Niklas Zennstrom’s Secrets For Going Global

Niklas Zennström, founder of Kazaa, Skype and soon The Venice Project, chatted with Loïc Le Meur at the LeWeb3 to talk about being a well-known European company, and the challenges of competing with the giants of Google, Microsoft, etc.

Niklas had this to say:

1. Forget about your home market as a reference
2. Prepare for internationalization from the beginning by using Unicode
3. Start in English

Loïc had some other questions for Niklas, like-

Will there be a Web2.0 Bubble?
Niklas doesn't think so – he says that the net infrastructure is in place so we can now build on that. However, we should keep our humility since there will be ups and downs.

JacobShare: I agree, I think that we are now during an up. Kind of like the stock market notion of bulls and bears. The first Internet Bubble will be the only bubble; the reason people call it that was because it's bursting end had dramatic consequences for many people and involved tremendous amounts of money being lost. Nowadays, startups are ‘bootstrapping' – doing things cheaply, often without venture capital – and as a result of these smaller risks, the eventual smaller failures will not have the same cataclysmic fallout.

What can you tell us about The Venice Project?
Niklas wouldn't say much except that the idea involves the convergence of Internet and television. Delivering TV over the Internet makes sense, Niklas says, because users have more choice while content creators have more ways of selling their content.

JacobShare: it also won't hurt to reach a wider audience.