Science & Tech Quote by Niklas Zennstrom

A little startup mythology hides inside Zennstrom's offhand phrasing: "Then" suggests inevitability, as if mass adoption were the natural next step rather than a knife-fight of timing, distribution, and luck. He frames scale as something that simply happens once people "started using it more and more", smoothing over the brutal engineering reality that "more and more" usually breaks systems before it blesses them. The line is deliberately frictionless, the way founders talk when they want a product to feel like a tide, not a push.

The subtext is classic network-effect thinking. He's describing a loop where usefulness increases with each new user, turning adoption into its own marketing. "Most downloaded software on the internet" is both a boast and a proxy metric: in the early-2000s web, downloads signaled legitimacy in a world before app stores and subscription dashboards. It's a number you can repeat at conferences, to investors, to regulators, to skeptics who still think peer-to-peer is a niche hobby.

Context matters because Zennstrom is inseparable from Skype's era: broadband spreading, international calling still expensive, and consumers newly comfortable installing software that promised to route around phone monopolies. The passive construction also conveniently launders controversy. Peer-to-peer infrastructures were often adjacent to piracy debates and copyright wars; saying "people started using it" keeps agency with the crowd, not the company. It's a founder's way of claiming both innocence and inevitability: we didn't force anything; the public decided.