為何我們的Skype投資大獲成功？
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????2009年年中我們創立Andreessen Horowitz后不久，就和Silver Lake Partners、Canada Pension Plan Investment Board的合作伙伴一起，以略高于20億美元的價格從eBay手中購入了Skype多數股股權。這項投資給我們帶來了極大的爭議。馬克和我作為天使投資者，一宗交易即投資了我們3億美元新基金中的5,000萬美元，這讓很多人感到意外。雖然符合我們“投資不分階段”的策略，但這的確是基金成立初期很大的一筆交易。讓事情更熱鬧的是其他投資者和記者也普遍批評這次收購?！都~約時報》(New York Times)的喬?諾塞拉就寫道： ????“本周我遇到的很多華爾街人士及眾多電信專家都對Skype的售價感到震驚，這不僅僅是因為我們處于經濟衰退之中?！?/p> ????有關爭議日前終于結束了，微軟(Microsoft)宣布以85億美元收購Skype——距離我們從eBay手中購入僅18個月。 再看當年 ????讓我們重新審視最初的決定以及為何投資大獲成功。當時人們對我們的批評集中于兩點： ????1. Ebay可能沒有Skype的相關知識產權。當時，Skype創始人尼可拉斯?曾斯特羅姆和賈納斯?弗里斯對Skype提起了知識產權訴訟。很多人猜測這兩位創始人會通過訴訟讓Skype關門大吉，投資者將一無所有。這使得Skype理論上缺乏可買性。正如諾塞拉所寫： ????“因此，Skype交易令人不解的地方在于：為何成功競購者愿意為一家可能因訴訟而關門大吉的公司支付如此高的價格？一種可能是他們有鋼鐵般的神經，另一種可能則是他們知道一些不為外人所知的東西?！?/p> ????2. 技術變遷可能令Skype逐漸失寵。雖然Skype贏得了最初的互聯網電話之戰，但他們依賴的是傳統的、龐大的臺式電腦用戶群。從技術角度，當時不可能推出高質量的客戶端或手機端產品，但這種情況不會持續。很多觀察人士堅信隨著全球不可避免地轉向客戶端和手機端產品，Skype將被遠遠落在后面。 ????對于像Skype這樣復雜的公司，投資者會基于同一個事實得出不同的結論。就此項收購而言，我們獲得的數據和其他人都一樣，但我們對Skype創始人及雇員的評價要遠高于懷疑論者和否定者。我們堅信我們能與創始人合作，而非對立。而且，我們相信Skype令人贊嘆的工程師團隊在開創了Skype服務、深具原創精神的東歐軟件奇才的帶領下，能與任何人競爭并獲勝。 ????特別是，我們當時相信，作為當代兩位杰出的科技創業者，尼可拉斯和賈納斯希望看到Skype大獲成功，并會盡其所能實現這一點。因此，我們并不認為其他投資者擔心的危機情境——即創始人將通過訴訟讓公司關門大吉——具有現實可能性。根據創始人的動機，我們感覺得快速了結知識產權訴訟。雙方都希望致力于提升Skype的競爭力，不能浪費時間為知識產權所有權爭吵不休。 ????在這一點上我們做得非常正確。在快速了結訴訟案后，兩位創始人旺盛的精力、精辟的洞見和杰出的知識才能為公司貢獻頗多。而且，我們的確需要他們，因為很快我們就面臨了來自谷歌(Google)和蘋果(Apple)的全面正面挑戰。 當巨頭發起挑戰 ????谷歌直接發起挑戰：提供一款免費產品，與Skype的美國付費產品競爭；提供一款大幅打折的產品，與Skype的國際產品競爭。隨后，谷歌向其龐大的Gmail用戶群大力推廣這些廉價產品，迫使每個Gmail用戶在進入郵箱前都要觀看谷歌的互聯網電話廣告。這些努力的結果如何？自從谷歌推出這些新產品以來，Skype的新用戶數量和用量呈現加速增長，現已達到： ????? *每日新注冊用戶 500,000 ????? *1.70億連接用戶 ????? *Skype平臺上同時在線交流的用戶數達到3000萬 ????? *2010年語音和視頻通話時間達到2,090億分鐘 ????在手機領域，蘋果在iPhone中內嵌了視頻通話功能，使其Facetime成為了iPhone用戶的默認應用。這對iPhone手機上的Skype使用有怎樣的影響？自從蘋果發布Facetime 以來，已有5,000萬用戶下載了Skype的iPhone應用軟件。 ????回顧來看，人們很容易低估Skype工程師團隊的質量以及Skype的網絡效應力量。當我們從eBay手中買下該公司時，很多人認為就像很多被收購的科技公司一樣，Skype的技術天才也會流失。我們通過研究發現，Skype有一群深具使命感的核心工程師。在公司被eBay收購后，他們留了下來，全心全意希望將Skype打造成未來的通信公司。過去十年，這個團隊不斷推出突破性的技術，從極具彈性、可伸縮的對等網絡，到通過更優的編解碼實現音質的大幅提高。在這個過程中，Skype在大多數重要領域的創新技術都超越了競爭對手。再加之以其強大的網絡效應（視頻通話服務如果沒人用，能有多少價值呢？），Skype成為了一個令人生畏的競爭對手。 明智之舉，微軟 ????今天，我要向一個老對手——微軟脫帽致意。通過收購Skype，微軟在移動市場的競爭力大為提升，并成為互聯網語音和視頻通信市場的顯著領先者。更重要的是，微軟獲得了一個由杰出的托尼?貝特斯率領、可與任何人競爭的團隊。 ????本文作者Ben Horowitz是風險資本公司Andreessen Horowitz的聯合創始人及一般合伙人。該公司旨在通過天使投資，滿足當今科技型創業者對大筆融資的需求。目前，Ben還在Okta、Nicira、Proferi和Skype的董事會任職。? |
????Shortly after we started Andreessen Horowitz in mid-2009, we, along with our partners at Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, bought majority ownership of Skype from eBay for slightly more than $2 billion. The investment generated a tremendous amount of controversy for us. Marc and I were known as angel investors, so investing $50 million of our new $300 million fund in one deal surprised people. While consistent with our stage-agnostic strategy, it was a very big deal very early on in the fund. To make matters more exciting, other investors and writers broadly criticized the deal. Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote: ????"Many people on Wall Street—and a number of telecommunications experts I spoke to this week—were stunned by the price Skype sold for, and not just because we're in the middle of a recession." ????That controversy ended this morning when Microsoft announced that it was buying Skype for $8.5 billion -- 18 months after we bought it from eBay. What it looked like back then ????Let's look back at the original decision and see why it turned out well. At the time, people criticized us for two primary reasons: ????1. Ebay might not have owned Skype's underlying intellectual property. Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, held an IP claim against Skype. Many speculated that the founders would use their claim to shut down Skype and leave investors with nothing. This made the company theoretically impossible to buy. As Nocera wrote: ????"And so, the mystery of the Skype deal: why were the winning bidders willing to pay so a high price for a company whose very existence could be threatened by this lawsuit? One possibility is that they have nerves of steel. The other is that they know something nobody else does." ????2. The shifting technology landscape would tilt the playing field away from Skype. While Skype won the original Internet telephony wars, they did so