Niklas Zennström

Niklas Zennström is a Swedish entrepreneur and technology investor, born on 16 February 1966 in Järfalla and raised in Uppsala, where he studied business administration and engineering physics. He began his career at the telecommunications company Tele2 in 1991. With the Danish colleague Janus Friis he co-founded the peer-to-peer file-sharing application KaZaA in 2001, and in 2003 the two launched Skype, a Voice over Internet Protocol service that eBay bought in 2005 for about 2.1 billion euros. He remained Skype's chief executive until March 2008 and later co-founded the video service Joost and the music service Rdio. He also founded the venture capital firm Atomico in London. Time named him one of its 100 most influential people in 2006, and the Oxford Internet Institute gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.