Skype, every mention

69 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Skype

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every year anyone Josh Silverman 25Harry Stebbings 18Akin Babayigit 11Chris Dark 5Taavet Hinrikus 4Jason Lemkin 4Steve O'Hear 2Sitar Teli 2Markus Villig 2Henrique Dubugras 2

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Skype comes up

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Anthropic Inference Costs Skyrocket |TikTok Deal Closes |The IPO Market:Wealthfront & EquipmentShare · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Jan 29, 2026 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 16:54 Jason Lemkin It harkened back to me to when Andreessen got off the ground doing Skype. 3 times in the scene

20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg Dec 12, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:33 Harry Stebbings It's so lovely to be in person, but I remember starting as like an eighteen-year-old on Skype, and I had very little idea of what I was doing, and I felt like a bit of an imposter, and I, I wanted to just start with, when did you feel like…

Index Ventures Partner, Martin Mignot: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index’s Decacorn Factory · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Aug 11, 2025 · 1 mention

Windsurf x Google x Cognition: Full Breakdown: Who Made Money, Who Did Not · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Jul 17, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 19:05 Jason Lemkin Like I literally could see, uh, I remember back in the day, I mean, Guru, you would actually remember the details, but like, you know, I think eBay bought Skype, but forgot to get the IP, right?

Plural Partner, Taavet Hinrikus: Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Apr 28, 2025 · 4 mentions

  • ▶ 1:04 Taavet Hinrikus And I think, you know, through the years of building, building wise and still working at Skype, I was like,
  • ▶ 58:07 Taavet Hinrikus I was also lucky to make money from being the first employee at Skype from stock options.
  • ▶ 1:00:03 Taavet Hinrikus We had great education during Soviet times, uh, and I think we had an early start thanks to Skype. 2 times in the scene

Hussein Kanji, Founder @Hoxton Ventures: Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US | E1248 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Jan 20, 2025 · 1 mention

Klaus Hommels: Why "Portfolios are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy"? | E1231 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Nov 27, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 53:17 Klaus Hommels So, um, at the time when I invested in Skype, there was no business model, because with Skype out wasn't even, um, invented.

Markus Villig, Founder @Bolt: The Most Insane Story in Startups & The Future of Self-Driving| E1225 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Nov 13, 2024 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 7:26 Markus Villig So then I went to my older brother who was, um, 15 years older and, uh, had a great career in tech and then used to be one of the early employees at Skype back in 2004.
  • ▶ 30:37 unnamed speaker Uh, and then we had this Skype interview with him back in like, 2016 when nobody was hiring remotely.
  • ▶ 1:20:10 Markus Villig You can't keep on launching markets like this, running Facebook ads and hiring people over Skype calls.

Mark Suster: Why Private Equity Will Replace IPOs and M&A as the Exit Path | E1147 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings May 1, 2024 · 1 mention

Daniel Dines: From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man| Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more | E1143 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Apr 22, 2024 · 1 mention

Davis Smith: From Selling $6M of Pool Tables to Scaling Cotopaxi to $150M in Revenues | E1095 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Dec 15, 2023 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 20:06 Davis Smith And I'm wondering if you jump on a call with me, we jumped on a Skype call back then this, we had the Skype call 2 times in the scene

Christian Lanng: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me" | E1065 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Sep 27, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 21:32 Christian Lanng Um, we, we used to have a Skype group, and Skype was a thing of a few people in the company that was called,

Akin Babayigit: How Tripledot Studios Became #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Europe | E1030 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Jun 26, 2023 · 11 mentions

Miki Kuusi: How I Scaled Wolt to $8B; Why I Sold to DoorDash | 20VC #953 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings Nov 28, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:13:00 Miki Kuusi Like if you think about like, you know, uh, 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.

