Niklas Zennstrom Quotes
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.
We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype call.
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.
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
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.
If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.
The thing about the Internet is the openness. People can link to each other themselves.
And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.
International markets are much bigger than the U.S. In Sweden we have 9 million inhabitants, and if you're successful in Sweden, you're not successful - it's such a small market.
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.
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.
You have 1 billion people using the Internet with 200 million of those now using broadband internet connections, so the Internet has become a powerful network. It can carry calls.
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.
I hope that my investment into Atomico will become my best financial investment to date.
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.
Video is moving online in a big way. It's proven to be a challenging market for some companies that start out as a pure Internet company such as Joost.
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.
When a business becomes successful seemingly overnight, no one knows about all the months and years you've invested, all the projects you've tried before that didn't work.
