Skype: Lessons Learned from a Dead Unicorn

Om Malik wrote an amazing piece (Skype is dead. What happened?) on the demise of Skype and there are lessons to be learned here for founders – and investors.
At launch, Skype was a seminal technology that upended communications. Prior to the launch of the peer-to-peer network, long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive. Suddenly, one could call anywhere in the world for free, as one can do with so many services today – now, even video, of course. At one point, like Zoom, Skype was a verb.
As for the lessons: