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 next valleys
The next Google or Facebook will come from somewhere other than Silicon Valley.
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.
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.
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.
entrepreneur today
Today as an entrepreneur you have more options.
jobs bird done
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.
successful sweden bigger
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.
country people each-day
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.
music thinking people
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.
computer ends resources
If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.
skype connections internet
Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection.
vcr watches watch-movie
And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.
skype use ifs
If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.
moving challenges way
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.