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At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas

… At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of hours to host Skype super nodes. Apparently Skype had gotten into a retry storm due to a cascading failure because too many peer to peer super nodes had been taken offline at the same time. I think that Tuesday was Windows update day and maybe that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The small list of hard-coded super-super-nodes couldn't cope with the deluge. It took 3 days to get everything back and running, and for me it was the start of a fun collaboration with the team at Skype and eBay who were always nice. Skype had sold to eBay for 2.6B in 2005. I don't think much diligence was done, and it didn't work out as a great integration for eBay. Then Skype was spun out and sold to Private Equity in 2009. The internet tells me that 65% was sold for 1.9B but I think there was some kind of write-down involved too. And then Microsoft bought Skype for 8.5B in 2009. …

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Skype was an intelligence-gathering platform with very few equals. In the era that Skype was producing unicorn horns, surveillance capitalism was on a rocket ride. I doubt those same conditions would allow for multiple unicorn horns in the modern era. You can't build a Skype-like surveillance network now; that horse has left the barn.

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> you can make a business with a great product Depends on the market reach. A product struggling due to scale (a good problem to have: Like WhatsApp c. early 2010s during New Years) and a product that mostly does not do what it should (the very many dead WhatsApp clones) are very different things. > a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient I remember the time Skype was pre-installed on popular Androids (including the Kindle Fire ) and yet couldn't compete with the likes of Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat (which also came pre-installed). Think MSFT was that soft landing that broke that resilience. > So you can have multi-day world-headline outages ... unicorn scale I mean, us-east-1 is a prime example ;)

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