Janus Friis
| Janus Friis | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 26, 1976 Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Nationality | Danish |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Known for | Co-founder of Skype, KaZaA & Rdio |
| Net worth |
 US$ 1.3 billion (2012) |
Janus Friis ([ˈjæːnus ˈfʁiːˀs]; born 26 June 1976 in Copenhagen) is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application Kazaa, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype. In September 2005, he and his partner Niklas Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6B. Friis has maintained ownership interest in Skype through Silver Lake Partners, which sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, in May 2011.
Friis and Zennström also developed Joost - an interactive software application for distributing TV shows and other forms of video content over the Web. The assets of this service were sold to Adconion Media Group in November 2009. Independently, Friis founded video streaming startup Vdio in 2011.
Friis and Ahti Heinla founded Starship Technologies in 2014, to develop small self-driving delivery robots.
Friis had no formal higher education, dropping out of high school before starting a job at the help desk of CyberCity, one of Denmark’s first Internet service providers. He met Zennström in 1996. At that time, Zennström headed Tele2 in Denmark, and Friis was hired to run its customer support. Friis and Zennström worked together at Tele2 to launch get2net, another Danish ISP, and the portal everyday.com.
After this, the partners decided to leave Tele2. Friis moved into Zennström's small apartment in Amsterdam in January 2000 where they started developing KaZaA, the company responsible for the most popular software for use with the FastTrack file sharing network protocol. The FastTrack protocol itself is also codesigned by Friis.
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