I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs—true entrepreneurs—pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers, on their ability to take a punch. But there aren’t too many second chances.
Not like the second chance that is unfolding right now.
Among the greatest pieces of communications technology in our age of great communications technology, and hence, when it became the victim of corporate synergistic turpitude, the greatest failure,
is Skype.
I still can’t get over Skype. When I’m feeling low I think of it. It’s like free food—the ability to make free phone calls. And it’s free phone calls with video. The picture phone has been the grail of communications since the dawn of telecommunications time and suddenly it arrived and it was free. Skype is the true community and social networking technology. Skype is the broadcast medium of the future. Skype is the quantum leap forward of time and space.
So imagine the pain, indeed the existential madness, its founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, must have felt when they sold Skype to eBay in 2005 and eBay, which shortly came to regret the $2.6 billion it paid for the company, let it languish. EBay did nothing, except bicker with the company’s founders, who were still managing the company (and argue over payouts and bonuses). Skype became a technology that existed without development or strategy.
As so often happens, the buyers and the entrepreneurial sellers came to hate each other. When eBay
finally decided to sell Skype earlier this year for $1.9 billion, it seemed to take special pleasure in not selling it back to its founders even though theirs was arguably the better deal.
That’s when the fireworks began. As so often happens when a large company buys technology from entrepreneurs who have created it, eBay didn’t understand what it was buying. Actually, in this instance, they failed to realize they hadn’t really even bought the technology they were now selling.
In a series of
jujitsu courtroom moves, Zennstrom and Friis outlined a case which would have effectively made it impossible for anyone to own the company without them. You either had to kill the baby or give them custody.
The two founders engineered the kind of moment that all entrepreneurs who have ever sold their companies dream of: to sell your company, and yet remain so fundamental to it that you get it back.
And what’s more, this is good for the technology business. Skype has a future as large and bright and transformative as Google and Facebook.
Skype will be how we will talk and do business. Skype will be the basis of far-flung family life. Skype will be the medium around which we will transform our messages. And it may be the wherewithal by which we build international peace and brotherhood.
And then there is Skype sex.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NewserColumns.
