Skype

“If they'd done it two years earlier, Wouldn't have worked. Two years later, it would have been too late.”

“It was three, 400,000 users after 20 days, and the rest is more or less history.”

“If you want to build a truly mid-market, kind of, you know, I'm focused on businesses that will become large, enduring, multi-billion dollar businesses, and I think in order to build one of those, You either have to figure out how to give something away for fr…”

“If we had taken the time to think carefully about who our customer base should be, you know, we could have built technologies like Skype, like Twitter as opposed to just continuing to build technology, selling to Orange or Singular or Nextel or AT&T, the custo…”

“When we were looking to buy Skype at eBay, we used that analogy to say, okay, if it doesn't work, is it going to hit us above the waterline where it's going to be ugly and we're going to have to fix it, but it's fixable? Or is it going to hit us below the wate…”

“I invested in Skype and Alibaba and Foursquare and this platform called Brizly, which was like a Twitter client And just started putzing around and finding my way towards interesting companies and interesting people and had some early success, which then led m…”

“Pivoting Skype from audio calls to video calls was probably the most powerful way to drive engagement. And so we made video calling the centerpiece of Skype for that out, changed Skype's brand, really, and mission to be about video. Shipped an amazing product …”

“When they asked me to run Skype, I was at eBay. Honestly, they spent four months looking to find anyone else, and no one would take that job because, you know, it's in the telecommunications industry, which is highly regulated, and international phone calls we…”

“I think Microsoft has Screwed up multiple acquisitions like Yammer or Skype, and they promised me when we sold it that they will try their very best not to screw up Wunderlist, and I think they did.”

“Like if you think about like, you know companies like PayPal and Skype and so forth, like, you know, these companies, I would argue the biggest impact of those companies wasn't the services they created. It's the people that they touched and what those people …”

“And it was dominating the voice over IP market, and it could have dominated so much more.”

“So at the time when I invested in Skype, there was no business model, because with Skype out wasn't even invented.”

“I was also lucky to make money from being the first employee at Skype from stock options. So in that sense, I've been financially Independent since 2002, three.”

“And the reason it was a structurally weird deal where they got a good deal. Now they took risks. Skype was a aging platform, but they bought it from eBay, right? Is that eBay needed to divest it? They had enough of it. There was no synergy and Andreessen went …”