The New York Times is running an article today about the improbability of the Skype sale, and not for the reasons you might think. eBay reached a deal earlier this week to sell off 65% of Skype at a $2.75 billion valuation in the last quarter of the year (meaning relatively soon). The point of the Times’ piece is that this is a lot of money to pay for a company with an uncertain future.
There is currently a trial against eBay which could shut down Skype for good. Essentially, the Skype founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom (the same guys who did Kazaa), had a license agreement with eBay for some of the technology involved in Skype’s operations, and they allege that the way the Skype business was being run violated the terms of the agreement. So should the founders win their case, they could in theory shut down Skype.
This would be a very bad thing with some real-world repercussions. Despite the recent news of an actual Skype-tapping piece of malware, Skype is still incredibly important to political dissidents in oppressive countries like Myanmar and China. If Skype were to go down, there would certainly be a bunch of other VoIP programs to take its place, but it would be very rough on people who for now really depend on Skype’s existence.
So far as business goes, the author of the Times’ article posits that someone inside the Skype acquisition has a way to settle the legal battle. Michelangelo Volpi of Index Venture Growth Fund, one of the firms that’s buying Skype, is apparently pretty close with Zennstrom and Friis. So the Times’ suspicion is that Mr. Volpi either knows something that can win the case against the founders or has enough clout with them that he can settle the case out of court.
This makes a whole lot of sense, as paying $2 billion for a company which could soon be out of business would be ludicrous. I would go so far as to say that in all probability, the buyers have already worked out a deal with the founders so that Skype will not be shut down. That just makes sense.
