category size is a ceiling.

Make it yours