Niklas Zennström & Janus Friis
Skype
Pioneering peer-to-peer voice and video calling software · Luxembourg (incorporated) / Tallinn, Estonia (engineering)
Portrait: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
The founder
Niklas Zennström (Sweden) and Janus Friis (Denmark) met while working at telecom Tele2, then built the file-sharing network Kazaa in 2000 before launching Skype in 2003. After their exits, they founded Atomico, a London VC firm investing across European tech; Friis went on to co-found delivery-robot company Starship Technologies.
How it was sold
eBay bought Skype in September 2005 for $2.6 billion upfront plus a performance-linked earn-out — of which only $530 million was ultimately paid, bringing eBay’s total verified spend to roughly $3.1 billion (eBay later wrote down $1.4B of the deal’s value). The strategic fit with eBay never fully worked, and a 2009 IP lawsuit between the founders and eBay was settled by giving Zennström and Friis a 14% stake in a new Silver Lake–led investor consortium that bought most of Skype. In May 2011, that consortium sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion cash — Microsoft’s largest acquisition to date — meaning the founders profited from both the 2005 and 2011 sales, just not in a simple "sold, walked away, came back" way.
Sourced & verified
In the news
Coverage of the Skype deal from independent outlets — read the original reporting, not just our summary.