VC Perspectives

It looks like things are finally getting clearer on what’s going to happen to Skype. Techcrunch reports that Index Ventures together with newly started VC-firm Andreessen Horowitz and a large PE-firm will acquire Skype from eBay. This would end months and months of speculation over what will happen to Skype.

eBay’s Skype acquisition has sometimes been called the worst M&A in tech ever, but I think that’s a bit misleading. Sure, the price was high at the time but the main problem was that eBay never knew what they would do with Skype. The idea of integrating the service into its auction service seemed a bit too weak compared to the value of Skype as the main challenger of telecom operators.

Even so, Skype has grown very fast (also in terms of revenue) and by again making Skype an independent company able to focus fully on its core business - providing communication to hundreds of millions of people through any means of mode or device - it will be extremely interesting to see what will happen next. I can’t but wonder what happened with the interest from Niklas and Janus to buy back Skype and if they still will reappear in some form or another.

Tags: Andreessen Horowitz, eBay, Index Ventures, Skype

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 9:19 am and is filed under Creandum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.