The Ledger, every show

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

“Well, that would mean that you would leave mean significant, you would need significantly less.”

“Now the difference was when we Got this customer service AI agent to reach a level where it actually served a lot of errands, and on a satisfaction level equal to what human agents many times did, and we took it live, the number of errands that our human agent…”

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

“You should think that software cost of creating software is going down to zero. That's it. So and that means that like everyone will be able to generate software at any point of time. So it is a massive change. And I was a hundred percent con, you know, convic…”

“But if you look at utilities, normal companies that are more utility, They may trade at one to two. So I, from that perspective, you would argue there is still some unfortunate potential to come down even further. Is it going to be, look at Chegg in the US, ri…”

“If I meet investors today that haven't actually downloaded and tried to build something themselves, I think they don't have the skill set to make an evaluation of the company they're looking at.”

“And I think it speaks to Elon's vision of X, that over time it can become the trusted source of information.”

“One of the challenges I think with SaaS models is especially the larger SaaS companies. They are less dependent on their monthly subscription fees, but they have this whole ecosystem of consultants who charge on the hour to implement and fix. It's true for Sal…”

“Klana has gotten so much attention around our efficiency gains, and we've gone from 7400 people to 3000, while, you know, our revenue has doubled since then. So, our revenue per employee went from 450,000 dollars per employee to over a million now.”

“Our agent that we launched about a year ago is still dealing with, I think it is about 1.3 million errands per month, which is the equivalent of previously was done By about 800 people on a monthly basis. And so that is obviously, and it's actually gone up a l…”

“We on average would have like a about 3000, it depends on because you have to remember also like our, just like Amazon, We have much more transactions around Christmas because we're very online, you know, so there will always be variations in these numbers, bu…”

“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…”

“They will become more and more standardized building blocks. And I'm, I think in the future, I'm not sure AI was even going to code that much. It's just going to pick some pieces together and stitch them together to come to what you really need, which also act…”

“The kind of winner of the future is much more likely to be extremely broad. They're kind of coming with a Claude bot or Claude bot of companies like those services. That's how I think the future of that kind of thing is.”

“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 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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“I think I have to go with David. Because I think, ah, Nick's challenge right now might be that he is so distributed. I mean, he's trying to go for the whole world, right? I mean, he's launching in Dubai. He's launching in India. He's launching everywhere. You …”

“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.”

“This is going to be a brutal awakening for Fin and Tech, that, like, that's what's going to happen to all of us. Like, we're going to have to wake up every morning, make sure that we serve our customers, we work really hard and effortlessly to make them happy …”

“Yeah, Nami and Zai, and they were like told by the VCs, the American VCs, like, you have to move your engineering center to Silicon Valley because otherwise everything's gonna go to shit, and they did, and it was a disaster, and they had it for a year, you kno…”

“I think that the challenge right now is a lot of them are piling money into AI that they don't necessarily fully understand.”

“So in enterprise, you're going to see this dramatic squeeze and compression.”

“This is actually the first time I felt that AI could do something that humans couldn't.”

“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…”

“What if AI would interview our employees? What if it would interview every employee and do like a Not to replace the human because the human is still their manager responsible for their workday, but just to like add a better depth and understanding of what's g…”

“So we stopped recruiting at Klana about two years ago. And the idea was that what we're going to do is if people on average stay five years at Klana, that means 20% resign every year. It's typical, kind of typical attrition rate for a tech company. If we don't…”

“So the layoff of like the comparison to the seven under layoff is actually a misquote by a news magazine online. It's not accurate. It was two years ago when we had to you know, change the amount of investments we were doing, we had to make layoffs and it just…”

“Well, they were not very happy because we tweeted about it, and a few of them had very severe implications on their market cap, because, like, one of them lost, like, over a billion dollars in market cap on the stock exchange.”

“So what we simply do is we read a lot of these transcripts on a continuous basis, and we do continuous quality checks to ensure that the error rate is not higher for the AI chatbot than it is for our human agents, and if we see that they are at least on par, T…”

“My belief though, if you ask me, is that like, I don't know, like maybe 70% is AI and 30% is automation or fifty-fifty. Yeah, but I still think it is that much, actually. That's still my belief, right?”

“So I think that, like, even though maybe the first iteration would only have been a substantial improvement compared to some other companies, if you give it one or two more years, it will definitely be an improvement versus what any other company is doing with…”

“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…”

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

“I do think that having that Freedom. And that is sense of, you know, not being dependent on that does give you something very valuable in life that is really different. And I, so that's why I think it's a little bit like, I don't really like when people with m…”

“It's going to be a much smaller industry, and that's because it is ridiculous that moving money back and forth is a trillion dollar industry.”

“The next thing that's gonna hit everyone bad is the switching cost of data.”

“If AI can do customer service, it means it's going to be the cheap customer service. It's going to be the one that everyone gets. Because it's cheap and simple.”

“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…”

“I feel like Dario maybe is one of few that actually is willing to stick up and say that officially. I feel a lot of the other executives of these big companies are getting nervous. They don't want, they're seeing the negative backlash of talking about this, an…”

“The future of banking is going to be some kind of digital financial assistant, wakes you up in the morning, say, I checked your mortgage. You're overpaying like hell, and I have renegotiated for you, and I can do all the paperwork. You just need to say yes to …”

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

“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 …”

“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.”