Janus Friis

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Janus Friis (born in 1976) is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application KaZaA and Skype, the peer-to-peer telephony application. He and his partner Niklas Zennström have recently sold Skype to eBay for $2.6bn.

Before embarking on his entrepreneurial career with Zennström, Friis worked at the help desk of CyberCity, one of Denmark’s first Internet service providers. He has no formal higher education since he dropped out of high-school before starting the job at CyberCity. Later he worked at Tele2, the leading alternative consumer oriented pan-European telecom operator, where he met Zennström.

Friis and Zennström worked together at Tele2 to launch get2net, another Danish ISP, and the portal, everyday.com.

After this, the partners decided to leave Tele2 and co-founded Kazaa, the company responsible for the most popular software for use with the FastTrack file sharing network protocol. The FastTrack protocol itself is also codesigned by Friis.

From the success of KaZaA’s peer-to-peer technology the duo co-founded Joltid, a software company developing and marketing peer-to-peer solutions and peer-to-peer traffic optimization technologies to companies.

Friis is also co-founder of Altnet, a network that sells commercial music to Kazaa users.

Friis enjoys skydiving, pool, martial arts and winter sea bathing.

Friis was named in Time Magazine's 2006 list of 100 most influential people.

He currently works on new peer-to-peer video distribution service dubbed "The Venice Project" together with his partner Niklas Zennström.

He and Zennstrom were the co-recipients of the 2006 Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award, an award given to business and individuals who have used information technology in a way that changed an industry or society as a whole.