20VC: The Contentful Memo: Point Nine's Christoph Janz on The Cold Email That Led to a Unicorn Investment, How To Approach Market Sizing and Timing & The Pros and Cons of Pre-Emptive Rounds, When To Do Them vs When Not To? Nov 24, 2021 · 1 mention

20VC: The Pinterest Memo: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on The Secret To Success within User Generated Content Plays, Where Most Investors Make Mistakes When Analysing Consumer Social and How The Pinterest Deal Wouldn't Have Happened without a Diverse Partners Mar 24, 2021 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 29:08 Jeremy Levine Relative to the social communication services, like Skype in his early days, it wasn't, because people do like to talk to their friends every day.

20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction Feb 15, 2021 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 10:24 Christian Reber 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.

20VC: Etsy CEO, Josh Silverman on 2 Defining Traits of Great Leadership, The Danger of Attaching Happiness To Milestones, How To Structure Teams To Optimise for Experimentation and Agility &Whether You Learn More From Success Than Failure Jan 18, 2021 · 26 mentions

  • ▶ 0:30 Harry Stebbings Prior to Etsy, though, Josh served as president of consumer products and services at American Express, who is also the CEO of Skype and CEO of shopping.com, and he also held various executive roles at eBay.
  • ▶ 7:48 Josh Silverman You know, I mean, when they asked me to run Skype, I was at eBay. 4 times in the scene
  • ▶ 22:08 Josh Silverman When I took over at Skype, Meg Whitman was the CEO of eBay, which owned Skype at the time, and she had sort of talked a lot about Skype. 8 times in the scene
  • ▶ 22:15 Josh Silverman Four dot O was this new platform Skype was going to launch that was going to, you know, change the trajectory and fortunes of Skype. 8 times in the scene
  • ▶ 25:03 Josh Silverman And so if I'm thinking about the Skype example, you know, Skype had a real aversion to metric, to tracking things. 4 times in the scene
  • ▶ 25:18 Josh Silverman And so I said, we're going to wire Skype four dot O to allow us to understand anonymously our customers usage patterns.

20VC: Ashton Kutcher on Early Lessons From Investing in Airbnb and Spotify, Why VC Ownership Requirements Are Becoming More and More Egregious & What Being Good At Product Truly Means Feb 17, 2020 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 0:37 Harry Stebbings As for Ashton, he started his career investing as an angel, with early home runs including Spotify, Alibaba, Skype, and Optimizely, to name a few.
  • ▶ 7:08 Ashton Kutcher I invested in Skype and Alibaba and Foursquare and this platform called Brizly, which was like a Twitter client

20VC: Brex Founder Henrique Dubugras on Why Being Mission Driven Is Not The Only Way To Build A Massive Business, Why You Should Not Associate Fundraising with The Cash Needs of Your Business & Why You Don't Have To Follow Startup Theory When It Comes To Feb 15, 2019 · 2 mentions

20VC: The 3 Stages of Denial For Founders When Scaling, Why You Will Likely Be Unable To Hire Through Your Network & The Interview Question All Founders Must Ask with Olof Mathé, Founder & CEO @ Mixmax Jan 25, 2019 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 0:45 Harry Stebbings And as for Olof, prior to Mixmax, he led the team that built Inkling Habitat, now adopted by the world's largest publishers, and before that, he was an entrepreneur, and worked at Skype and McKinsey.

20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise Sep 28, 2018 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 18:52 Maynard Webb And so, for example, 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…

20VC: Why Partners Are There To Save Each Other From Themselves, Why Effective Reserve Allocation Is The Hardest Question In Venture & What Makes The Truly Special Board Members with Jeff Fagnan, Founding Partner @ Accomplice Aug 13, 2018 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 32:44 Jeff Fagnan He would Skype in and everything like this, and Fred would just get in his kind of mastermind head the types of things he wanted to do and chase after him, and there wasn't a lot of collaboration, and I think venture is a really…

20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown Jul 27, 2018 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 11:28 Eddy Lu We Skyped every week for a few months so that he could give me advice and tell me all his awesome startup and corporate stories.

20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value? May 8, 2018 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 13:53 Andy McLoughlin Both doing the selling and then managing a sales team, and then, you know, being lucky enough to hook up with a bunch of ex-guys from Skype to actually build the technology, all of a sudden, it makes perfect sense.

