Janus Friis Net Worth & Biography

Danish entrepreneur Janus Friis who never had a formal higher education as he dropped out of high school, is the co-founder of numerous businesses including Vdio, Rdio, KaZaA, Skype, Joltid, and Joost. Together with Niklas Zennstrom who he met in 1996, Janus launched the Danish ISP get2net and the portal everyday.com. They both decided to leave their jobs to concentrate on building KaZaA, the company behind the most popular software for use with the popular FastTrack file sharing network protocol. Janus Friis is also the co-founder of Altnet, a network that sells commercial music to users of KaZaA. With the success of KaZaA, the partners also co-founded Joltid, a software company creating and marketing peer-to-peer traffic optimization technologies and peer-to-peer solutions to companies. In 2002, the partners founded the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype, which they sold to eBay for a deal worth $2.6 billion in 2005. However, Janus still kept an interest in the application through Silver Lake Partners until Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. In 2006, Janus and Niklas came up with another creation named Joost, thus moving all forms of video to the user’s personal computer. It was later sold three years later to Adconion Media Group. In 2010, they co-founded an ad-free music subscription service called Rdio, before Janus founded his own music and video streaming program called Vdio the following year. With all that he has developed in his illustrative career, Mr. Friis has displayed his truest talents as one of the world’s greatest living internet entrepreneurs. His success is not only marked by the fame he has earned but also can be seen from his net worth which is pegged at over a billion dollars as of this writing. A breakdown of his professional life and financial statistics along with other important details regarding his life has been given in the article below.

Early Life: Childhood, Education.

This businessman from Denmark was born on 26 June 1976 in Copenhagen, where he was also brought up. He never had a formal education since he dropped out of school as a high school student in order to pursue his dreams.

Professional Life: Entrepreneurial Career

When Janus Friis first dropped out of high school, he started a job at the help desk of one of the first Internet service providers called CyberCity.

In 1996, out of chance, he met Niklas Zennström. At the time, Zennström worked at Tele2 in Denmark, and Friis was offered a job to run its customer support. The two men connected easily and became friends, and worked together at Tele2 to create get2net and everyday.com. When they realized the extent of their creativity, Janus and Niklas decided to leave Tele2. They started living in Zennström’s small apartment in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in January 2000 where they started building KaZaA.

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström created the FastTrack protocol in 2001. From the success of KaZaA’s technology, the duo co-founded Joltid, a software company that creates and markets peer-to-peer solutions and traffic optimization technologies to companies.

The two men founded the online music streaming service Rdio in 2010. It filed for bankruptcy five years later and announced the acquisition of its assets by Pandora Radio for the sum of $75 million. Janus then founded Wire in 2012. In 2014, Janus worked with Ahti Heinla to develop Starship Technologies, which built small self-driving delivery robots.

Achievements: Awards & Honors

In 2006, Mr. Friis was named one of the top 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. That same year, he received the prestigious award “IT-prisen” in his home country, awarded by the Danish IT industry and IDG, for all his works and innovation.

Janus Friis and his business partner, Niklas Zennström, were the co-recipients of the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award in 2006, given to individuals and businesses that have brought positive change to an industry or society as a whole using information technology

Personal Life: Relationships, Private Interests

Janus has always kept this aspect of his life very private indeed. He rarely takes the center stage to talk much about anything that doesn’t involve his business and accomplishments. However, he was engaged to Danish singer Aura Dione for a while, but the couple split up in April 2015.

Janus Friis Net Worth: Salary, Income Sources, Assets

The Danish entrepreneur, Janus Friis, currently has a net worth of $1.3 billion. He achieved tremendous success in his career despite not having any degree or academic qualifications to his name. His wealth has come from numerous investment schemes, particularly the many software companies he has either founded or co-founded in his career. Some of these companies include Get2net, Joltid, Kazaa, Joost, Vdio, Rdio, and others.