Niklas Zennstrom
Niklas Zennstrom
Niklas Zennströmis a Swedish entrepreneur best known for founding several high-profile online ventures with Janus Friis including Skype and Kazaa. More recently he founded the technology investment firm Atomico and has become a significant figurehead for entrepreneurs in the tech sector. Zennström is also the co-founder of the charity organization Zennström Philanthropies...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionScientist
CountrySweden
google pay advertising
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.
entrepreneur needs faster
As an entrepreneur, if you're the originator, you need to be faster than ever.
ebay people today
Today, over one million people now make their living on eBay, which is astounding.
powerful work phones
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.
numbers people world
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.
thinking investing execution
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.
successful years months
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.
powerful people connections
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.
block cities world
Talent can pop up anywhere in the world, it's not just one city block,
google trying looks
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.
valleys way best-place
Silicon Valley is the best place to start a tech company in so many ways.
love-is half one-love
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.
real needs bigs
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.
video netflix kind
Some Internet operators are concerned that video services such as Netflix and YouTube consume lots of the bandwidth on the network. While there is some truth to this, my guess is that the operators wished they could provide the same kind of services with the same success as Netflix and YouTube.