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Skype soap opera set to continue

November 6, 2009 6:55pm
by Richard Waters

You just know that this is not the end.

It’s like one of those bad soap operas. There’s a big family wedding coming up and the distant European cousins aren’t invited. It leads to some vicious public name-calling. Eventually everyone calms down and the cousins are invited after all, though some other guests have be thrown off the list to make room for them.

But as soon as they all get in the same room again, it won’t take long for the bad feelings to return. You just know.

The Skype soap opera has just reached the patching-up stage, with Zennstrom and Friis (pictured) back in the fold.

They used very sharp elbows to get an invite to this particular event, and that won’t be forgotten. When I spoke to Marc Andreessen earlier today he assured me there was no emotion involved in this, the investment group has no history with Skype and can work just as easily with the original investors - in fact, he said he’d actually prefer to have the founders along for the ride.

But how can Zennstrom and Friis not feel powerful emotions at this point? They created one of the most amazing viral internet companies of them all, then saw it drift under eBay. They missed out on more than $1bn of the original earn-out they hoped to get when they sold out in the first place (incidentally, we hear that the compromise that has now been reached values Skype’s underlying technology - which the founders still own - at around $300m, so that makes up for some of the pain).

As they have shown by fighting so publicy and bitterly: for them, this is deeply personal.

You have to pity Josh Silverman, Skype’s highly regarded CEO. He now has a potentially dysfunctional board to deal with, and founders who are almost guaranteed to take a far more active stance than their stake and board representation might suggest.

Tune in soon for the next episode.

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November 6, 2009 6:55pm in Internet, Tech | Comment

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