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Skype Files $100M IPO
- theDoug 16y agoIt's a shame they're doing this a decade later than they should have.
- jacquesm 16y agoWell, not really, considering that Friis and Zennstrom sold it to ebay at a very high valuation and then managed to get paid again when they found out they missed a bunch of core tech. If they had ipo'd a decade earlier they might not have made as much as they did.
- riffic 16y agothese guys are some of the biggest crooks out there. fuck em investors, I wouldn't go anywhere near this stock. you'll get burned.
- jacquesm 16y agoI agree with the general sentiment there, but calling them 'crooks' is a step too far, they've been this side of the law or they would have been sued for sure.
- rdl 16y agoI think it's more that the people on the eBay side were either morons or in breach of their own fiduciary duty to eBay shareholders. The deal terms were voluntarily accepted by eBay; terms which were insane. Plus of course the total lack of any strategic value for eBay. It was the worst tech M&A of its size.
- shalmanese 16y agoSee http://www.quora.com/Why-did-eBay-buy-Skype http://www.quora.com/Why-did-eBay-buy-Skype
- niccolop 16y agoWell this isn't a surprise! Good for them and all their investors, I think it's one of the most useful tools to have been created in the last 10 years.
- AlexMuir 16y agoSkype seems to have been static for the last few years. Which is surprising because 'skyping' is as much an everyday word for web-calling as 'googling' is for search. It's been under appreciated.
- AgentConundrum 16y agoI've never heard anyone use the word "skyping."
- AlexMuir 16y agoLet's Skype, Skype me Very common for me.
- mikeryan 16y agoIn particular I use this when dealing with European clients/international calls. "Skyping" is a pretty common alternative to "calling".
- stanleydrew 16y agoHave you heard anyone use any other word for voip calling?
- eitally 16y agoThat just reflects the fact that you probably don't operate in a workplace where it isn't clear what mode of communication is meant when someone sets up a "call." At my multinational, explicitness is requisite since the requester could mean POTS-to-POTS (legacy PBXes), VOIP-to-POTS (Nortel softphone for the VOIP, connecting to older PBXes), VOIP-to-VOIP (Asterisk), Skype-to-Skype, or Skype-to-Voice (via VoSky). When someone says "let's Skype" in my world, they either mean Skype-to-Skype (which is implicit if they are in your Skype contacts) or Skype-to-VOIP using one of our VoSky appliances that's tied into our PBXes. The verb "to call" is almost meaningless these days.
- riffic 16y agoit's a shame this service based on a proprietary protocol gained critical mass before a interoperable open standard could have taken its place.
- jacquesm 16y agoThere was 'speakfreely', but I think John Walker gave up on supporting all the different ways to get around fire-walls. The kazaa code did that pretty good and Friis and Zennstrom figured a way to monetize their bag of tricks they'd created while creating kazaa. Remember how they sold off Kazaa but kept the fire-wall penetrating technology by licensing it back to the buyer (Joltid), then later they did the same thing with ebay and skype. Given that they'd already pulled that one once before ebay was really pretty stupid to fall for it.
- wensing 16y agoUnless you enjoyed all the years of usage instead of waiting for a interoperable open standard. :-)
- ZeroGravitas 16y agoI think the point is that due to network effects the winner actively holds back the losers, so you can't extrapolate from what happened in a world where Skype won to another world where they didn't. It would have been better for everyone if the winner had been an open standard and a very small change could have accelerated that solution to ubiquity rather than Skype, in the same timeframe.
- gorog 16y agoThey're just relocating/centralizing their headquarters in Luxembourg. The IPO is from their Luxembourg office on their US office. Not a big deal.
- alttab 16y agoExcept look at all of the American Capital investment firms that were in on the offering - Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch. Putting the good 'ol American dollar in good investment overseas. I'm happy for Skype, but this act doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
- shadowfox 16y ago> this act doesn't exactly inspire confidence Why exactly?
- gorog 16y agoUh, as a reply to myself, I think I confused an IPO with a tender offer.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- relix 16y agoWith earnings of about $500 million in the first half of 2010, and 44% growth since last year, isn't a $100M IPO really, really conservative? Does this mean the stocks will jump sky high the second it's on the market?
- shimon 16y agoTechnical question regarding IPOs: is the offering for the entire stock of the company, or just a fraction, and how would potential investors know what fraction? $100m would be low for all skype share but high for 2%.
- awad 16y agoA (pre-determined and explicitly stated) fraction. Afterwards, however, shareholders are allowed to sell off their shares, provided they meet any lock-in/holding period requirements first. So, a founder might have to wait 6 months before he can unload his or her shares.
- ollerac 16y agoThey're probably putting a relatively small percentage of the company on the public market. I don't know how much of Skype is being sold, but here's an example from Wikipedia: "Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place."
- jonknee 16y agoRevenue of $400m in the first half of 2010, that's a huge difference. Their net income was $13m.
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- kogus 16y agoAnybody know what technologies / languages they've used to build Skype?
- MC27 16y agoC++ as far as I know. Skype has its roots in Kazaa's file sharing technology, they use a proprietary P2P network to get around routers and firewalls - something that VOIP services lack. It also does direct high quality connections where available.
- sunny_s 16y agowhat do you mean exactly by getting around routers and firewall? I've been working with freeswitch and NAT is really a no brainer if you have a UPnP router. Firewalls? Does skype get around firewalls that are explicitly configured to block it? As far as 'direct high quality connections' are concerned, even freeswitch does that, it only does the SIP signalling and lets the media stream exchange directly between the endpoints, given that both can see each other directlly (no NAT in between).
- wmf 16y agoNAT is really a no brainer if you have a UPnP router Skype does much better than that. AFAIK they can traverse NATs and firewalls that don't support UPnP; they can fall back to TCP if UDP doesn't work; if all else fails they have a network of supernodes to relay traffic.
- sunny_s 16y agoI just mentioned a UPnP router because I think most home routers I see here given buy ISPs support it. There are other ways as well, and yes that includes falling back to TCP if UDP doesn't work. I'm just saying that everything skype does can be done with OSS using open standards. That skype is in any way technologically superior is mostly result of excessive FUD campaigns IMHO. :)
- mkramlich 16y agoSkype has become for VOIP as Google is to web search. It may not be perfect but it's pretty darn good and it Just Works. It is almost ubiquitous and the company name has become a verb for a large segment of the popultion. "Let's Skype!"