20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius Apr 6, 2018 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 28:29 Harry Stebbings I mean, I'm hugging you through Skype right now, but I do want to do a penultimate question.

20VC: Why This Is Just The Start for Consumer Mobile, 3 Lessons China Taught About How To Invest Better In The US & How To Think About The Opportunity Cost of Capital Deployment with Hans Tung, Managing Partner @ GGV Capital Jan 8, 2018 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 0:39 Harry Stebbings And previously, Hans was with Bessemer Venture Partners, where he helped global players such as Skype expand into China.

20VC: Accel GP, Rich Wong on When Is The Right Time To Scale A Startup, Optimising Initial vs Follow-On Investment Decision-Making & The Globalisation of VC In Recent Years Dec 4, 2017 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 17:38 Rich Wong 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

20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years Aug 7, 2017 · 1 mention

20VC: Bessemer's Ethan Kurzweil on How To View Pattern Recognition and Deal With The Anti-Portfolio, The Next Frontier In Developer Focussed Businesses & Why eSports Is Interesting Again Jun 28, 2017 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 0:05 Harry Stebbings All ads get a personal message from me, but we're back today to this feature week with one of the world's leading venture funds, Bessemer Venture Partners, the team that backed the likes of Pinterest, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Skype, just to…

20VC: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on Why We Are In A Fallow Period For Consumer, Why It Is Bogus That Operational VCs Can Add More Value & 2 Golden Rules To Always Tell Entrepreneurs Pre-Investment Jun 26, 2017 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 0:12 Harry Stebbings But to the show today, and it's been a long time since we had a themed week on the show, so today I'm thrilled to change that with our feature of the globally renowned Bessemer Venture Partners, with a portfolio including the likes of…

20VC: Pejman Nozad: Tech's Most Unlikely VC: From Yoghurt Shop To Investing In Startups Now Worth $20Bn+ Feb 20, 2017 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 5:03 Pejman Nozad So I started to, to call her every day from payphone, and, and imagine in nineties, early nineties, there was no internet, there was no Skype like now, me and you, so it was

20VC: DFJ's Josh Stein on Why VCs Must Adapt To Their Founders, The Major Transition Points For Aaron Levie @ Box & Why SaaS Startups Are Growing At A Rate Never Seen Before Jan 9, 2017 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 0:14 Harry Stebbings I'm also immensely excited for this week on the show, as we feature one of the most prominent funds of the last decade, with investments in the likes of Skype, Tesla, Twitter, AngelList.
  • ▶ 4:24 Josh Stein Uh, and so deals like Hotmail and Skype were really controversial, particularly Hotmail.

20VC: Reddit's Alexis Ohanian on How It All Started With Paul Graham @ YC, The Biggest Surprises About Making The Move Into VC & Why Alexis Believes All The Best Investors Have Operating Experience Dec 12, 2016 · 1 mention

20VC: Investing In Sectors That Were Cool 2 Years Ago, What Accel's Facebook Fund Taught a Generation of LPs & Why LPs Need A New Discovery Process with Paul Martino, Founding Partner @ Bullpen Capital Nov 16, 2016 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 36:35 Harry Stebbings We have people streaming movies in the living room, gaming in the games room, to me skyping in my office.

20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow Nov 14, 2016 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 2:40 Harry Stebbings To conduct Skype interviews like I do in the office, and much more, all at the same time.

20VC: CEO Whisperer Jerry Colonna on How Investors Mimic Aggressive Behaviour To Cover Insecurity and Why Vulnerability is Key To Success In VC Nov 4, 2016 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:31 Harry Stebbings We've got people streaming movies in the living room, gaming in the games room, to me skyping in my office.

20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster Jun 29, 2016 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:21 Wesley Chan Skype was sort of making a big inroad at that point, and Larry said, maybe you should think about what people should do on the phone and real-time communications.

