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"The bold shall make the earth rethink all its business models."
Internet entrepreneur Julie Meyer says gutsy start-ups need investors with vision

In December 2003, Lady Lynn de Rothschild, founder of several successful telecoms firms, addressed the Ariadne third anniversary party on the theme of The Next Big Thing. In her speech, she mentioned a little known start-up called Skype. In the back of the same room was Niklas Zennstrom , the founder of Skype, who looked frankly shocked to have been mentioned.

Skype, now a leading VoIP (voice over internet protocol) provider, had built up a base of 54 million active users by the time it was sold to eBay for $4.1 billion last month.

'Disruptive' technologies and business models that require gutsy entrepreneurs and ambitious investors are back on the agenda. What Skype did well was become a phenomenon through massive PR, and by having a downloadable free application that offered a built-in incentive to get others to use it. Just like with fax machines, if you're the only one with one, you can't fax anyone. The Skype 'early adopters' encouraged friends and family to download Skype so that they could call up.

Skype's success was founded on Zennstrom's decade of experience in the telecoms industry. The emergence of mass-market broadband made the time right for Skype, although there were many start-ups that had been facilitating free phone calls over the PC through the internet. Skype linked the free internet calls over your PC with a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, giving it an inherent advantage over major telcos in terms of cost structure and customer benefit.

What lessons does Skype's success have for us?

First, Skype suggests to European investors who want to blame their poor financial results on a lack of good entrepreneurs that their lack of vision and ability to help start-ups scale their businesses globally might be the problem - rather than the dearth of the right people to back.

Second, Skype reminds us that the bold inherit the earth. One of the most amusing meetings I've ever attended was with Zennstrom and 12 executives from a big US telco who were eager to meet Niklas in early 2004; Skype was getting better known, but the US telco was still not realising how threatened it should be by Skype. Instead, it presented very elaborate details of what it thought it could offer Skype in terms of a partnership. Gradually, it started to dawn on it that Skype simply did not have to pay for the development of its network. In other words, Skype had an inherent structural advantage by virtue of being a P2P application. Because of this, Skype was rolling out a business model of free phone calls and paid-for services that would force telcos to change their business models forever.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, everyone was fêting the Google founders - the new billionaires who had taken the concept of internet search to a new level. Few seemed to know Zennstrom at Davos. That will change next year: the impact of the acquisition by eBay has had the effect of a tsunami throughout the European business community.

The point is that great internet entrepreneurs do exist in Europe ; and indeed, it is possible to become one if one chooses an industry one knows about, understands how technology can make it more efficient or deliver a better customer benefit, has the right capital partner and addresses a global market.

Something global for the internet has finally come out of Europe post Tim Berners-Lee, who is considered the father of the world wide web. And lots of investors missed it. Skype chose a strategy of becoming ubiquitous rather than profitable. Many investment committees of venture capital firms in Mayfair will be thinking hard about that as they evaluate their start-ups this week.

Merger rumours were swirling all summer as talks with Murdoch and Google came and went. As one investor in Skype said to me recently: 'It was a good deal for eBay.'

Whether you believe that eBay over- or underpaid, value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You can count on one hand the number of companies that started from scratch in Europe over the past 30 years and have become billion-dollar businesses, let alone the ones that have achieved this status in three years. Skype enlarges that elite group, and will inspire a new group of men and women to live unbalanced lives for a couple of years, being unreasonable about success as they work to change the world.

· Julie Meyer is CEO and founder of investment firm Ariadne Capital, which was an adviser to Skype.