Janus Friis (; born 26 June 1976) is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the

file-sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...

application Kazaa, and the

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

telephony application

Skype Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, deb ...

. In September 2005, he and his business partner

Niklas Zennström Niklas Zennström (; born 16 February 1966) is a Swedish entrepreneur and technology investor. Zennström is also the co-founder of the charity organization Zennström Philanthropies. Education Zennström has dual degrees in Business Administr ...

sold Skype to

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

for $2.6 B. Friis has maintained ownership interest in Skype through Silver Lake Partners, which sold Skype to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

for $8.5 billion, in May 2011. Friis and Zennström also developed

Joost Joost () was an Internet TV service, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). During 2007–2008 Joost used peer-to-peer TV ( P2PTV) technology to distribute content to their Mozilla-based desktop player; i ...

—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 Starship Technologies is an Estonian company developing autonomous delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia and in Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has office ...

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 Telenor Denmark is one of the 4 major Danish mobile telephone operators with a customer base in excess of 1.4 million customers. Since 12 February 2004, it has been a subsidiary of the Norwegian mobile telephone company Telenor ASA. Before 15 ...

, one of Denmark's first

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privat ...

s. He met Zennström in 1996. At that time, Zennström headed

Tele2 Tele2 AB is a Swedish telecommunications operator headquartered in the Kista Science City, Stockholm, Sweden. It is a major telephone operator in Sweden, Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Tele2 also has a 25% share in T-Mobile Netherland ...

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 FastTrack is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that was used by the Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh and Morpheus file sharing programs. FastTrack was the most popular file sharing network in 2003, and used mainly for the exchange of music mp3 files. The ne ...

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 Rdio (pronounced "r-dee-oh") was an online music streaming service that offered ad-supported free streaming and ad-free subscription streaming services in 85 countries. It was available as a website and via app for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, an ...

with Zennström in 2010. It filed for bankruptcy in November 2015 and announced the sale of assets to

Pandora Radio Pandora is a subscription-based music streaming service owned by Sirius XM Holdings based in Oakland, California, United States. The service carries a focus on recommendations based on the " Music Genome Project" — a means of classifying indi ...

for $75 million. In 2012, Friis co-founded

Wire Overhead power cabling. The conductor consists of seven strands of steel (centre, high tensile strength), surrounded by four outer layers of aluminium (high conductivity). Sample diameter 40 mm A wire is a flexible strand of metal. Wire is c ...

, 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 San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

in a test authorized by the city.

Awards

Friis was named in ''

Time Magazine ''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on Ma ...

s 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, po ...

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 Wharton may refer to: Academic institutions * Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania * Wharton County Junior College * Paul R. Wharton High School * Wharton Center for Performing Arts, at Michigan State University Places * Wharton, Ch ...

, 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 w ...

Aura Dione Maria Louise Joensen (born 21 January 1985), known as Aura Dione, is a Danish singer and songwriter. In 2008 she released her debut album, '' Columbine''. The album spawned the hit single " I Will Love You Monday (365)", which reached number one i ...

but the couple split up in April 2015.

Notes and references

External links

Atomico Ventures - Friis' venture capital firm

Wire - new project by Janus Friis
{{DEFAULTSORT:Friis, Janus 1976 births Living people Skype people Danish company founders