Niklas Zennström

CEO & Co-Founder, Skype

Niklas Zennström’s newest venture is Skype, the Global Internet Telephony company founded in 2003 based on peer-to-peer principles. He started his professional career at Tele2, when there wereonly 23 employees. Now the company is the leading consumer oriented pan-European telecom operator present in 23 countries. Mr. Zennström served in various business development roles including launching and being responsible for European Internet Service Provider business get2net and as CEO of the everyday.com portal. He later co-founded and servedas CEO of KaZaA, the world’s most downloaded Internet software to date with more than 370 million downloads. After that Mr. Zennström founded and served as CEO at Joltid, a software company developing and marketing peer-to-peer(p2p) solutions and p2p traffic optimisation technologies to companies. Mr. Zennström also co-founded Altnet, the world’s first secure p2p network promoting commercial content to millions of consumers and integrating the full value chain ofpromotion, distribution, and payment of digital content, including beingthe world’s largest issuer of DRM licenses. Mr.Zennström’s newest venture is Skype, the Global Internet Telephony company founded in 2003 based on peer-to-peer principles.Mr. Zennström, a Swedish citizen of 39, has a dual degree in business and MSc Engineering Physics, computer science from Uppsala University in Sweden. He spent his final year at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. When he is not creating new cutting edge disruptive businesses, he enjoys sailing, skiing, outdoor activities and travelling.