Janus Friis

Janus Friis is a Danish entrepreneur, born on 26 June 1976, who is best known for co-founding two peer-to-peer applications that reached a very large public: the file-sharing program Kazaa and the internet telephony service Skype. He had no formal higher education. He left high school and started at the help desk of CyberCity, one of the first internet service providers in Denmark, then ran customer support at the Danish operator Tele2, where he met his later business partner in 1996. The two launched another Danish provider, moved to Amsterdam in 2000 and built Kazaa, and in 2001 they developed the FastTrack protocol that the Kazaa network used. They went on to found the peer-to-peer software company Joltid, and in September 2005 they sold Skype to eBay for 2.6 billion US dollars. Friis later co-founded the music streaming service Rdio, the end-to-end encrypted collaboration platform Wire, and, with Ahti Heinla, Starship Technologies, which builds small self-driving delivery robots.