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
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.
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
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.
Talent can pop up anywhere in the world, it's not just one city block.
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.
And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.
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.
We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype call.
We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries. We're getting 80,000 new users each day. And more than half a million people are connected via Skype at any given moment.
They also can combine voice with instant messaging and online file sharing.
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.
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.
We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries.
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.
Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, we just surpassed our first 1 million simultaneous users online.
If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.
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.
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.
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.
As an entrepreneur, if you're the originator, you need to be faster than ever.
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.
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. If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.
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.
You shouldn't be afraid of failure - when something fails, you think, 'What did I learn from that experience? I can do better next time.' Then kill that project and move on to the next. Don't get disappointed.
Today as an entrepreneur you have more options.
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.
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.
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.
I try not to dwell on big mistakes but to move on when I make a mistake. I make mistakes most of the times and that's part of the risk profile being an entrepreneur. I guess one big mistake I did was not to start my own company earlier. I spent nine years working for others before starting Kazaa in 2000.
I hope that my investment into Atomico will become my best financial investment to date.
The next Google or Facebook will come from somewhere other than Silicon Valley.
The Chinese market is very, very unique.
Look for when the environment is changing - the big shift now is mobile Internet. It's really happening big-time. The way you interact with services on a smart phone compared to the Web is quite different, so there's a huge opportunity.
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.
Silicon Valley is the best place to start a tech company in so many ways.
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.
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.
