So I'm Nicholas Anstrom, I'm a Swedish entrepreneur who started several companies, most notable Skype, before that Kasa and a few others, but for the last nine years I've been working as an investor with Atomico when we invest in the next generation of technology companies which is super exciting. Over the last 10 years since I was active, since I started Skype in 2002, the market has changed tremendously to the better. So today is actually the best time ever to be an entrepreneur in technology. It's also the best time ever to be an investor in technology. Ten years ago we didn't have any smartphones and today we have 1.7 billion smartphones out in the world, and actually a lot of the growth in our economy is coming from technology. I actually think it's an advantage if you're coming from a smaller country because you have to think about the global markets from day one. That's what we did with Skype. You know, we started out of Sweden and our tech office in Estonia and so forth, so we thought about the world as our Market.
What you can see is that successful entrepreneurs are investing in the next generation of companies. You can also see that people who worked for a successful tech company, some of them go out and start their own companies. So what I wanted to do with Atomico was to build a platform for entrepreneurs to scale and for me personally gives me an opportunity to work with some of these amazing entrepreneurs, take advantage of my team's experience. The big driving factor for growth of the sector are entrepreneurs and people who want to be entrepreneurs, and of course capital coming into the market. I think that just success breeds success. Now we're starting to see more and more great opportunities coming from Europe for sure.
