The Ledger
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Shakil Khan: TransferWise Could Exceed Spotify and Skype in Scale
“TransferWise is doing an amazing job, and I hope this goes down as, you know, one of the biggest companies ever to come out of Europe, up there with Spotify and Skype, or bigger than even those companies.”
Khan: Small-market European startups succeed by designing globally from day one
“Take a market like Sweden, the reason why Spotify partly has been successful was, from day one, the product was built to go global. The same thing with Skype, transfer-wise, a building for a global audience, because The local population is far too small to be …”
Sohoni: Seedcamp Portfolio Company TransferWise Will Become a Platform Business
“So, you know, you do have the Skype founders who've obviously done an incredible amount with Atomico and then some, but you have Tavit who left Skype and started TransferWise, which is a portfolio company of ours. Absolutely. And you know, I would say has a hu…”
Babayan: Europe has major tech successes, but post-exit mafias remain underdeveloped
“Well, I mean, I think the list is pretty long of, you know, Spotify and Skype, and I mean, there's, yeah, there's a whole bunch of success stories. I think what probably hasn't happened yet is you don't have the mafias that have followed those yet necessarily.”
Hinrikus: Banking expectations are set by seamless apps like Uber and Skype
“Consumers have come to expect that everything works the way Skype works the way Uber works. You know, you basically get what you want to get it now. You know how much you pay for it. You know how quickly it's going to arrive, but banks, you know, aren't quite …”
Remote team relationships must be built face-to-face before going virtual
“That's, I think that's a learning that we got from Skype, is that you can build human relationships face-to-face, and then you can maintain them over video calls. And when you're booting up a new team, you have to ensure that there is enough of that face-to-fa…”
Balaji: Bitcoin is inherently viral because payment recipients must install wallets
“Bitcoin is inherently viral, like PayPal, like email, like Skype, like Facebook, because when you send Bitcoin to somebody else, you're telling them, download the Bitcoin client.”
Matthew Turk: AR telecollaboration outperforms Skype for physical tasks
“So the two of these two people can collaborate quite successfully on this physical task in a way that's hard to do, again, with just telephone or Skype or something like that.”
Horowitz: a16z invested $65M into Skype in Fund 1
“It's actually sixty-five million. So, but 15 of it, 15 of it was generously given to us by Silverlake for participating in the deal. But reinvested sixty-five million.”
Hinrikus: Skype controls 40% of international long-distance calling
“I spent a large chunk of my life building up another company called Skype, and Skype today is, I don't know, 12 years old maybe, but Skype owns 40% of long distance calling.”
Skype had 10 offices across 16 time zones at just 200 employees
“So by the time we got to 200 people, we had 10 offices across 16 time zones.”
a16z's first European investment was a Skype buyout
“So the first investment in Europe was actually not a venture investment. It was the buyout of Skype that we did with Silver Lake and the Canadian pension board, I think. So that kind of made people pay attention because it was an unusual deal. I think people's…”