Janus Friis

Janus Friis (born 26 June 1976 in Copenhagen) is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application KaZaA, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype. In September 2005, he and his partner Niklas Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6B. Friis has maintained ownership interest in Skype through Silver Lake Partners, which sold Skype to Microsoft Corporation for $8.5 billion, in May 2011.

Friis and Zennström also developed Joost - an interactive software application for distributing TV shows and other forms of video content over the Web. The assets of this service were sold to Adconion Media Group in November 2009. Independently, Friis founded video streaming startup Vdio in 2011.