Skype

“There were so many solutions out there. The market was extremely crowded. However, I did spend a lot of time on talking with those users. Do you like Skype? Do you like WebEx? I did not see a single happy customer who told me that Really like the existing solu…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“A lot of people picked up on this, I think kind of five, six percent 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 money that the twenty million that we raised in a ser…”

“EBay coming up with, like, a really attractive offer. 2.6 billion and a 500 million earn out.”

“The largest Internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? One point by a billion. And So this was like two X. And then you had. This is amazing. YouTube. YouTube was also 1.6 billion or something like that. Yeah. Also the same year with Google. So this was…”

“Microsoft came along and makes an offer that, you know, the investors took on for eight and a half billion.”

“They could have done, if you ask me, they could have done so much more with it. You know, they kind of, I think they missed an opportunity to make it really, really big.”

“We looked at how many companies have been started from Skype alumni, and it turned out there's been 900 companies started by Skype alumni, but also the second generation”

“And, you know, 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”

“Microsoft announced that it would permanently retire Skype and shift its remaining users over to Microsoft Teams. Skype will ring for the last time on May fifth, 2025.”

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

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

“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 …”

“So there's, especially these days, like a lot, people would not pay nearly as much attention to me if I worked at, you know, small parts limited.”

“With discord, the way that voice chat works is it's like an always on conference call because you invite people into a group space and then create a voice channel. If you and I are talking, You know, our friend can see that we're there and just click the butto…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“And if your purpose gets diluted, and I would say in some respects that would be the case for Skype, then your purpose gets to a different place, and things change so much that it doesn't actually have the same focus that it had before.”

“We knew at Skype that if you downloaded the app and registered, if you didn't make a video call in the first seven days of onboarding, we lost you. You were not going to be a valuable user. You were not going to be an engaged user.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“So by the time we got to 200 people, we had 10 offices across 16 time zones.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“It was a mobile video application that drew to twenty million users, and it got acquired by Skype in 2011.”

“They paid one fifty million.”

“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…”

“You know, the funny story we always tell my boss's previous life is, you know, he missed Be Around Facebook and Seed Stage Ways. And a round Skype because Deutsche Telekom said these aren't strategic enough to us.”

“I think of Canada Pension Plan joining with Silver Lake and buying Skype. And waiting it out for like six months, there are some legal issues, and effectively doubling their investment in a year.”

“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.”

“We have a seed round closed in May, 700 K, mostly from angels. We have a great, great investors from Google, ex-Googlers, ex-Amazon, Skype, I mean, all of the communication companies, so we have angels from this company.”

“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…”

“The first Skype video call, they cut off a 100,000 simultaneous audio users in order to get the bandwidth for our video to work.”

“They actually never had to tap into our money.”

“We run our entire business on Skype, and I think it's the way we do Skype, I could give an entire training on how efficient we are on Skype.”

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

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