Mark Evans

It’s Good to be Niklas Zennstrom

Must be good to be Nikas Zennstrom these days. You sell Skype to eBay for a lofty $3.1-billion, and then decide to launch another start-up, Joost, to disrupt the television/video industry. It turns out investors like your track record and the Joost story so they agree to pony up $45-million in venture capital. I guess there’s nothing like a successful track record to give investors (Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, CBS Corporation, Viacom and Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing) a sense of confidence about a new venture. That said, it seems like an awful lot of money for a business that has its fair share of hiccups in recent months amid a flurry of buzz and hyperbole. And it’s not like Joost has no competition.