SCT with Niklas Zenstrom

OK, liveblogging from Second Chance Tuesday with Niklas Zenstromm, well, quasy-live, since the internet doesn’t work, as it’s suppose to be at a decent web conference. Anyway, some funny highlights as they were happenin’…
As the moderator has recognized corretly, it feels like 1999 all over again. Niklas is a looser! Had a job, finished his degree, had an office, not garage…
Kazaa had 400mio downloaded copies and no business model better than advertising. They wanted to talk about it with music industry but only recived letters from their lawyers.
“Was your principle back then, that the people won’t pay for content?” Yes, the reality is that on internet you can get anything for free, so advertising is the way to go. “So you ended up sued to death?” Yes, noone but lawyers made any money with it. “So then we continued to create services not involving so many lawyers.”
It took more than a year to raise first money for Skype. Becuase it was a bad year and for the track record.
There was noone offering something like it, and they were not easy to use. You had to have one geek talking to the other. “What a horrible conversation that is.” When we launched, everyone called us, at the end of august 2003.
“Did you have a clear business model from the start?” Yes, get people to use free service and upsell skype-out calls, and then maybe have yellow pages with ads.
The telecom companies said “who’d wanna use a computer to make phone calls?”
“And eventually you’ve come up with a perfect business model – selling Skype to E-Bay for an enourmous amount of money.”
“How much money did they pay?” “It depends on how you look at it…”
“How did you feel when e-bay cut back some of the investment” “well, that was mostly accounting”
“How many of you have tried Joost? quite some… How many are actually using it?” [you can imagine the amount... ]
“Profitability is not on the roadmap for this year” – how long has Joost been around allready?
“Startup is not so dependant on the cycle of the economy.”
Biggest mistake and best decision? I missed the first internet wave, ecause I wasn’t etrepreneur from the begining. To launch Skype.
“How did you come up with the name Skype?” “It used to be Skyper, but that was registered to Deutche Telecom…”

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