Skype Founders Assembling Killer Team For New Online Music Startup
Now that they got what they wanted - a renewed stake and board representation in the Skype that will be spun off eBay soon - the Scandinavian duo Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis can divert more of their attention again …
Context & Ripple Effects
The duo spent 2009 fighting on two fronts: a legal battle over whether eBay still held rights to Skype's core technology that threatened the service's foundations, and a push to convert that leverage into ownership — which landed with a renewed equity stake and board seats ahead of the spinoff from eBay. That settlement matters here because it frees their bandwidth: with the Skype question resolved in their favor, the pair can staff up an entirely separate company.
They also arrive with fresh capital infrastructure — the $266M venture fund they set out to raise in May 2009 — so this music startup is not a garage project but the first deployable bet of a newly capitalized vehicle run by two founders with a track record in peer-to-peer consumer services.
First-order effects
- Zennström and Friis now split their operating attention between board duties at the spun-off Skype and a new online music venture they are actively hiring for — a second consumer platform built by the same founding pair.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent online music services gain a competitor backed by founders who have twice scaled disruptive distribution technology, and who can fund the attack through their own vehicle rather than waiting on outside term sheets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, spinoff settlements like the Skype deal become launch platforms rather than endings: founders trade litigation leverage for equity and board seats, then redeploy capital and credibility into adjacent consumer markets.
The trend: Founder-operators are recycling hard-won exits and settlement stakes into self-funded follow-on startups, turning one successful consumer platform into a portfolio.