My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries - without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.

One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.

Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'

You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.

When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.

The 2 hardest things you'll have to do when running a company are recruiting and talking people out of leaving.