Klarna

“Google was pushing for a while, 20% of creative time. We implemented 20% of creative time. Nothing happened. We took it away.”

“Sports have, and games have, that makes it motivating, and these essential building blocks have to be in place first, and if you have those building blocks, then you can also add to that a great sense of purpose, and some kind of positive contribution to socie…”

“But at least what I've learned to do much more nowadays is that I'm trying, to your point about vulnerability and kind of approachability, I try to at least tell people that. If I go into a meeting, I'm just like, guys, just so you know, like, I had a quarrel …”

“In the best of worlds, if you have great leaders That are very self sustained and really can push forward themselves. Then you can have a lot of direct reports. You can even manage up to, you can maybe do 14 people. If you are in a tougher starting phase or wh…”

“At the end, around 16 and 17, I got a new management team in place. Niklas had left, and the marriage quarrel were gone. And so we were finally able to sit down seriously and talk through how do we think we create a culture and a setup that works. And we decid…”

“The best spot is at the place where you're, like, challenged to the precise point where you're almost giving up, but not entirely, right?”

“Michael Moritz. Michael is amazing in so many ways that like I could write a book about Michael and what he's done for me and the support he's given me. And someday I will tell the stories of what really happened. And I think he genuinely very different to a l…”

“I know you're going to have Revolut as an example, or you already had Nick. Like, obviously, partially, he's a competitor to me, but much more, he's a soulmate to me. Like, he's also going to change this industry, and he's going to do that successfully”

“At the end of this decade, there will be a couple of new total players that will be very dominating in this space, and the rest will either cease to exist, will merge, and kind of try to acquire some of the new ones, or maybe a few of them will manage to reinv…”

“With Niklas and me, it was slightly different because at the end, me and Niklas became a little bit like an old couple. An old couple to me is one where you kind of stop listening to each other, so you don't anymore actually hear what the other person is sayin…”

“Because they're so obsessed of trying to kind of think about what other people could have done differently, and why situations arised, and why it wasn't their responsibility, and so forth. They spend a lot of time on that, because we've unfortunately brought u…”

“I think Klan is a good example in Europe, right? And they do a 90% down round rather than taking like a lot of structure because that structure then sticks with you for multiple rounds.”

“And I think any attempt to do so may yield some short term excitement, but even Klarna long term, I'm pretty sure we'll move on to a professional purpose built system.”

“Certain use cases where the distribution of the types of questions is really tight, rather than this big, long, normal distribution of so many different types of questions, will be able to create these tight custom experiences. If you're a Klarina, for example…”

“You know, there's all these stories, and, you know, you have, like, Klarna that's positioning for investors that they're firing half their staff, and no one really wants, and I think. I think it's BS, yeah.”

“I think that ultimately I don't think they are. I think that I think that Salesforce Like, has built, again, like, a very, very, very sticky network effect with people, and people are the shifting function at the end of the day. It's not a technology problem. …”

“I think they announced that they grew 32% last quarter. I think we announced that we grew 35%.”

“And we have companies like Klarna who are saying, oh, we're replacing all of our SaaS with AI. They're not, they're absolutely not. And they won't.”

“Take Klarna as the public example. I mean, they talked boldly and they probably did save those people, right? But I think in the end you'll discover it'll have roughly the same profits as other lenders. It'll be marginally more efficient. It won't be a step fu…”

“And out of 20,000, they have a handful of folks that are at a hundred, like Klarna... Two. Two, one, 200.”

“If you're a Klarna, if you're a financial player where access to capital is really important, you know, you are fundamentally a lender. I think being public and having access to money in all its different ways makes sense. If you're a high growth AI company or…”

“13% growth, the cost of borrowing is way up.”

“There's so many product directors at Klarna or at Spotify or these companies that have made it, that they're not incentivized to be curious. In a way, they're kind of incentivized to keep the company on the track it is.”

“The guys who priced it at six billion were right. And the guys, which is Sequoia and the guys who priced it at forty five billion were wrong, which is SoftBank.”

“They just overpaid and they're going to get converted and they're going to trade at 30, 40 cents of what they originally paid.”

“Its peak was 45, Sequoia, which SoftBank did Sequoia brilliantly did the round at five or six, and obviously two or three X that, and I think overall seven X the overall investment.”