with a classic fat desktop client. From a technology standpoint, at the time, it was impossible to field a high-quality web client or mobile product, but that time wouldn't last. Many observers believed that as the world inevitably transitioned to mobile and web, Skype would be left in the dust. ????With a company as complex as Skype, investors draw different conclusions about the same facts. In this case we had the same data as everybody else, but we had a radically higher opinion of Skype's founders and employees than the doubters and naysayers. We believed that we could work with, rather than against, the founders. And we believed that Skype's amazing engineering team, led by the original Eastern European software wizards who created the service, could compete and win against anybody. ????We specifically thought that Niklas and Janus, two of the preeminent technology entrepreneurs of our time, wanted Skype to be a huge success and would do everything in their power to make that happen. As a result, we did not think the doomsday scenario that greatly concerned other investors—that the founders would attempt to shut down the company through the courts—was an actual possibility. Based on the founders' motivations, we felt that we'd quickly settle the IP litigation. Both sides wanted to get on with the business of making Skype more competitive and could not afford to waste time bickering about IP ownership. ????We couldn't have been more right about that. After quickly settling the litigation, both founders immediately made major contributions to the business through their energy, insight, and intellectual prowess. And boy did we need them to do that, because we soon faced full frontal assaults from the both Google and Apple. When giants attack ????In a direct attack, Google offered a free competitor to Skype's US paid product and a heavily discounted competitor to Skype's international product. Google then aggressively promoted these cheap products to their enormous Gmail user base by forcing every Gmail user to view Google's Internet telephony advertisement before allowing them to access their email. What was the result of this effort? Skype new users and usage growth has accelerated since Google's launch, culminating in: ????? *500,000 new registered users per day ????? *170 million connected users ????? *30 million users communicating on the Skype platform concurrently ????? *209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010 ????On the mobile front, Apple built video calling right into the iPhone, making their Facetime product the default offering for iPhone users. How did that impact Skype's usage on the iPhone? 50 million users have downloaded Skype's iPhone product since the release of Apple's Facetime. ????In retrospect, it was easy for people to underestimate the quality of the Skype engineering team and the power of Skype's network effect. When we bought the company from eBay, many thought that Skype, like so many acquired technology companies, had lost its technical talent. Through our research, we found that Skype had a core group of engineers who were completely dedicated to the mission. They stayed through the eBay acquisition and were hugely determined to make Skype the communications company of the future. Over the past decade, this team consistently introduced groundbreaking technologies ranging from highly resilient and scalable peer-to-peer networking to radically higher sound quality through dramatically superior codecs. In doing so, Skype out-innovated the competition in the most important areas. When combined with its powerful network effect—how valuable is a video calling service if there is nobody to call?—Skype became a formidable competitor. Smart move, Microsoft ????Today, I tip my hat to an old rival, Microsoft. By acquiring Skype, Microsoft becomes a much stronger player in mobile and the clear market leader in Internet voice and video communications. More importantly, Microsoft gets a team, ably led by the exceptional Tony Bates, that can compete with anyone. ????Ben Horowitz is co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm created to support the needs of today's technology-focused entrepreneurs through angel investments to large scale funding. Ben currently serves on the board of Okta, Nicira, Proferi and Skype. |
