Danish entrepreneur Janus Friis is the co-founder of KaZaA, Skype, Joltid, Joost, Rdio and Vdio who has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. He never had a formal higher education since he dropped out of high school. He started a job at the help desk of CyberCity, one of Denmark’s first Internet service providers.
In 1996, Friis met Niklas Zennstrom who headed Tele2 in Denmark. Janus was hired to run its customer support. Together, they worked to launch get2net, another Danish ISP, and the portal everyday.com. The partners decided to leave Tele2. In 2002, they started developing KaZaA, the company responsible for the most popular software for use with the FastTrack file sharing network protocol, which Friis also co-designed.
Janus Friis also co-founded Altnet, a network that sells commercial music to KaZaA users. With the success of KaZaA, they also co-founded Joltid, a software company developing and marketing peer-to-peer solutions and peer-to-peer traffic optimization technologies to companies.
In 2002, Janus and Niklas founded Skype, a peer-to-peer telephony application. They sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for a deal worth $2.6 billion. However, Friis still kept an interest in the internet application through Silver Lake Partners until they sold Skype to Microsoft Corporation for $8.5 billion in 2011.
Friis and Zennstrom created Joost in 2006, thus moving television and other forms of video to the user’s PCs. It was later sold in November 2009 to Adconion Media Group. In 2010, the duo co-founded Rdio, an ad-free music subscription service. Friis then founded his own music and video streaming service called Vdio in 2011.