Niklas Zennström

When you think about European tech figureheads, it’s hard to look past Niklas Zennström. Not only is he the founder of one of its most successful companies, Skype, which when it sold to eBay for $2.6bn became Europe’s largest M&A deal – he is one of the European ecosystem’s biggest champions. He uses many of his speaking opportunities to call for deeper capital pools, founders with the ambition to scale and reduced regulatory fragmentation in a bid to see Europe content with Silicon Valley.

He was born in 1966, in Järfälla, a suburb north‑west of Stockholm, where spent his childhood and teenage years before leaving for university. Niklas earned dual degrees in Business Administration and Engineering Physics from Uppsala University – spending his final year at the University of Michigan as part of an exchange program.

His first role in technology came at Stockholm based telecom operator, Tele2 where he met future co-founder, Janus Friis. The pair started mulling over the concept of building peer-to-peer networks, harnessing the emerging internet to connect people directly. Together they developed FastTrack, a peer-to-peer protocol on which they co-founded Kazaa in 2000, a peer-to-peer file-sharing application, commonly used to share music and video files, which became the world's most downloaded internet software by 2003. The platform attracted a number of legal challenges and lawsuits, which eventually led Niklas to sell Kazaa in 2002.

Building on the experience with peer-to-peer technology, and inspired by the high costs of the long, expensive international phone calls Niklas was having with Janus and investors, they co-founded Skype in 2003. Using a team of Estonian software engineers, the product was built in Tallinn. Skype’s presence in Estonia would go on to have a huge impact on the area, spawning a generation of local tech entrepreneurs who believed it was possible to create great things in a small place.

Skype's innovative approach to internet-based voice and video communication quickly gained global traction. In 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion – eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman seeing it as a way to let buyers and sellers call each other inside their listings. Niklas remained CEO until 2007. The same year, eBay took a $1.4bn write-down of Skype, acknowledging that the investment had not performed as hoped.

Having heard that eBay planned to sell Skype and seeing that the company still had huge growth opportunities, Niklas and Janus were part of a consortium that bought it back from eBay in 2009. The pair developed Skype’s focus on mobile and just two years later, Microsoft purchased Skype for $8.5 billion.

In 2007 Niklas also founded Joost, with Janus again. This time the pair were looking to revolutionise TV programming with an online platform. Just like Zazaa and Skype, it used peer-to-peer technology, but it wasn’t a huge hit with users and was eventually closed in 2012.

Shortly before he left Skype, in 2006, Niklas founded Atomico, a London-based venture capital firm focused on investing in technology companies. By leading on rounds up to late growth size, Atomico enables European start-ups to access investment rounds beyond Series A without heading to the US. Through Atomico, he has invested in over 200 companies across four continents, including notable firms like Stripe and Klana and continuous apace.

Beyond his business ventures, Niklas is committed to philanthropy. He and his wife, Catherine, established Zennström Philanthropies, focusing on issues such as climate change, human rights, and social entrepreneurship.