Le Web3 Live

According to Janus Friis, great successes like Kazaa and Skype were only “by-chance ideas”! When he started to work with Niklas Zennström, they wanted to “basically start something,” but they did not know exactly what. This was the very first step to the birth of Kazaa…

During the conversation they had on stage, Loïc Le Meur teased him: “First you disrupted the music industry, then you disrupted the telecom industry…” Le Meur was referring of course to Friis’ second great creation - Skype.

Friis explained that after a few years of working with the “peer-to-peer concept”, he wondered: “What can else technology do for us?” That is why he imagined Skype as a system which could be used for good voice communication online. “Well… I guess it was the right time, because it just took off!”, he added.

Le Meur insisted on the entrepreneurial character of Friis and Zennström. He mentionned their sale of Skype to embark on a new Web adventure - Joost. Friis laughed: “We’re not, like, retirement age!” Actually, he seems to embody his own sentence: “If you’re not flexible enough to change, you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. You should have a job.”

At a time when user-produced content is so successful on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion, Friis explained that he wanted to create a “global internet-based tv, with high-quality content.” And so, here is his new Internet bet: to create a “global offering that is based on legitimate content.”

See Janus Friis’ profile, in French.