My morning at Skype

I'm in Estonia at the moment for a meeting about an ENNA project and this morning we were lucky enough to have the meeting hosted by Skype.

I don't know how many of you realise that Skype is an Estonian company? I know I certainly didn't know before we came out here.

We were meeted-and-greeted by Andres Kütt, Chief Evangelist, who was kind enough to give us a bit of an overview of Skype and its history.

Essentially the company was started by some childhood friends who met to share their love of computing in the 80s. They started making computer games together and as the internet developed they created software that would allow peer to peer file sharing. Rather than shutting up shop when illegal file sharing was being stopped they started to look at whether or not their tools could be used to share voice as well as files. And so Skype was born.

Andres talked a lot about the principles of Skype, one of the main ones being that it should be an easy tool that anyone could use and another that they "eat their own dog food" - I think he meant that they use their own product in the company.

It was really interesting hearing about Skype's freemium model. With a lot of tools there is a cost associated to both the free and paid for versions and the company covers its costs by charging more for the paid for version. At Skype the free tools cost them hardly anything so they are not looking to overcharge for the premium version.

A couple of interesting nuggets I picked up:

• Skype has its own government relations team, working to address some of the telecoms/ info sharing issues that come up in countries like China. Andres admitted it was really difficult for Skype as they have no way of knowing who the person is; are they an Estonian national, living in the UK but working in America? Who has the legal authority over them if they need to challenge something involving Skype calls?
• Skype is actually registered as a company in Luxembourg, for many reasons but one being they have very good telecoms laws.

Working at Skype is like working as part of one big family and one of the things that draws people in and keeps them there is the impact they can have on other people's lives and the world.

Andres has written a blog post about what it's like working at Skype: http://www.infoq.com/articles/learnings-five-years-skype-architect