Niklas Zennstrom spoke to a standing room only crowd today, in perhaps the best attended session of the morning. He used a powerpoint largely unchanged from that given in Toronto a month ago at VoN Canada. I had this presentation on my laptop, so I pulled it out and compared. Some minor updates – number of registered users has grown to 39M, growth rate stable at 150k per day. Some other minor revisions here and there. He also emphasized a focus on wifi and other wireless means, saying “I never connect with a wire anymoreâ€. Since his presentation at VoN Canada was commented on widely, I won’t add much here.
He did, however, take 3 questions:
- Q. What did you learn from prior ventures [Kazaa]
A. “It’s not the big that beats the small, it’s the fast that beats the slowâ€. Skype, he says, will never be a big company. - Q. Revenues?
A. We have low costs, 135 employees, no marginal cost of product delivery. We’re committed to free calling for our users. We benchmark our ARPU with google and yahoo, not with traditional telco profiders. We’re a a nickel and dime ARPU company. - Q. How do you compare yourself to AOL, MSM, Yahoo Messenger, given that they are all rushing to promote voice?
A. Well, all of these other players are primarily portals, and they created an IM service to drive traffic to their portal and add content from the portal. This is their model. We are first and foremost a real-time voice company, we added IM to facilitate voice.