Niklas Zennstrom, Found­ing Part­ner & CEO, Atom­ico and Loic Le Meur,  Founder, LeWeb

Niklas runs a $200 mil­lion fund which has invested in 50 com­pa­nies. They don’t look for any par­tic­u­lar sub­sec­tors. They look at oppor­tu­ni­ties in all kinds of sec­tors. When Google entered search, all the exist­ing search engines piv­oted into por­tals because that’s what the invest­ment bank ana­lysts were pre­dict­ing was the next big thing. Google instead focused just on search with a bet­ter prod­uct. That is why Niklas does not look at a sin­gle sec­tor, because sim­i­lar tim­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for inno­va­tion exist in all sectors.

It’s very hard to develop for Win­dows or Black­berry. First, you have to put a gun to the developer’s head, because no one wants to go through the trou­ble. Alos, often the user­base on those plat­forms is just in the sin­gle dig­its, so it’s not pos­si­ble to jus­tify the cost and effort.

The growth in star­tups is not in US or Europe, it’s in emerg­ing mar­kets. China, Brazil, Rus­sia, Turkey is show­ing a lot of growth.

The best way to reach Niklas is through the web­site, <a href=“http://Atomico.com”>Atomico.com</a>