skype
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Martin Rand and the Value of a Conversation That Never Happened
A deal he lost helped Martin Rand imagine software that could negotiate. From Skype and farm fields to Pactum AI and a new venture backing overlooked founders, his work keeps returning to the opportunities people leave unattended.
Mark Asseily and the trouble with being heard
After working on the business of connecting calls, Mark Asseily co-founded State to connect opinions. His next problem was giving people a reason to listen.
Nils Hammar and the art of getting people to turn up
From Skype to family trees to classifieds in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Ghana, Nils Hammar kept returning to one question: what makes people find one another? Saltside gave him several answers, including a retreat and two sales to a rival.
Skype made distance cheap. Staying useful cost more.
Skype made a call across an ocean feel ordinary. Its rise, expensive changes of ownership, and final move to Teams reveal how easily a simple idea can become complicated.
Enlai Chu
Enlai Chu is the founder and CEO of Productive.ai (Phoneic, Inc.), an AI call assistant that turns ordinary mobile phone calls into transcribed, summarized, CRM-logged records of work. A telecom builder with 25-plus years across messaging, voice and video, he co-founded the early group-texting startup 3jam (acquired by Skype in 2011), then held product roles at Skype and Microsoft before returning to founder life. His through-line: phone calls are where business actually happens, yet the moment you hang up the value vanishes.
Vijay Tella
Vijay Tella is the co-founder and CEO of Workato, a $5.7B enterprise automation platform that has become the integration backbone for over 21,000 businesses worldwide. With 30+ years spent building the middleware plumbing of Silicon Valley - from co-founding TIBCO Software to architecting Oracle Fusion Middleware to selling Qik to Skype - Tella launched Workato in 2013 with a straightforward conviction: integration should be something anyone can do, not just engineers with specialized tools. His book 'The New Automation Mindset' became a Wall Street Journal bestseller in 2023, and Workato has been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for iPaaS seven consecutive years running.
Taavet Hinrikus
Taavet Hinrikus is an Estonian tech entrepreneur who became Skype's first employee, co-founded Wise (formerly TransferWise) in 2010 - growing it into Europe's largest fintech IPO via a 2021 direct listing at $11B - and now invests through Plural Platform alongside backing social initiatives like kood/Jõhvi coding school. One of Estonia's first billionaires, with a net worth around $1.35 billion, he is also a co-owner of the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers.
Gergely Orosz
Gergely Orosz is the Hungarian-born, Amsterdam-based author behind The Pragmatic Engineer, the #1 technology newsletter on Substack with over 1 million readers. A former engineering manager at Uber who helped build payments infrastructure processing $65B+ annually, he left Big Tech in 2021 to write independently. He covers software engineering careers, Big Tech culture, and the AI-driven transformation of the industry - earning $1.5M+ per year from subscriptions alone, with zero ads or sponsors.