YouSaid · the spoken record

Niklas Zennström

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-03-17
most recent: 2025-03-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That track record is amazing, right? It's like It's not basketball when you have like a you know 40% field goal it's more like soccer right it's like you you have to take a lot of shots on goal and most of them you're going to miss but you have to keep shooting and that's just kind of the statistics of being an entrepreneur”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that's a very good question, right? The reality is that being at the right base at the right time is pretty critical. And the reality with starting companies is that there's very, very few companies that are successful. And the companies I've been part of starting, one became really successful but no money. One became a big home run. And two others, you know, we burnt a lot of money. But that's still.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, and the other effect that Scub have had on Europe is that it created this belief among a lot of entrepreneurs that they can build the next Skype.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they obviously paid a lot of money for it. And of course they could have done, if you ask me, they could have done so much more with it. They kind of, I think they missed an opportunity to make it really, really big. But I'm not so sad about. I mean, it's like we had a reunion 20-year reunion since we launched, and it was just great to see people. And I'm so proud of what we achieved. One thing that we did was that we looked at what is a Skype effect. And we looked at how many companies have been started from Skype alumni. And it turned out there's been 900 companies started by”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first time when we sold Skype, I was so emotionally attached to it to the extent that was part of buying it back, right? When Microsoft acquired it, I did not have that emotional attachment because I moved on.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think for me, there was a need for better investors in Europe. Back then, we were talking about 2002 to 2007, whatever, that time period There was one place in the world that you had to be if you were serious about building a tech company, which is where you are. San Francisco Silicon Valley. That was the only place in the world, right? And what we did, we proved that it was possible to build a global tech leader from Europe. And we were not just like super special. We were not just the exception that proved the rule. You know, we were just normal people. My conviction was there's no reason why there will not be other companies on the scale of Skype or even bigger coming out of Europe. So Atomico was built with a mission to disrupt the monopoly of Silicon Valley.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Skype was doing well, right? What had happened during the years at eBay, the company got too big, as typically happens in really large corporations. They just hire a lot of people becoming too much of a corporate culture. So we thought this company under private ownership and you've refocused it has a huge potential.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spending Exactly, both that and brilliant in terms of building relationships with some of the big online companies like Facebook and others. So Spotify created an amazing kind of aura around them because it wasn't available in the US, but first was only available in Sweden. Become very, very popular, you know, filling the void of the casa and after kind of pirate bay. And then, you know, people just waited up for that to take off.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's kind of the same time. And I thought RD was really, really good. User experience. And we launched in the US like a year before Spotify. So we had that market. We could have taken it. Why did not take off, you know, I don't really know exactly the answer, but I think one reason was that I think we learned through both Casa and Skype that we didn't want to pay for user requisition. Like that should just be viral. There was really little virality in it. So that was one of the issues. So I think Spotify, the paid-for users.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we hired people, you know, a management team, really, really good people, by the way, to run this. But I think that it's hard. Is your founder and you start a company but you don't have time to run it, you have other people running it, I think it's just you don't have that connectivity. I think it's harder to be successful. You can be successful, but it's harder.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we had this vision that you could use, this peer-to-peer for so many different things. And we built a team for that. And again, I was like CEO of Skype. I was full-time there.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in parallel when we were negotiating with eBay, we worked with another set of lawyers trying to settle with suitors, with MPA and RIAA before the transaction was announced, because we knew, of course, that when the transaction is going to be announced, we're going to have to pay them something, right? And then what we didn't manage to do that is like time was running out. So we had to pay them to settle. But that wasn't a hard thing to do because to get that problem to walk away was pretty nice.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. So there was a lot of people who benefited. But we wanted to continue to build. So we were happy to stay on. I stayed on as a CEO for a few years because we had all these ideas and a vision how to scale it.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, no, it was certainly a life-changing event, not only for us, but also for a lot of our team who had options. A bunch of these Estonians.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two years before it was unreal, to be clear, it was unreal. And you have to put this in a context of 2005, right? There was a few years post.com crash. The largest internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? 1.5 billion. And so this was like 2x”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. Yeah. So we use this competitive situation to try to negotiate and see who's going to be willing to pay more. At the same time, we were not committed to selling because we said where we're not really for sale because we're raising money. We want to be independent. And there's a few others who are interested. We decided to run a process, but we also run a process to raise gross capital to stay independent. You know, there's going to have to be a really high premium. And through this process, we ended up with eBay coming up with a really attractive offer. 2.6 billion and a 500 million earnout.