Skype Co Founder: Many Failures Result From Lack Of Concentration.

He is a Swede and wears a pair of square rimmed glasses.

Six years ago, the Times described the spectacles as Bill Gate style.

At that time, he just bought his own company. Six years later, the company had a new buyer. Coincidentally, the founder of the new buyer was the pair of glasses.

"I will make Bibil Gates richer.

Because my thinking, my technology, and my product are more open than him, I will have more partners than him. "

This is what Niklas said when he came to China in 2004. In the same year, Bill Gate only donated 3 billion dollars to charity.

A small company that has just raised $20 million actually said it would be better than the world.

Niklas certainly did not think so.

In English, there is a word Pragmatic, which means pragmatism and arbitrariness, which seems to explain his business logic.

In 2005, he sold Skype at a price of 3 billion 100 million dollars.

"Don't ask me what to do with this money. It's very personal."

Niklas said that he had a strict and less spoken character in Nordic countries, but whenever he appeared in the media, he would produce extraordinary movements.

He once launched the P2P software Kazaa that changed the industry, and later produced the video service product Joost. Niklas, 45 years old, runs an investment company Atomico, financing $165 million and sitting on a fortune of 320 million pounds.

His investment company has just invested in what is called the sexiest creature in the world - angry birds - a popular game all over the world.

As the first round of investment companies, what kind of benefits will Niklas get?

Destroyer

Niklas is an only child and his parents are teachers. He spent his childhood in University of Uppsala City, Sweden, and showed a bright side from childhood.

After entering the University, he chose computer science and engineering, and considered whether he became a consultant of a consulting company.

In the end, he chose Tele2, which is responsible for management, operation and Internet business. The company is a competitor of Sweden's state monopoly telecom company.

During the Tele2 company, Niklas used a new ten year old Ganassi Vries named Janus Friis. The cooperation between the two people lasted for many years.

The latter is another founder of Skype.

Janus is responsible for software development. Niklas serves as a project organization, and two people cooperate with each other to introduce and operate Tele2 Internet services in many different countries.

Two people seem to have always been traditional outsiders, and he left school at the age of 16 and killed time in India.

However, they share a common characteristic, using "destructive technology" to find shortcuts, thus opening up their own business models.

They found that the Internet could be used as a new means of distribution.

This means that the expansion of the scale will no longer require a substantial increase in expenditure.

This idea falls on Skype specifically, that is, as long as you and your partner are online at the same time, you can use the call service without additional expenses.

Therefore, Skype does not spend money to acquire and retain users, but relies solely on the user experience of high-quality user sticky, in other words, users feel good use, save money, they will use it.

These practices are quite different from traditional telephone companies.

Concentrator

Nicklas believes that the business model of Skype will bring about great changes. It can also make use of its technological advantages to cover the whole world, and still remain a small and beautiful company with light assets and low cost operation.

In 2003, Skype.com domain name registration, in the same year, in China, in the face of the "portal" profit predicament, there is a company's Internet registered in Hangzhou, its domain name is taobao.com.

Almost simultaneously, the world-famous e-commerce website eBay acquired eBay and entered the Chinese market.

It was in that year that Zuckerberg studied at Harvard. He had a little memory of high school's "roster", which contained every student's big picture and name, but Harvard had nothing at all, which was a nightmare for technology otaku to find a girlfriend.

Like all new things, the final success requires optimism and patience.

The first version of Skype software is not ideal, often dropped, the quality of the call is very poor.

But "free phone calls on the Internet" - today's technology is boiling but often lacking in functionality, which is enough to make it a killer application.

But it wasn't a light day.

Because of the continuing lawsuits in Kazaa, some people who invested in Skype began to start the idea of divestment, including even Niklas's relatives.

Fortunately, with a tacit entrepreneurial team and continuously optimized products, Skype can continue to survive, though not very hot.

"Many failures result from lack of concentration."

In the future, Niklas, who has become an investor, said to entrepreneurs, "in many cases, you are the only person who believes in what you are doing.

Everyone around you will say, "why not give up?

Don't you see it doesn't work?

At this point, you will look for it to see if others are right or right? "

In 2003, one year, in order to continue to raise funds, Niklas sought 26 investment, only wanted to raise 1 million 500 thousand euros, and was ready to give up 1/3 of the company's shareholding.

But no one wants to invest.

Niklas did not give up. He firmly believed that voice communication business was no longer a telecommunications business, but a software business, and the fixed telephone would disappear.

As time went on, in 2004, Facebook was launched, and the spirit of Internet sharing, such as free sharing and sharing, began to prevail in Flicker.

A large number of users begin to get broadband connections, which is very important for the development of Skype. Enough bandwidth makes Internet phone service a more feasible proposal.

In the next two years, Skype is like a spaceship heading straight into the sky.

Globally, 180 thousand users are registered to use Skype every day. At this point, people seem to understand that Niklas's persistence and self-confidence are not without reason.

Dictatorial

Back to those companies in 2003? What happened to them these years?

Taobao.com has won the eBay in China, but it doesn't mean that eBay has lost all the money. In 2002, it was still wise to take a look at the acquisition and payment tool Paypal in 2002. It was this acquisition that prompted Niklas to sell Skype to eBay in 2005.

"EBay has a whole set of brands, communications, and a system that is partly coordinated by government regulation, all of which can play an important role in the development of the global market by Skype."

Niklas explained his decision to investors in the early days of Skype. "More importantly, they operate the largest electronic payment service in the world. From the perspective of business execution, it is undoubtedly good."

Although many people were skeptical at that time, Nicklas was still busy selling valuations.

In the future, he told the media that for startups, if they wait for competitors to catch up, they will think of selling, and the price will be underestimated.

The instinct of the merchant made Nicholas once again choose to be arbitrary.

If calculated from the average user value, in 2005, when eBay purchased Skype, the average user value was $45.6.

Today, Microsoft has bought Skype from eBay for $8 billion 500 million, with an average value of $14.7 per user.

By comparison, the strict Nordic shows the businessman's astute and the potential of investors.