NIKLAS ZENNSTROM

If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.

I hope that my investment into Atomico will become my best financial investment to date.

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

As an entrepreneur, if you're the originator, you need to be faster than ever.

Look for when the environment is changing - the big shift now is mobile Internet. It's really happening big-time. The way you interact with services on a smart phone compared to the Web is quite different, so there's a huge opportunity.

They also can combine voice with instant messaging and online file sharing.

You have 1 billion people using the Internet with 200 million of those now using broadband internet connections, so the Internet has become a powerful network. It can carry calls.

Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way.

Today as an entrepreneur you have more options.

The Chinese market is very, very unique.

Angry Birds is one of the fastest-growing online products I've seen, growing even faster than Skype, and the company has done a brilliant job of extending it across different platforms and merchandise.

If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.

Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.

When a business becomes successful seemingly overnight, no one knows about all the months and years you've invested, all the projects you've tried before that didn't work.

As an investor, what we're not looking for is 'oh this is a cool app,' it's 'is this something that can become a big business?' You need to find those that can become real businesses.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle. It defines you. Forget about vacations, about going home at 6 pm - last thing at night you'll send emails, first thing in the morning you'll read emails, and you'll wake up in the middle of the night. But it's hugely rewarding as you're fulfilling something for yourself.

Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection.

When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff.

And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.

Silicon Valley is the best place to start a tech company in so many ways.

We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries. We're getting 80,000 new users each day. And more than half a million people are connected via Skype at any given moment.

It's extremely hard to build a company with a product that everyone loves, is free and has no business model, and then to innovate a business model. I did that with Kazaa, had half a billion downloads but that wasn't a sustainable business.

When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution.

When we started Skype, if you look at analyst reports, no one forecasted it as a big business. Also when Google started, it was not fashionable to be in search. It's not trying to do the obvious - that's the hard part.

You shouldn't be afraid of failure - when something fails, you think, 'What did I learn from that experience? I can do better next time.' Then kill that project and move on to the next. Don't get disappointed.