“And I was jamming at night with Sebastian, actually, from Klarna, who is, like, thinking about AI 24 seven and probably one of the sharpest mind in terms of like integrating AI into your business.”

“Klarna is very different. Like our customers, like I shop online, I do shopping, you know, we skew more female than male. We have a very different brand. I would think of us more like a lifestyle brand, like a digital version of American Express.”

“We have our own payments network. Just like Amex, we have our own Rails. Every time you shop with Klana, the information that flows on the rails isn't just the amount that you purchase for. It's the exact products. We have the full digital receipt.”

“Whose market share are we eating? You know, Barclays, you know the Wells Fargo's, the Capital One, those are the companies that we are going after, right? So I don't really see there's a big conflict between us. It's more the incumbents that are going to lose …”

“20% of our transactions are debit. And then the rest is credit, but the credit is interest free.”

“The engagement that I have is not as high yet as it is with Revolut.”

“We raised 60,000 dollars in our first angel investment, 30,000 dollars of that was spent, and then we became profitable. And we were running this as a profitable company from oh five to 19.”

“I could have been, you know, more careful, specifically on the hiring side, because it was very sad and difficult to me to, like, a few quarters earlier be hiring at a high pace, and then a few quarters later have to announce layoffs. That, that I felt that, l…”

“Like, I think actually if you read the article, the original article, it's actually fairly balanced and it kind of tries to describe this, but then the headline is like, they're rolling AI back, you know, and then the whole media circus go on. So it's like, oh…”

“I announced already in 23 that, you know, our AI customer service had, you know, done the equivalent of 600 agents jobs, and it caught a lot of attention at the point of time.”

“So our employee compensation has grown almost 50% per head. During the same time.”

“Yesterday on X, somebody wrote like, Clona-like. Clona-like company is going to offer buy now, pay later on rent. It was Clona-like. So it was actually another company, but people didn't see that. They just say, Clona is going to offer buy now, pay later on re…”

“They took a 25% stake at a hundred million dollar valuation, right? Yeah, at a hundred million dollar valuation.”

“Is we actually built like our own Uber model, which means that we encourage today, we recruit our own customers, the most passionate customers that live in rural areas and so forth. And we say, Hey, do you want to work extra? Would you want to work part-time i…”

“So we're shrinking Through natural attrition with about 20% per year, it's just people leaving their stay about five years and then they move on, which is natural.”

“No, it may very well be even less than that.”

“So we said the future of VIP experience will be the human connection. The relationship. And then we genuinely believe. So we said, we need to transform our customer service from thinking about it as like, okay, yes, it's officially just like good customer serv…”

“We have been trying to compete with Stripe and Adyen for five years, and we were like losing it. Like they were just, you know, crushing us. And we were like, this is it. And Adyen had just signed with Daniel X, Spotify, my neighbor. And I was like, this is ov…”

“We gave up a hundred million dollars of revenue when we removed revolving because we used to do it in Nordics.”

“Klarna has a hundred ten million customers worldwide. Revolut now has 65, right? So I'm twice the size in number of customers.”

“We have thirty million users in the US, right? Almost like I think it's 28 or something. So like, but soon it's going to be 30.”

“When we were the most, you know the most highest valued fintech in Europe, blah, blah, blah. Then like, I could do no wrong. Whatever I said was like, that's brilliant. He's so smart. And then when we like, you know when we came down to 6.5, and we had to do l…”

“Yeah, of course, if I could own the company a hundred percent and be private, I would prefer it, right? But that's not the reality.”

“We've gone from 7000 people. We're now below 3000. We've shrank 50%.”

“And what we realized when we looked at SAS and all of these things already two years ago, which is why we started closing down SAS for us was because We need to provide our AI the best context.”

“I don't go to that many of those, to be honest, because I'm hard coding and working with my teams and trying to make sure that Clon is as successful as possible through this transformation.”

“Sooner or later, you wanted to read the source code and explain to the customer how it works. You want them to provide as much context as possible to be able to give the right answers. And that's when you start realizing that it's not something you, in our cas…”

“And then the worst thing about this market is that for any sophisticated buyer, an Airwallex, a Klarna, a Navan, a technology-facing company, everyone has built their own.”