Janus Friis (; born 26 June 1976) 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 business partner
Niklas Zennström sold Skype to
eBay for
$2.6
B. 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
Ahti Heinla (born 2 May 1972) is an Estonian computer programmer and businessman. He is one of the developers of Skype.
He was also an organizer of Let's Do It 2008, a civic action with 50,000 volunteers participating in cleaning up the countr ...
founded
Starship Technologies in 2014, to develop small self-driving delivery robots.
Career
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. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström developed the FastTrack protocol in 2001.
From the success of KaZaA's peer-to-peer technology the duo co-founded
Joltid, a software company developing and marketing peer-to-peer solutions and peer-to-peer traffic optimization technologies to companies.
Friis is also co-founder of Altnet, a network that sells commercial music to KaZaA users.
Friis founded the online music streaming service
Rdio with Zennström in 2010. It filed for bankruptcy in November 2015 and announced the sale of assets to
Pandora Radio for $75 million.
In 2012, Friis co-founded
Wire, a secure collaboration platform that uses end-to-end encryption to protect digital assets.
Friis and Ahti Heinla founded Starship Technologies in 2014, to develop small self-driving delivery robots. In September 2016, the robots took the streets in
San Francisco in a test authorized by the city.
Awards
Friis was named in ''
Time Magazines list of
100 most influential people
''Time'' 100 (often stylized as ''TIME'' 100) is an annual listicle of the 100 most influential people in the world, assembled by the American news magazine '' Time''. First published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, ...
in 2006.
In 2006 Janus Friis got the prestigious award “IT-prisen” ("The IT Prize") in his home country, given by the Danish IT industry and
IDG
International Data Group (IDG, Inc.) is a market intelligence and demand generation company focused on the technology industry. IDG, Inc.’s mission is centered around supporting the technology industry through research, data, marketing technol ...
, for his work and innovation.
He and Zennström were also the co-recipients of the 2006
Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award, given to business and individuals who have used information technology in a way that changed an industry or society as a whole.
Personal life
He was engaged to Danish
recording artist
A musician is a person who composes, conducts, or performs music. According to the United States Employment Service, "musician" is a general term used to designate one who follows music as a profession. Musicians include songwriters who wr ...
Aura Dione but the couple split up in April 2015.
Notes and references
External links
Atomico Ventures - Friis' venture capital firmWire - new project by Janus Friis
{{DEFAULTSORT:Friis, Janus
1976 births
Living people
Skype people
Danish company founders