Surround yourself with smart, dedicated people - to build something isn't a one-man show. It's more important to have smart people who really believe in what you're doing than really experienced people who may not share your dream.
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
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.
They also can combine voice with instant messaging and online file sharing.
With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.
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.
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.
Talent can pop up anywhere in the world, it's not just one city block.
We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype call.
And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.
The thing about the Internet is the openness. People can link to each other themselves.
If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.
What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone lines.
We have just started, and if you compare the number of people using Skype to the number using a telephone network around the world, we're still just starting.
We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries.
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.
Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection.
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.
People need to access Skype wirelessly, no matter where they are, and what happens is that we'll be taking advantage of the rollout of Internet everywhere - WiFi and WiMax in particular.
It is very similar to companies like Google and other internet companies. When you go and search on Google you don't pay for that. But sometimes you click on an advert and Google makes money on that.