20VC: X.ai's Dennis Mortensen on Why There Is No Incumbency Advantage in Artificial Intelligence Jun 24, 2016 · 1 mention

20VC: Greylock's Sarah Tavel on What Founders Need From A Good Investor and Why Products Need To Be 10X Better & Cheaper Apr 6, 2016 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 22:13 Sarah Tavel Um, I think like, you know, we're using Skype right now and WhatsApp, like those are great examples of companies that have figured out how to give something away for free that actually usage costs money, or you have to figure out how to…

20VC: Christian Hernandez on The Importance of Mobile and The Relationship Between Growth vs Revenue Mar 9, 2016 · 1 mention

Index's Martin Mignot on Sourcing Rocketship Companies, Evaluating Founders and His Attitude Towards Risk At The Early Stage Feb 1, 2016 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 20:46 Martin Mignot Between, you know, if you think about, you know, Just Eat, Skype, Criteo, Zendesk, King, you know, all of the ones that are coming in the Spotify, Van Privé, Showroom Privé, the Zalendo.

20 VC: How To Say No Fast and Efficiently and Why UX Must Always Be At The Core Of What You Do with Sitar Teli, Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures Dec 30, 2015 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 5:13 Sitar Teli But back then, you know, Skype was probably the only product people had heard of. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 5:33 Harry Stebbings What do you think has taken that change from the kind of unknown Skype birthplace to what it is today?

20 VC FF 021: From TechCrunch to Founder to TechCrunch with the legend, Steve O'Hear Nov 13, 2015 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 24:54 Steve O'Hear Even though I don't go for that, but like, it's, yeah, the conversational style of 30 minutes is, can often produce some really good content, and I, the thing is, I do a lot of Skype interviews, and 2 times in the scene

20 VC 086: Starting A New Venture Fund and How London Compares To The US with Hussein Kanji @ Hoxton Ventures Nov 9, 2015 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 16:40 Hussein Kanji And it happens very naturally when you're physically there, but when you're far away, just people forget to Skype you or send you an email, right?

20 VC 082: 500 Startups Week: Growth Hacking 101: How To 10x Your Conversion with Matt Lerner, Head of Distro Dojo London Oct 26, 2015 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 4:34 Matt Lerner So in the evening, cause they're in California time, most of these companies, I'd get on these Skype calls with people and they'd explain their business.

20 VC 072: Super Angel, Fabrice Grinda: The Future of Startup Investing Sep 16, 2015 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 26:10 Fabrice Grinda On Skype, by default, every time someone logs in, you see the little name, that needs to be off.

20 VC 068: Why Now Is The Best Time To Be An Entrepreneur with Sean Seton-Rogers @ PROfounders Capital Sep 2, 2015 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 8:16 Sean Seton-Rogers Because, uh, as much as we like to use Skype and Google Hangouts and all this sort of stuff, um, the ability to meet face-to-face on a regular basis with someone is, um, is just hugely valuable.

20 VC 067: Scaling Startups Into Unicorns with Atomico's Mattias Ljungman and Carolina Brochado Aug 31, 2015 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 19:53 Carolina Brochado I'm, I think, you know, based on the experience of, you know, the, the many people who, who built Skype and have been around, you know, in technology for such a long time, we tried to pinpoint, um, what are sort of the, the key areas that…

20 VC 065: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Brad Feld: Founders Should Be Obsessed, Passion Belongs In The Bedroom Aug 24, 2015 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 10:32 Brad Feld This time, instead of doing a phone call, I was at my house in Alaska in the summertime, and I said to James, all right, great, let's, but let's do a, you know, let's do a Skype this time.

20 VC 043: How To Be A VC Analyst and Lessons From Union Square and First Round with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Venture Jun 8, 2015 · 1 mention

20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO May 4, 2015 · 6 mentions

  • ▶ 0:26 Harry Stebbings Following game replays, Chris has held leadership positions at AOL and Bain, before making his foray into venture capital with Atomico, the London-based venture fund founded by Skype founder Nicholas Zenstorm.
  • ▶ 3:18 Chris Dark Um, and so, so I left there and, um, actually was just in conversation with Nicholas, who was one of the Skype founders. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 6:20 Chris Dark So the people they have around the world are this unique resource that built Skype around the world, which was phenomenally successful.
  • ▶ 19:03 Chris Dark Let's use Skype as a great example. 2 times in the scene
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