Niklas Zennström at LeWeb
by Eliane Fiolet on December 9, 2009 at 10:05 am
By Karsten Lemm at LeWeb 2009 – “If you want to be successful, swim against the stream, follow your own path.” That was Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs at the LeWeb conference in Paris. The serial entrepreneur, who initially gained fame and fortune with file-sharing service Kazaa, pointed out that none of the potential investors that he and co-founder Janus Friis approached wanted to put money into Skype. “The VCs in Europe felt that Skype was way too risky” and had little future, Zennström said. The Internet phone service became a big success, of course, and was sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion.
