I was offered investment many times during my years as an entrepreneur but always with the caveat that I move my company to the West Coast.
At that time, the strongest ecosystem and virtually all of the capital was in Silicon Valley. Zennström: It was very difficult to raise money for Skype and my previous ventures in Europe. Today I do not own any parts of Skype and I am no longer part of the company, but I am still a happy user!įorbes: So now you can do whatever you like so what motivated you to start Atomico? What I am most proud of after all this is that I still hear people’s stories about how Skype changed the way they connect with their family and loved ones abroad. In 2009 my co-founder and I participated in an MBO with Silverlake, and then subsequently Microsoft acquired the company for $8.5 billion. eBay ended up acquiring Skype in September 2005 for $3.5 billion. By January 2005 we already had 20 million active users and were gaining 5 new users every second. We had one million users after the first month.
We launched it in August 2003, and the exponential growth happened almost instantly. Knowledge gained from our previous ventures in peer-to-peer networks turned out to be very useful, and we built Skype pretty quickly. I thought that there must be a better way. I travelled a lot, and in every country I would have to buy a new SIM card for my phone and pay extortionate rates to call my team. Zennström: The idea for Skype came to me as I was picking up huge phone bills calling my colleagues based across Europe. Q: You were the founder of Skype please tell us about this? Niklas Zennström - Forbes Q&A – November 2017 We discussed Skype, his new venture fund Atomico, unicorns that he has backed, artificial intelligence, cyber Securities, technology applied to helping the environment and what young Forbes readers should do to have their own Skype like success. He was pressured to do It in Silicon Valley but ever the contrarian went with his instincts which has proven very successful.
After selling Skype Niklas decided to set up a London based Technology Investment fund focused on Europe. We first met in 2005 when he and I became Young a Global Leaders part of the World Economic Forum based in Davos, Switzerland. I recently spoke with Skype founder Niklas Zennström during his trip to New York City.
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