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Now we started this company not to be acquired because with Casa, we had to get out of it. So we said this time we're building something that's going to last. And there should be a company online that is like dominating. Online telephony or communication, real-time communication. And that's something that we wanted to do.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Com But the interesting thing is that the answer from all of those companies was, no, we're not interested in that. We were already building it, but we would be very interested to have a conversation about a much closer relationship, i.e. to acquire us.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we charge you for that, but also if you invest into our company, we have a stronger relationship. So we thought that could be good because then we can get a big sibling to protect us from the others. We can get more distribution. We can get capital and we take out one potential.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All text messaging But they had pretty much everyone online in the Western world at the time. So we were always nervous, like, when are they going to wake up and compete? Because if they're going to crush us or not. And then we got this message that Yahoo was building something. Okay, so let's talk with them. And we kind of say, okay, what are you doing? Maybe we can do something together. And then we find out that it's not only Yahoo, it's also AOL and Microsoft and even Google are kind of looking at building their versions of Skype. We said, okay, that's not great. So we speak to all of those companies and ask them, hey, why don't we do a partnership? We provide a version of Skype that is integrated into their Messenger.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we, you know, if you remember back in the time, Yahoo had Yahoo Messenger, which was awesome. A lot of people used it. You had a well with AWL instant messenger, and you had Microsoft with Microsoft MSN Messenger.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So I try to kind of change direction and of course slip. And then, of course, you being served, as you see in the movies, like slapping the papers on you and you get this thick pile of papers with a lawsuit. And my wife got really angry with them. It's like trying to defend me. But then it's done. It's happened very quickly. But that's one of those moments where it's like you get a lot of adrenaline and then it's like, you know, you're scared. It's like what's happening. Because that was the moment that we wanted to avoid, but we knew it would kind of happen at some point.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly, and definitely not going to the gym. But then someone else steps in in front of me, and then there's a motorcycle coming. So there's all these people from all different...”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we moved to London because we thought launching a global online company, internet company from Europe, London is the best place. So we moved there. And I was walking out with my wife, I think it was a Monday in the morning, you know, stepping out the door, you know, talking to each other as you usually do. And then someone comes up and calls my name and I kind of like figure out, you know, in a split second, okay, this is the moment. So I start running because I didn't want to be served. And I start running. I wasn't very fit at the time because I was like an entrepreneur working very hard and not exercising.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, exactly. And a lot of people picked up on this, I think kind of 5-6% or something of users. It was actually very, very popular. So we started collecting a lot of cash. So we didn't really have to touch that the 20 million that we raised in a series B, we didn't really have to touch it that much, actually.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially. But what was interesting, though, is that we launched the paid service, I think, I don't know, 15th of May or something in 2004. And the beautiful thing with this was that it was prepaid. So when you're buying those Skype out credits, you uploaded $10, $20, whatever you wanted, and you had your credits that you could use to make calls.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the B round. So we did an A round of like, I don't know, it was like 3 million or something dollars. Then we did a B round already like six months later.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We raise money, so this time no one wanted to invest. When we launched in September 2003, and it really takes off virally immediately, right? And then now we've got phone calls. Now we get emails. Now people are saying, oh, now investors.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So I could call you from Skype to any phone number in the world, but the pitch to consumer was that you make a global long distance phone call or international phone call, but you're paying a local rate. So, you know, think about that if you say that you're in San Francisco and you have relatives in Australia. That's a pretty expensive phone call. But for your Australian relative to make a phone call to their neighbor in Sydney is a pretty cheap phone call because it's local rate. So, what we did, we used the internet to transport this coal from you in San Francisco and then have a local agreement with a local telecom operator in Australia to connect locally. So we could sell local phone calls globally. We thought it was pretty disruptive. offering in the world of telecommunication.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And that we thought we launched that later on. But first we need to get a free service out. But we were pretty confident that we would be able to have a premium service because there will be a lot of phone calls that you want to make that are not on Skype. So the idea that we had that we launched was Skype out, meaning that you called from Skype to a public telephone number.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so, you know, one thing we figure out, we're not only one figure that one out. If you want to have like a viral consumer online service, you should take away all frictions for people to use it. Make it free Now, to your point, where do you have your revenue? Because having very low costs and you can have very small overhead because we're small scrappy bootstrapped organization, we did not need to make a lot of money to cover overhead. But the business model was always going to be the paid service.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% that built in virality was a really fundamental growth driver because you probably have like five to ten people that you speak to regularly, whether friends or family. And that's really how it spread.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Figure out a way to connect a microphone and why was that? Because the desire for people to connect with the loved ones, with their friends, relatives, or for business across the world for free was a pretty big desire. So people had no problem kind of to sit in front of the computer and to make those calls.