Janus Friis is backing a communications startup that claims to solve ‘nagging problems’ in messaging, voice and file sharing. Can it really be the ‘ground up reimagination’ he claims?

When Janus Friis co-founded Skype in 2003, its entrenched competition was instant messaging software like MSN Messenger, AIM and Yahoo Messenger. In 2015, he’s backing a new communications startup called Wire. Its entrenched competition? Skype.

Well, not just Skype. Wire combines elements of Skype, WhatsApp and currently-buzzy workplace communications service Slack. It’s launching as a slick, fully-formed app for Mac, iOS and Android devices and a team of 65 people – not to mention the domain name wire.com and the Twitter handle @wire.

Little details that show the company’s big ambitions, as does the financial backing from Friis. “What attracted me to Wire is that it is something truly new. This is not some marginal improvement. This is not just an app,” he told the Guardian, in a rare interview ahead of its launch.

“This is not just attacking one feature trying to do something marginally better. What the team has done is a complete from-the-ground-up reimagination of what communication should be. I wouldn’t have been interested if this was just another feature.”

Wire is an app, of course: Mac, iOS and Android initially, with an HTML5 version in development – “It will be ready in less than a quarter,” chief executive Jonathan Christensen told the Guardian – that will cover other devices, including Windows PCs.

It’s based around conversations, which can be one-to-one or group chats, into which photos, YouTube videos and SoundCloud tracks can be dragged and displayed or played. Wire populates each user’s social graph using their contacts list, sorting those contacts using various signals including regularity of chats, and time of the day or week.

Wire also does voice calls, with audio quality being one of its key selling points: clear and loud, using the Opus open source audio codec that was developed in part by the company’s chief scientist Koen Vos. “We have deep expertise in audio technology: we’ve made many refinements to the audio stack. It’s one of our core things,” said Christensen.

‘Solving nagging problems’ in communications apps

Design is also a big deal for Wire, with lots of clever touches to its user interface, from the ability to “ping” contacts to get their attention, to the simplicity of muting conversations if they’re getting too distracting. In its mobile apps, the text-input cursor can be swiped aside to reveal action icons.

“There are hundreds of features in the product, and a lot of refinement from being in this space for many years, and knowing where the pain points are,” said Christensen. “We want to solve all those little, nagging problems that have been persistent for years and years in digital communications.”

Skype looms large in Wire’s DNA: several members of its founding team worked there, including Christensen, who spent six years at Skype rising to vice president of emerging technologies, before leaving after Microsoft bought the company in 2012.

He’s been building Wire’s team ever since. The company is headquartered in Switzerland, although its development team is based in Berlin, with other staff dotted around the world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wire blends chat and voice calls.

Switzerland? That brings us on to one of the most important questions for any new communications startup in 2015: security. After the surveillance revelations prompted by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the ability (and desire) of any new communications startup to protect its users’ privacy is rightfully under scrutiny.



Locating its head office in Switzerland was Wire’s first decision taken on security grounds. “If someone is interested in accessing our user data, there’s a formal and well-regulated process in Switzerland for that. They’re very mindful of privacy, and the same is true in Germany.”

End-to-end encryption of voice calls

What about the product? Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a “Secure Messaging Scorecard” to rate various messaging apps on their security features, from whether they encrypted messages in transit; whether users could verify contacts’ identities; and whether the code was open to independent review.

The trend, clearly illustrated in the EFF’s scorecard, was for niche privacy-focused apps to get lots of green ticks, and for the mainstream, popular apps to get lots of red stop signs. Can Wire buck that trend?

“The first high-level statement is that we think people care about privacy, and we care about privacy. I use the app to talk to my wife, and to my business partners. I want my communications to be safe,” said Christensen.

He added that Wire uses end-to-end encryption for all its voice calls, and encryption to and from its data centres for all its messages and media.

“Unlike a lot of small startups, we have made a significant investment and are thoughtful about security. We have a full-time security expert working with us, and we hire outside firms to audit who can see the data and under what circumstances,” he added.

Christensen did query some aspects of the EFF scorecard, though, suggesting that some of its criteria are challenging. “If you have multi-party chat and end-to-end encryption, there’s a lot of key-sharing that has to go on. At some point, you break the product and make it unusable,” he said.

“But we have long-term persistent conversations: that’s a big part of our model, we want to have recall, we want to do search, and you have to have something to search against. Our model is cloud-based: it’s more like Gmail when you can always search.”

How important will security and privacy be to people deciding whether to sign up for Wire, though? Social motivations – what services your friends and colleagues are using – have tended to be the dominant factors for past communications tools, from those early instant messaging clients through Skype and on to Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.

Friis suggested that security and other features can sit alongside one another. “The perception in terms of how much people think about security has certainly increased a lot since 2013 and the Snowden revelations. Simplicity, beauty, ease of use and functionality is still bigger, but they’re not mutually exclusive,” said Friis.

“There are complicated trade-offs to be made in the design choices when you design these products. They’re not as black and white as sometimes they can be made out to be, but Wire have thought security in from the beginning.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Janus Friis in 2003, when he was still working at Skype. Photograph: Steve Forrest / Rex Features

Wire’s launch is global with no barriers, rather than a slow, invite-only rollout, which means while it worked beautifully while writing this article, the real test will come if and when users start piling on to the platform.



Video calls to be added later

What are the challenges? Video calls aren’t included at launch, which may be a problem if Wire is hoping to suck users away from Skype, Viber and Tango. “It’s not available now, but let’s just say we have those skills in-house,” said Christensen.

The app includes in-app pointers explaining how features work, which Christensen acknowledged as essential for older users: “If you put this in the hands of a 17-25 year-old, they’re masters from the very first minute. If they’re 35-55 year-olds, they’re a little ‘why?’,” he said.

Christensen would not say whether the company is targeting businesses or consumers, but said it had identified potential revenue streams if it can build a critical mass of users first.

Wire is completely free for now – pre-revenue, as investors call it – with the emphasis on signing up users before introducing paid features later on.

“It’s in our terms of use: we’re not going to look at your data and cultivate it for advertising,” said Christensen. “We’re not going to put advertising in the client. My head of design would kill me! It’s more about finding the right kind of opportunities that are additive to the user experience, and that they’re motivated to pay for. We’ve found what we think are a couple of good ones.”

What comes after WhatsApp?

The biggest challenge for Wire – and any new communications tool – is to get popular in the first place. Clever design, clear audio and respect for privacy are all good things, but only if enough people are using it: specifically, enough of your friends when you’re deciding whether to use it yourself.

In November, Microsoft said that Skype had more than 300 million users calling and messaging one another. Wire is starting with a handful (by comparison) of beta testers. Word-of-mouth will be the defining factor in whether Wire matters in a year’s time.

Christensen said that the company has “removed many potential barriers to getting on board”, requiring only a name, email address and password to sign up, as well as the contacts list to build out a social graph.

The company hopes this will serve it well in a cyclical communications market where people are still willing to try new products. “We’re laser focused in making it as good as it can be, and fill the space when people are ready to move on from the purely functional,” he said.

“Our philosophy was if the first generation was about price arbitrage – Skype made phone calls free, WhatsApp made SMS free – that’s great, but what about the next thing? What about the real product that’s built around these features?”

• Next for messaging apps: encryption, payments, media and ads

