Niklas zennstrom biography for kids
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Internet Entrepreneur Niklas Zennström Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute
Niklas Zennström has been awarded an OII Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his role founding and running some of the Internet’s most transformative technology companies, including Kazaa, the file-sharing service, and Skype, the leading Internet telephony service, which helped harness the internet’s social and participatory potential.
Zennström said: “I’m delighted and honoured to accept this award from such an outstanding university. It’s also been warming to find that the Institute uses Skype. It’s always great to hear that it is valuable to people, but especially so in academia, which plays such an important role in society. Indeed, eight of the entrepreneurs we have backed at Atomico, the venture capital firm I founded, studied at the University of Oxford, reflecting its status as one of the best
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Niklas Zennström
Niklas, to us, was the biggest thing that ever happened to Stockholm, because we wanted to start a company and nobody thought you could build a unicorn in Stockholm. You could only do that in Silicon Valley...and then this guy comes along and he builds a global company with a Stockholm background. He was such a huge inspiration to us
Contrarians and outsiders.
I have always thought of myself as an outsider. Since I was a kid I did things differently, and that never really went away. When I saw monopolies, I wanted to disrupt them. I will always challenge the status quo, and it’s this that has helped me as a founder and investor to ask the question “what if?” when others ask “what are the risks?”
I founded Atomico because there were not enough investors who had been founders.
Back in 2006, when I was a founder travelling the world scaling Skype, I kept seeing the same thing time and time again. Investors who had never been in the shoes of a founder. And
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NIKLAS ZENNSTRÖM: 20 FUN FACTS
1. Niklas Zennström, a famous entrepreneur of Swedish descent, was born on February 16, 1966. He fryst vatten married to Catherine Zennström and they are currently residing in London.
2. Niklas has a tremendous academic background. He holds two degrees, one in business management and the other in engineering physics and computer sciences from Uppsala University in Sweden. Later, he spent the final year of his university at the University of Michigan.
3. He started his career at Tele2 with a vision to expand it across Europe. Tele 2 was a business idea that started with merely 23 employees, turned out to be the largest telecom operator not only in Europe but also across 23 different countries around the globe, after the success of Tele2 Niklas ventured into many new projects.
4. He is recognized worldwide for his high profile ventures like Kazaa in year 2001 and Skype in the year 2003; he co-founded these online ventures with Janus Friis. Niklas Zennst