We’re not done announcing our all-star lineup for Disrupt Beijing. In addition to top Chinese Internet names like Tencent co-founder and CEO Pony Ma, proven successes like YouTube’s Steve Chen and top up-and-coming Western names like Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka and Evernote’s Phil Libin, we’ve got even more startup experts lined up.
I’m thrilled to announce that Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom will be joining us in Bejing as well. As co-founder of Kazaa back in the Web 1.0 days, Zennstrom was on the bleeding edge of the peer-to-peer music revolution that helped make the Web cool. He followed that up with a wonky plan to leverage peer-to-peer technology to make cheap international phone calls that initially no one wanted to fund.
That idea would become Skype– a company that sold to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005, was bought back, and sold again to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. Few entrepreneurs have managed to achieve multiple billion-dollar-or-more exits in their careers– fewer still have done it twice with the same company.
Skype is also one of the only Western Web companies of its generation to achieve huge success in China. Today, Zennstrom is interested in doing more investing in China through his London-based venture firm Atomico, so this is a keynote local Chinese entrepreneurs will not want to miss.
We’re also bringing Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom with us from the Valley. Instagram has been a runaway success locally and globally. On stage, Systrom will talk about the journey and what’s next for Instagram. Off-stage, he’ll be exploring China for the first time.
Not all the US speakers are new to China. In fact, China has been core to the success of two of our other speakers’s companies: Hosain Rahman of Jawbone and Brian Lee of ShoeDazzle.
The scorchingly hot Jawbone has raised more than $100 million in funding in the last year and has some of the biggest names in the Valley behind it– from Andreessen Horowitz to Sequoia Capital. It has achieved something few Valley companies have in the last decade: Building a cutting edge hardware company. And Rahman couldn’t have done it without Chinese partnerships.
Similarly, Brian Lee’s ShoeDazzle has leveraged China’s supply chain prowess to invent a new, highly-lucrative business model for ecommerce. Lee and Rahman will tell us about their experiences doing business in the country, and why more Chinese entrepreneurs don’t exploit these endemic advantages to create their own branded, product companies.
Stay tuned for even more speaker announcements of this can’t-miss conference in coming weeks. As a reminder, tickets are on sale here now, and applications are still open for the startup battlefield and the hackathon. Thanks as always to our partners at Innovation Works, who are working hard to ensure the event’s success.
If you have any doubts about whether you want to apply or attend, I encourage you to watch the footage from last week’s stellar Disrupt San Francisco conference.
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system. Skype was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who were also the founders of the file sharing application Kazaa. Skype has also become popular for its additional...
Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...
For more than a decade, Jawbone has developed products and services for the mobile lifestyle unparalleled in their innovation, ease-of-use and sophistication of design. The company is the creator of the award-winning and best-selling premium ICON Bluetooth headset; the inventor of NoiseAssassin® technology, the world’s first and only military-grade noise eliminating technology; JAMBOX, the first intelligent wireless speaker and speakerphone; as well as THOUGHTS, a free mobile service that allows users to utilize their voice in a new way....
ShoeDazzle is a Los Angeles-based online personalized styling and retail service that features reality show star and model Kim Kardashian. Members pay a set monthly fee in exchange for a pair of shoes that are selected by Hollywood stylists.
Niklas Zennström is an internet entrepreneur who co-founded Skype, Kazaa, Joltid and Joost among other high-profile technology companies, before founding Atomico, the international technology venture capital firm based in London. He serves as CEO and Founding Partner of Atomico, overseeing its strategy and overall management in addition to sourcing new investments and working with portfolio companies. He currently serves on the boards of Fon, Jolicloud, Rovio and Rdio. Prior to forming Atomico, he held the position of CEO at Skype from its...
Hosain Rahman is the CEO and founder of Jawbone, a developer of popular products and services for the mobile lifestyle, and one of the largest venture capital-backed consumer electronics companies in the world. Jawbone’s premium Bluetooth headsets have disrupted the headset market; its JAMBOX wireless portable speaker is the best-selling speaker in North America; and its highly-anticipated UP by Jawbone, a comprehensive mobile health and wellness system that combines a wristband and app for your smartphone, will launch this...
Kevin Systrom is a co-founder of Instagram, a photo sharing application for the iPhone. He also founded Burbn, an HTML5-based location sharing service. Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering. He got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo, the company that birthed Twitter. He spent two years at Google; during the first, he worked on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products, and during...
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