With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense. – Niklas Zennstrom
It is very similar to companies like Google and other internet companies. When you go and search on Google you don’t pay for that. But sometimes you click on an advert and Google makes money on that. – Niklas Zennstrom
If you want to be an entrepreneur, it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle. It defines you. Forget about vacations, about going home at 6 pm – last thing at night you’ll send emails, first thing in the morning you’ll read emails, and you’ll wake up in the middle of the night. But it’s hugely rewarding as you’re fulfilling something for yourself. – Niklas Zennstrom
As an investor, what we’re not looking for is ‘oh this is a cool app,’ it’s ‘is this something that can become a big business?’ You need to find those that can become real businesses. – Niklas Zennstrom
What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone lines. – Niklas Zennstrom
Surround yourself with smart, dedicated people – to build something isn’t a one-man show. It’s more important to have smart people who really believe in what you’re doing than really experienced people who may not share your dream. – Niklas Zennstrom
People need to access Skype wirelessly, no matter where they are, and what happens is that we’ll be taking advantage of the rollout of Internet everywhere – WiFi and WiMax in particular. – Niklas Zennstrom
When we started Skype, if you look at analyst reports, no one forecasted it as a big business. Also when Google started, it was not fashionable to be in search. It’s not trying to do the obvious – that’s the hard part. – Niklas Zennstrom
It’s extremely hard to build a company with a product that everyone loves, is free and has no business model, and then to innovate a business model. I did that with Kazaa, had half a billion downloads but that wasn’t a sustainable business. – Niklas Zennstrom
Angry Birds is one of the fastest-growing online products I’ve seen, growing even faster than Skype, and the company has done a brilliant job of extending it across different platforms and merchandise. – Niklas Zennstrom
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It’s time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century. – Niklas Zennstrom
When we look at investing, we always think about ‘how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.’ E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it’s execution. – Niklas Zennstrom
And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more. – Niklas Zennstrom
Another differentiator is that Skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to join the Skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free. – Niklas Zennstrom
When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff. – Niklas Zennstrom
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don’t need to be tech savvy – a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way. – Niklas Zennstrom
We have just started, and if you compare the number of people using Skype to the number using a telephone network around the world, we’re still just starting. – Niklas Zennstrom
We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype call. – Niklas Zennstrom
We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries. – Niklas Zennstrom
If you could utilize the resources of the end users’ computers, you could do things much more efficiently. – Niklas Zennstrom
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet. – Niklas Zennstrom
