WHEN I WALK IN, Niklas Zennström is peering into his computer.

“He will be with you shortly,” says his assistant, but from where I am standing, Zennström’s long, hunched figure seems more likely to climb into his screen.

Eventually he disengages and ambles over, offering a muted greeting and a hesitant handshake. Zennström, 39, looks like a tousled schoolboy dressed to meet the City: pale blue shirt, pinstripe suit hanging awkwardly, floppy hair brushed Bill Gates-style across rectangular glasses. Only the slight paunch on his 6 ft 4 in frame shows his age.

He seems embarrassed to be there, an effect doubled by his lazy left eye, which looks one way while his right moves the other — making conversation unsettling, as if Zennström is permanently distracted.

He is not, of course. He is, in his Swedish-inflected English, an intense and articulate speaker with a lot to say — so long as you don’t ask him about money. That’s because London-based Zennström, who sold his internet telephony start-up Skype to Ebay for $2.6 billion (£1.5 billion) last month, is understandably wary about his new status as tech millionaire hero.

“I am an entrepreneur,” he shrugs, playing it all down. “I just want to run my company.”

Which begs the question as to why he sold Skype, even though he is staying on to guide its growth, but he has cogent reasons for that too. What he doesn’t want to reveal is just how much he and co-founder Janus Friis, a Dane, pocketed from the deal. They had already sold many chunks of Skype to venture capital, but are likely to have retained at least 15% each — stakes worth £225m.

“It is a private matter,” he says dolefully, sounding rather like Sven-Göran Eriksson.

Ah, these Scandinavians. Perhaps after the first £100m it doesn’t matter. You can buy a lot of pinstripe suits with that.

“Actually I had this suit from before the deal. I am meeting some people today so...”

It wasn’t just for me. He grins lopsidedly. Sitting in a long, glass-walled meeting room in Skype’s Soho adland base, Zennström, it is clear, is not your conventional entrepreneur.

For a start he is determinedly unmaterialistic — no car, no trappings of wealth — with an anarchic streak that makes some wonder how he can hold an organisation together. He is also an uneasy salesman, slow to warm up and so focused on his business that personable small talk is not on the agenda.

Added to that, he runs a surprisingly dispersed outfit: a finance and marketing team in London, a head office in Luxembourg, a software centre in Estonia. Little wonder he complains of spending most of his life in airports.

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