Howard Hartenbaum, Skype investor

So the Mercury News article on the Skype backstory is out:

But the story behind Skype is also about a scrappy scoop scored by a relative novice at the venture business, Howard Hartenbaum. And it may reflect the danger of Silicon Valley-centric firms becoming too complacent, even while business goes global.

On Monday, eBay announced it would pay up to $4.1 billion for Luxembourg-based Skype, which lets users make calls free over the Internet and is growing like a weed, with 54 million users.

That represents a huge return for investors, who injected only $20 million. The earliest investors garnered far in excess of 100 times their original money. The icing on the cake: It was quick. Skype delivered less than three years after the first investments -- unlike Google, which made its VCs sweat for six painful years before it went public.

MercuryNews.com | 09/15/2005 | Skype hunt: How VCs struck gold in Europe

The person credited with finding Skype and investing first is Howard Hartenbaum of Draper Richards.

Howard will be much more in the limelight after the Skype story spreads, so I thought I'd link to two articles- one that he did for AlwaysOn, and one which is a Q&A on a PR blog.

This Hartenbaum piece on Skype as well as European VCs is from Nov. 2003!

Skype's multinational team helps the Internet telephone company take hold. [alwayson-network.com]

The only things that a young company should care about are: customers, good references, and implementation. There's no need to tell everyone what you are doing. The worst thing that a small company can do is tell the market what they are doing, and then have the large competitors provide the same service or product. There is no benefit for a young company to announce all its great things. They can call and get a great reference - all they need to do is to tell the other companies in the space (customers' space) and that will do more than a press release.

It turns out that Howard has spent time in Japan, is fluent in Japanese, has worked at Honda R&D and for a DirecTV Japan project. I'm sure it is an interesting story to find out how he ended up at Draper Richards.