Ben Horowitz

So the first thing that made it insane was like the deal itself.

When it spun out of eBay,

eBay didn't own the IP.

They owned the company, but not the IP, which how they ended up there is like a crazy, dumb story.

But, by the way, never do that.

Never buy the company without buying the IP.

So the founders kind of had this hold on them where they could have sued them and shut down the service.

And so everybody was like, oh, that's an unbuyable asset.

But, like, we knew the founders, Yanis and Nicholas, and we knew, like, the one thing they had in life that defined them was Skype.

So they weren't going to shut that thing down.

It was just a matter of, like, how much money did they want?

Did they want to be on the board?

It wasn't the client.

It was the underlying kind of library that controlled the protocol.

Oh, sure.

The communications protocol.

Yeah, which was, you know, very hard to replace and all that kind of thing.

So anyway, we bought it and then 18 months later, we got like a Forex return on it.

And so like you got a Forex on a quarter of the fund in 18 months and everybody goes, okay, well, even though we thought you were nuts, like maybe you're not completely insane.

Yeah, I mean, I think people just didn't understand network effects as well.