Career
Zennström began his career in 1991 at the telecommunications company Tele2, where he worked under Jan Stenbeck.[6][5] In 1997, he hired Janus Friis to head customer service of Tele2’s Danish subsidiary.[6] In 1999, he resigned from Tele2 at the peak of the dot-com bubble to co-found Get2Net and Everyday.com with Friis.[2][6]
In 2001, Zennström and Friis co-founded the peer-to-peer file-sharing application KaZaA which was released in 2003 and became the most downloaded software at that time.[6][5] It was sold to Sharman Networks in 2002.[6] During this period, Zennström also founded and was CEO of Joltid, a software company that developed traffic optimization technologies, and co-founded the peer-to-peer network Altnet.[6][7]
In 2003, Zennström and Friis launched Skype, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service.[6][8] In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for approximately €2.1 billion ($2.6 billion).[2][5] Zennström was Skype's CEO until 2008. In 2009, he was part of an investor group that repurchased a majority stake in Skype, which was subsequently sold to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion.[2][6]
In 2006, he co-founded the internet video service Joost, which was sold in 2009.[6][9] In 2010, he and Friis launched the music streaming service Rdio which was acquired by Pandora in 2015.[6]
Zennström is also the founder of European venture capital firm Atomico headquartered in London. The firm has invested in technology companies including Supercell, Klarna, Skype, and DeepL. Atomico’s most recent Fund VI raised $1.24 billion.[10]
