Klarna

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• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think the Clarn example is more in that category. Um, uh, like, it's just like, if you go to the average company and you're like, do you want to be responsible for running your own HR system? Like the average enterprise is not going to say yes to that. And no matter how agentic, you know, something is, it does mean that you're responsible for the thing.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I found it very fascinating. Um, and I, I, I enjoyed, uh, that, that it was happening and I, I mean, I enjoy that it's still theoretically happening. I think some of his updates were that like, they didn't actually do as much on the customer support side, or they have some more, you know, kind of premium agent, uh, you know, human agents that they now have. Um, but, but so I, I thought it was great from a provocativeness standpoint. I think we do need people testing the boundaries.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  great CEO has been, um, I think he tweeted something recently. I think he accidentally, uh, made news, uh, in his telling of like consolidating SAS vendors and moving more things to agentic workflow. And I'll tell you, uh, it set off a little bit of a firestorm internally to see if this is like a, you know, a longterm thing that we need to be existentially worried about investing in software

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  today there's so many people who have been around you know worked at you know with Skype or king or clar Spotify and these people now coming out you know starting their own companies and and you know recruitable so this it's U it's a lot of the the the the talent pool and and the experience pool is is certainly getting much much bigger

• neutral assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  people are a little too too trendy in the valley by your that's my you know people are little more loyal here more focused

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  I think I mean I I actually think stockolm is a great City to run a comp I think there's there's there's some challenges

• neutral fact_claim Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  which is why both us and Spotify more than 50% of our recruitments are from abroad and we bring these people to Stockholm

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  I think however in Stockholm that that ecosystem has started to exist now there are a number of companies there are a number of unicorns there are people to call for advice and and I think that that is kind of you know that's the most important basic aspect

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  I think that's something that when I talk to you know people today and they ask me who you know what is a good investor to have I actually recommend Nicholas because I say you know these guys are going to actually be able to advise you properly

• bullish endorsement Niklas Zennstrom

  we wouldn't we wouldn't tell Sebastian how to do payments because he knows that better than anyone else

• neutral fact_claim Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  Michael Moritz joined the board and he flies over here for every board meeting

• neutral fact_claim Niklas Zennstrom

  yeah there were I mean I was talking to Yuri Milner and he looked really stupid investing at in Facebook at 6 billion to 10 billion when he put a billion dollar L of us and he's also an investor in CL by the way oh y put money in as well did he do the last round no Yuri came in a couple of years I think just before you or at the same time right

• bullish assessment Niklas Zennstrom

  I think Klarna they just started so they you know you know whether you know they just you know did a you know uh financing right now and I think you know this is a company that's going to be around for very very long time and and there's so much more opportunities so much more growth so it's not you know one thing I learned about you know Investments is like you know you see these companies kind of taking off and you say well you missed it it was too late but some of these companies just continu

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  what we've done instead I create a dynamic model where like everyone who is a good customer that we recognize gets the one single click payments and everything super simplistic but if you are a fraudster you're going to have a bigger challenge

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  we use very Advanced fraud algorithm and risk algorithm to basically identify which of the customers are good and which are the customers you know are fraudulent

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  we want to level that playing field give every other Merchant the chance to compete with Amazon on the same terms when it comes to that user experience

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  clana tries to for the merchants to create that single click experience to every customer of that Merchant and if you're only doing it for the subset it's not going to have the big impact for the merchant but if you're doing it for the older customers and you really give older customers a oneclick buy solution it's amazing and it really creates you know sales for merchants and make customers more happy

• bullish assessment Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  what we've done over the years has just been extremely focused on on shopping online and how that can be made simplified

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  people won't shut up about your company and in America we don't even know what it is um but everybody is telling me how amazing this company is

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  seven or eight unicorns now between Klarna and Spotify and a bunch of other companies

• bullish endorsement Sahand Dilmaghani

  So we work with them. They obviously are, you know, hugely valuable in that sense that they help us be able to reach more customers and without us kind of assuming their credit risk.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  If you're a FinTech company, you probably want to have some AI pixie dust on you. So I totally get that point.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  in an interview with Alex Kantrowitz from big technology that came out, uh, today, in fact, um, Klarna CEO, Seb said essentially that they're handling more customer service work to AI, but they're hiring humans for the higher end problems. So I think we're seeing a bifurcation of how AI impacts jobs versus it's all or a retrenchment.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I wonder if the Klarna thing was a bit performative in some ways, Alex, where maybe that was like, I want to be the AI first CEO, you know, and I want to, I'm not saying pander, but I want to get cred for that.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  the reason the Klarna story became the Klarna story was because he was like wholesale, we're down 700 people out the door. Right. And everybody was like, what? Like, why wouldn't you cut 10%, see how it goes, cut 20%, see how it goes.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  they had let go of a whole bunch of their customer service people and replaced them with AI. And now they're sort of backtracking a little. They're like, we may, we were a little aggressive. We're having some low quality issues.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Yeah, that's why it is not public yet. But we don't know that much about what we do know they have now they I think they released some numbers for 2021. It was a pretty robust business 80 billion in GMV. This is a gross merchandise value. This is like what they sold. So $80 billion worth of product was done on a buy now pay later, you know, that's that for installation kind of payment. Um, their operating income was 1.6 billion. So they get a fraction of that 80 billion in gross market value, it

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  There was a story that suggested that, uh, it was like as many as one in four, um, were, were in default on these loans. That seems incredibly high to me.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Risk here, but more attractive, right? I mean, they already have a payback problem.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  Buy now, pay later, I think is going to be more. I, my theory would be, it would be a more attractive product in a down market.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  The people who do get, um, will take the brunt of this will be the employees and the founders who, you know, might have thought they had six times as much shares.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And, um, this is what happened. We thought private market valuations would come down slower. Mm hmm. So this is kind of matching, I think what happened to a firm coin base and, you know, some of the other really big pullbacks in the market. So, uh, this is still in negotiation. Supposedly it's 650 million, um, is what they're trying to raise. And sure it's a haircut. But again, if the firm is growing 30 or 40% a year, if it's a high growth company in that space, they'll be able to catch up maybe

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  there is news now that Klarna is reportedly raising money at a six and a half billion dollar valuation, which is about a seventh of what that company was valued at a year ago in June of 2021.

• bearish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  And Klona is apparently raising around at a $6 billion valuation. Remember, they were they were up in the $40 billion club. So that is quite a striking markdown if it's in fact true.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Klarna announced on November 25th, Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later giant that went public here in the US this year, a major venture-backed victory for a lot of its early investors, announced its own stablecoin on Stripe's Tempo blockchain for stablecoins. So we are seeing this happen as we speak.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I saw the Klarna story where they said they were going to rip out Salesforce and Workday because they're able to write their own bespoke code using AI. I mean, I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical of that story for a couple of reasons. One is, if that's their goal, why wouldn't they have open source these products they created? You might as well get the whole ecosystem working on it because they're not trying to sell this product that they've internally created. They're just trying to rip ou

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  Well, I'll tell you how it's possible. And so this is like this next crazy thing that's been happening. We've been doing a version of this to go after some other sources of software. We haven't had the balls, to be honest, to go after Salesforce or Workday, but here's how they do it. They write these agents and these agents can spawn other agents, right? So it's very classic kind of machine that builds a machine. And you start to observe the inputs and outputs of a system, right? I'm hyper-simpl