Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, exactly. Skype has over half a billion users around the world at this point and is quite profitable and making a lot of revenue. In the third quarter of 2009, Skype itself did $185 million in revenue. But it’s just not a fit within eBay and Wall Street is saying that they should spin it out or do something, this makes no sense. And so they start working on a transaction that we referenced earlier where a consortium of private equity firms and Andreessen Horowitz, which had just been founded by Marc and Ben, are going to invest directly in Skype, spin it out of eBay, eBay will retain a stake, and end up valuing the company about at what eBay bought it for a few years earlier. Because I think somewhere in the middle there, October of 2007, eBay did a write-down internally of the value of Skype. Yup. But there’s still one problem again, which is that Skype doesn’t own the IP. And they’re just licensing it back from Joltid, from Zennström and Friis. And so, what happens, Zennström and Friis actually sue both eBay and the investor consortium, sue to stop them using the technology and there’s this whole big… and this is all playing out in public, eBay is a public company.…

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