When I first met Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype, which was sold to Ebay in September 2005 for $2.6 billion, it was the autumn of 2003 and he had yet to bag the big money from the top VC's. All he had was a reputation for having created one of the most downloaded applications of all time - Kazaa, the peer to peer music file sharing application. It was why one venture capitalist sought him out, thinking that if he could have that kind of impact on the world, then what would be his Act 2?    No one would have predicted that he'd sell Skype for $2.6 billion however, it is safe to say.

Unfortunately, Zennstrom's  fellow Swedes behind The Pirate Bay, an internet site that offers thousands of links to music, TV and movie files online, didn't have his luck, and were found guilty of illegal downloading this past week and jailed. The entertainment industry has had a stay of execution. Violent change to the industry however will continue to send waves high over the sides of it as it tries to sail through The Pirate Bay.

Watching new products take off from the inner circle is one of the most wonderful things to be a part of. When Ariadne Capital, my firm, first started advising Skype, there were less than 500,000 regular users of Skype globally. I remember logging on and always checking how many Skype users were online throughout 2004 as the numbers climbed to 13 million, now hundreds of millions.

Colly Myers' next gig, five year old AQA 63336, is about to take off in a major way as well. On Monday, Myers launched a new product in his post-Symbian company called "AQA2U". It is essentially a mobile Twitter - a publishing platform for anyone who has a mobile phone and wants to make money. AQA, or Any Question Answered, enables you to ask the service, for a text fee, any question which its team of consultants answers back to your phone. They are a profitable mobile data service, and the management team is full of trivia as you can imagine. Twitter, the Silicon Valley phenomenon, has no business model, but huge hype; it enables you to post to your network what you are doing, keeping you in contact with friends through short bursts of communication. "AQA2U" enables you to communicate to your network a message by phone, and to share the mobile data revenue. Watch Twitter announcing a mobile strategy asap.

Companies start with a concept which needs validation - that phase where the founders have to prove that their insight into consumer behaviour is on target. Then you move into commercialisation which means taxing the consumer behaviour; said another way, you find a business model. If all is still working, the company starts to scale, leading to sustainability and/or exit.

Skype, currently potentially up for resale, was sold for billions without having achieved commercialisation. Elements of its validation phase were surreal however. AQA, I believe, will have a killer application on their hands asap, and that should lead to a much longer and stronger trajectory of company growth.