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and how to plug in a microphone. And this was the thing that was the big unknown for us because most computers did not have Why would you So, when we launched, it was always the challenge were people really able to use it even if they wanted to. Maybe they download the software cannot make a call. And another thing we did not know, will people really want to sit in front of the computer to have a phone call? Because otherwise people probably had a cordless telephone for their fixed telephony or had a mobile phone. Now they have to be in front of the computer. Even if you didn't have video when we started, but you're sitting in front of your computer to make a phone call. It turned out that people had absolutely no problem to do that and people had absolutely no problem.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, so what we realized was that, okay, that vision was great, but how do we get there? It's just not going to happen from day one. We needed to do things in different stages. The first stage was to develop Skype for PC.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every month was about scraping money, but it also made us super lean, right? We did not Growth organizations, we realized we could just get things done with very few people.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we went around in Europe. We went to kind of all the VCs and we tried to raise money and were unsuccessful. And we thought that these VCs there, they don't get it. And the model for European VCs at the time was to invest in Coppercart or US internet company and use the language barrier as a mode. So you kind of... Was really smart to invest in, say, a German coppercat of eBay because eBay would probably buy them or a Nordic version of Amazon. That was the model pretty much. And we had this plan. We're going to change global telephony. Using peer-to-peer technology, which no one else had done. But of course, the other thing that made them also not wanting to invest that we had is pending litigations of billions of dollars. So you can understand that not like VC would not want to invest”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think we raised a bit more. But it was still in the hundreds of thousands, I think. But during the time, again, this was created so much stress for me when I could not pay our developers.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were like set up the meeting with a VC who wants to have a meeting with you. But we were extremely difficult to get hold of for that reason. But it turned out to be completely legit. And Bill Draper, he said, like, I know nothing about the technology. I know that the telecom industry is huge and there are dinosaurs. I also know that you guys had success with Casa. You created something that became really big. You did not make money from it. So you must be extremely hungry for success.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's like this is like maybe this is a way to try to serve us through this potential investor. So we were like extremely, normally if you're an entrepreneur looking for money, you would be like, yes, please.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Bill Draper is like, you know, he's one of the first generation of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. And he had some working for him, Howard Hartenbaum, out of Luxembourg, to basically do like early stage investments. And Howard was looking around and he got hold of me. And I was very suspicious because, so you have to remember, this was still, we were trying to avoid being served. So we were like hyper.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So we thought we had this amazing business, what we called Skyper, because it was peer-to-peer in the sky, right? Peer to peer-to-peer.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And coupon pilots exactly. And this was actually Ironically, Microsoft was ahead of the curve that had Windows pocket PC. So at some point we started to figure out, hey, there's no opportunity here to build, you know, you take your pocket PC, the killer app for this would be voice so that you could use you access this Wi-Fi, global Wi-Fi signal everywhere. And then you connect and make voice calls over the internet and provide free internet telephony.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was an opportunity for the phone companies to charge extra money. And that was something that we was thinking about as an issue. And then we had another kind of megatrend that was happening was Wi-Fi. You started to have Wi Fi everywhere. And then you also started to have this PDAs, personal digital assistants. You know, remember the Compaq.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complete limb, and it turned out that it was really complicated. So if you were skilled engineer, you could do it, right? But then the other result when we started using it, that pretty crappy voice quality. So it wasn't very successful. But the other thing we did was traveling as, you know, like the great thing in Europe is that it's easy to travel between different countries. You take your mobile phone, travel to another country and still use it, which was amazing. The problem is that the roaming fee was like very, very expensive. So the mobile operators really took advantage of roaming because essentially to cost to produce a phone call, whether you're roaming or not is kind of the same.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really, really sucked. So, the conclusion back in 1999 is it's not that great. But then I thought like, now we're in 2002. Surely things moved on. And the other thing was happening now was also the kind of enabling technology trend was broadband. You know, we started to have broadband at home through your cable TV or whatever. we can use voice of IP now. So I asked one of our engineers, hey, why don't we set up voice of ripies so we can use that between ourselves”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you have to remember fully distributed, really cash poor. Saving money was an important thing because we were calling each other. And back when I was at Tele2, one project that we were doing back in, I guess, 1999 was trialing VoiceOver IP.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's fine. I'm actually moved to Stockholm back in Copenhagen, where it was from, and our developers were in. Estonia, and we had one person in Amsterdam.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this, of course, becomes a problem because of the other side RAA, MPA. They said, well, these guys now are trying to do a maneuver to get away from this.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not get a lot of money out of this. No, no, no, nothing really. I mean, you know, less than a million. But we did retain the technology.”
2025-03-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT