TBPN - LIVE @ NYSE for Klarna IPO | Peter Tuchman, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Lynn Martin, David Sandstrom, Mati Staniszewski, Andrew Reed, Markus Villig

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

(00:00) - Peter Tuchman, known as the "Einstein of Wall Street" for his distinctive appearance and animated presence, is a veteran stock trader on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) floor. In a recent conversation, he recounted his collaboration with streamer IShowSpeed, where he introduced the young audience to investing by highlighting that many products they use daily are from publicly traded companies, suggesting they consider buying shares instead of just the products. This engagement significantly boosted his social media following, increasing from 260,000 to over 419,000, with some posts garnering 40 million views. (17:44) - Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna, a Swedish fintech company, discusses the company's journey from its inception to its recent IPO, highlighting the challenges faced, including early cash flow issues and the strategic shift towards consumer services. He emphasizes the importance of global expansion, particularly in the U.S. market, and the role of AI in enhancing operational efficiency and customer experience. Siemiatkowski also reflects on the significance of building transparent financial products that cater to consumers seeking alternatives to traditional credit cards. (41:44) - David Sandström, Chief Marketing Officer at Klarna, discusses his journey from leading a major Nordic ad agency to transforming Klarna from a traditional B2B financial institution into a vibrant consumer lifestyle brand. He emphasizes the importance of understanding consumer behavior and the psychology behind brand preferences, highlighting the strategic decision to adopt pink branding to differentiate Klarna in the predominantly blue financial sector. Sandström also explores the cultural differences between European and American markets, noting the U.S. consumer's appreciation for marketing and entrepreneurial success, and discusses Klarna's expansion strategies, including the introduction of in-store payment options and a physical card to meet consumer demand. (52:32) - Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, a voice AI research company, recently joined Klarna's board of directors. In his conversation, he discusses how he met Klarna's CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, through a Sequoia event, leading to their collaboration on integrating AI to enhance customer service and internal processes. He emphasizes the importance of using AI to automate routine tasks while leveraging human expertise for complex issues, and highlights the growing European tech ecosystem, particularly in Sweden and Poland, encouraging founders to think globally from the outset. (01:09:26) - Andrew Reed, a Partner at Sequoia Capital since 2014, has been instrumental in investments across various sectors, including fintech and consumer internet. In the conversation, he discusses Sequoia's initial investment in Klarna in 2010, the company's strategic expansion into the U.S. market, and the evolving landscape of the fintech industry, emphasizing the importance of innovation and adaptability in a competitive environment. (01:21:55) - Markus Villig, the Estonian entrepreneur and founder of Bolt, discusses his journey from starting the company at 19 to its expansion into global markets, emphasizing the importance of first establishing a strong home base before scaling internationally. He highlights the similarities between Bolt and Klarna in building two-sided marketplaces, noting the focus on supply-side growth to enhance consumer value. Villig also shares insights on the future of ride-sharing, the impact of self-driving technology, and the role of artificial intelligence in improving operational efficiency. (01:43:05) - Lynn Martin, the 68th president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the second woman to lead the exchange, discusses the recent surge in initial public offerings (IPOs), highlighting successful listings like Figma and Klarna, and emphasizes the importance of companies having a clear, deliberate strategy with a path to profitability when going public. She also notes the positive market response to Oracle's recent partnership with OpenAI, which led to a significant increase in Oracle's stock price. Additionally, Martin highlights the launch of NYSE Texas, which has attracted over 50 listed companies and 13 ETFs, attributing its success to Texas's pro-business legislation. 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You're watching TVPN! Today is Wednesday, September 10, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange, the East Coast Fortress of Finance. That's right. And we have a special guest with us opening the show. Introduce yourself for the stream. Hi, my name is Peter Tuckman. I'm known as the Einstein of Wall Street. Einstein of Wall Street.

How do you get that? I'm not that smart. I just look at you. Who was the first person? Did you give yourself that? Aaron Burnett gave me that. And I've had a show on her show now on CNN for the last four months, ever since the beginning of the sort of mini crash

that was sort of self-induced by our, the new leader, the new sheriff in town. But correct, she called me in. So she used to work on the floor with CNBC. Sure. And she nicknamed it probably 20 years ago and called me Einstein and that sort of picked up. But your latest collaborator is not on TV,

but on streaming, correct? Correct. So I had the fortionality of actually meeting I Show Speed, right? Young 20-year-old. kid who I got invited. So there's a team that's doing his stream thing. There's a young guy named Adam Faze. We know, he came to our event. We were here about a month and a half ago. He came to a party. So Adam, Adam is something special. He found me about four years ago and asked me if I

would let him shoot me every day walking out of the stock exchange for 30 days and just do what I do. Sure. And we did this whole TikTok thing called Einstein Elementary. He went viral like me and like marching bands from Brooklyn and walking around with a 50 pound Hershey's Kiss and doing all this crazy stuff. So you called me last week asked if I could bring speed to the floor and it didn't seem appropriate at the time and he said, well, how can I get you to meet him?

And I said, come up with an idea and he's an idea guy. So he called me on Thursday morning. He said, we're going to be at the bowl. Yeah. He's going to be at the ball. Would you come and welcome him to Wall Street? I said, absolutely. So they gave me a police escort.

I went down there and met this young guy and talked about it. some of the shtick I do, you know, investing in stocks and not stuff and about, you know, the fact that, you know, that everything that his life is based on is actually a publicly traded company. And then instead of, you know, buying the next iPhone, he could probably buy a couple of shares of Apple and that maybe, you know, he could invest in his future besides the amazing future. How do you receive it? He received it.

Totally. He talked about it a couple days down the road. So I got the message across. And I've blown up. I've got literally 200. So I have now, I came in at 260,000 followers on Thursday, and now I have 419 and it's counting. And I've got 40 million views on some of my posts.

7,000 DMs. 7,000 DMs. I actually just did a video to answer that. Anyway. What was the first stock you ever bought? You know what? I did not ever buy a share of stock until recently. I went through most of my career

because I'm a registered trader, a broker on the, floor and I'm not allowed to be in a stock for a customer and for myself in a 30-day period and so I built a trading strategy 20 years ago trading the S&P 500 based on information that I have as a broker on the floor and I trade all 347 names in the S&P every day so basically I made a decision years ago you know and also money does a funny thing if I'm in a stock for myself and I get an order for a customer it's gonna impact the way I trade and I didn't want that to ever be the case so I I do well enough here as a commission broker

that I said, you know what, I'll invest in my kids, I'll put them through college, and they both graduated without any dead, and that's where my money went. What about some of the first stocks that you were brokering? First stocks that I broker, so we're here. We're talking about IPOs, right? And so, you know, I probably have traded more IPOs

than anybody on earth. I've been in the crowd on all of them. I mean, the first IPO I think I traded was LinkedIn, right? It was priced at 30, it opened at 60, ran up to 180, same day. And that was where I got the sense of how amazing the understanding, enthusiasm around an IPO because it's based on confidence.

Nobody knows it. And then, and so one of, I've had so many fun experiences in IPOs. Jack Ma, Alibaba IPO, which was one of the biggest that we've ever had here. He and I bonded. We spent, so the IPOs here take probably four or five hours. We just opened Klarna, right? And the process behind that, which we do better than anyone in the world, is the price discovery process that what goes on, it's kind of like building a

building. The way you open a stock, the way we open a stock, it takes, time because it's a matter of the information going back and forth. It's a public offering. So the public has to understand what's going on. And so we go back and forth with our customer. It's kind of like if you put the bricks and the mortar in the right place and you, the way a stock opens, if it's built correctly, is going to purport the way it trades forever. Now, it doesn't guarantee it's going up, but it will have structure and foundation. And, you know, you go to NASDAQ, nothing against NASDAQ, but if you go to NASDAQ, it's fully electronic.

So it opens when the buyers and sellers meet in an electronic market. marketplace. Here it's different. So then you're going to see what you see in it's handmade. It'll go up, it goes down. There's no, there are no guardrails, right? So here things are a lot different. So Jack Ma and I spent four hours together in the IPO. He and are very short, so we bonded on the fact that we were the shortest people in the crowd. We were on the same level, not this, not, not financially, because he became a very wealthy guy again on that day. Someone on our team actually was here at that IPO as well. Amazing time. And then we've had, look, but then, you know, the, you know, the,

the whole landscape has changed when WeWork completely blew up the whole IPO market. And that affected. Tell us that story because I remember the S-1 going out, but then did they get out? Well, what ended up happening? Look, as I said, it's built on confidence. And when, you know, everybody, it was huge money put into WeWork. He was lauded by, he came down to the floor many times. And it wasn't until the night before everyone needs to know this,

that on the end of the road show is when all the financials are given out to the public. And it turned out that it was all smoking mirrors. and he'd spend all the money on prostitutes and blow, and that the company had no basis behind it. And so it was aborted. The deal was aborted. And what that did was it changed amazingly enough that one stock could change the landscape of IPOs for years.

It literally everyone said, I see a windows closed. That's what closed. And I remember Jim Kramer on Mad Money was saying, we don't want this. We don't want this. Exactly. Remember that quote.

And so to think that you know something about what's going on and we didn't know anything on literally until the night before made such a huge impact on the market. It literally has taken a couple of years to grow out of that. Before that, we had had some really wonderful robust years, remax and a bunch of stock. They would open, a huge premiums. We were trading 10 IPOs a day. Give us a quick history on Klarna, right? Because Klarna has tried to get out a couple times.

Okay, so I don't know the history about Klarna. All I know is that I watched how it opened here. So it did take a little while. It did open at 52, I think. Right? And so it's not trading, you know what? It's hard to know. So what's important about it is where the bids are, where the offers are, and how the foundation looks. So where the bodies are buried within the stock when it opens, right? There was enough stock at 52 bid on balance, which's what it's called. So stocks pair off that are priced accordingly. So four point something million shares open. That means that they were market orders. They had no limits to them. And that's they that was good. They paired themselves off. It was a 52 bid for 300,000 on balance meant that meant that. that there was a stabilizing bid, whether it was by the Goldman Sachs the company or the banker or not. But that's what made it open at 52. If there had been more to buy at the market, it would have opened higher or more to sell, it would have opened lower.

It opened at 52. It did trade up to 5720 on a small bit. 70,000 shares traded up, and then it came in. It's trading at a couple dollars lower, which is reasonable. It does not have the power and the impact that Figma and Bullish did. Is this? Bigma and bullish. So, so, so, so, but, but all three of these are relatively, like, is there a specific strategy that, that these IPOs have had in terms of, like, pricing at a, at a, at a, at, at a, at, at, uh, uh, very reasonable, like. So, you know what, they're, they, they're pricing it based on the reaction to, to, to what the, what the investment community is. Supply demand. Yeah. It is. So some of the other ones got priced at 30. There was over supply, overdemand at 30. They opened it to 30. They opt up to 30. 35. That's how it will go.

So the last night when they go out to the road show to give out allocations, they will get a sense of where that valuation should be. And then that's where they will give it up. They left some talk on money on the table, as did those other IPOs. The other ones opened at 90 and went to 117. That was bullish. And Figma also traded a huge premium. My gut is that the sectors that they were in,

there's a lot of pressure on this sector right now. And so those sectors were more I-Cloud. and AI based, right? And so I think that's why there was a little more pop to it. Well, we know you have to get out of here. Thank you so much for stopping by the show. We'd love to get back sometime. Anytime.

I'm always going to talk for another two hours. Let's go. So thank you so much. Love it. Love it. Amazing. In other news, you wanted to talk about Oracle. Oracle has become the current thing and give us the highlights.

It was a miss on top line, miss on bottom line. Double earnings miss. but a massive spike in the share price due to a large cloud backlog. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So take us through. So this, you know, just sort of joking around here, but this reminded me of a company

that would like to get a bridge round done and comes out and says, yeah, you know, we missed our, we missed, we missed our forecast. We miss. But like, just look out here. Like, look, look at these big numbers coming down. at the horizon. So they basically reported on their backlog for the next five years, which is, which we've been seeing from the other hyperscalers. Remember when we went through Microsoft earnings, GCP earnings, we saw really strong backlogs there in the hundreds of billions of dollars

that they can just chip away at for years. Unclear how exactly how binding those contracts are. So from the transcript, we expect Oracle Cloud infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to 18 billion this fiscal year, then increased to 32, then 73, then 114 billion over the subsequent four years. And they say most of the revenue in this five-year forecast is already booked in our reported RPO. Yep. So anyways, people, the stocks obviously up tremendously. Larry Ellison is currently the richest man in the world.

Oh, he is. He beat Elon today because of the stock pop. Yes. And, yeah, Oracle had just been doing. buybacks and buybacks and buybacks. And so Larry's, Larry's ownership percentage has just gone up over time. He, he's definitely known to hold. And, but yeah, a lot of this, King, bet on yourself. Yeah, he's betting on himself. Absolutely wild. And yeah, I mean, overall, there's been some negativity in the timeline. People were bringing up that during the 90s.com era, there were a number

of class action lawsuits against Oracle just due to the way in which they were reporting revenue effectively like basically reporting like forecasted revenue as so funny because didn't we all just go through this with C.A.R.R in the startup world like contracted ARR? Yeah. Like we like two demo days ago I think we were talking to Gary Tan about hey. Oh it was last demo day. Maybe last demo today. I think we talked to Gary Tan and we were like, hey, it feels feels like startups are getting a little loose with the ARR definitions, what should we do about that? And Gary said, look, we've given very clear advice to all the YC companies. If it's a contract and it's non-binding, make that clear. If it's a contract and it's binding, make that clear.

If it's actually cash in the bank, make that clear. But don't just come with some crazy ARR number that isn't actually anything like what people expect. And so it's funny that we went through this. We saw kind of the correction to understanding metrics in the, in the startup world, and now we're having a reconciliation. Yeah, so there's somebody named Steve Burns said this morning. Oracle stock is up 36% on pace for the best day since 1999. And then somebody here is posting a meme of a duck. The goose chasing saying, what happened after 1999?

What happened after 1999? And of course. That is, it is crazy to see a 30% move in a stock as big as Oracle. It's now over a trillion dollars, correct? Yeah. Zero Hedge was posting. a trillion dollar company trading like a penny stock. We do need to have the conversation of expanding the Mag 7, right?

Broadcom, the elite eight. I think we're going to 12. We're going to 12. Maybe 50. Who knows? Fascinating. Yeah, so anyways, Marco Kalanavik was saying yesterday. Oracle was looking like a great short.

Hopefully. Hopefully didn't get blown out. Hopefully didn't get blown out. Or people throwing intelligent investor in the trash? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the real thing is if you were, I mean, brutal for anybody that was short, Oracle going into earnings because, yeah, you were right on the earnings call, but missed the overall narrative.

Yeah. What I thought was interesting was meta. I mean, people are like, people are, the self-proclaimed smart money is like really pissed off about this. is just come in mis-earnings and then say, oh, don't worry about it. We have a half a trillion dollar backlog. And that's like, okay, it's a lot of billions, right? Where is that?

Like, there's not that many. And it's from a very concentrated group of customers. Yeah, there's only so many customers. And a lot of them have dance partners. Yeah, Nvidia sells GPUs to Oracle. Oracle builds a cloud and then is actually renting and then is like providing, providing that cloud, basically selling that cloud back to, Nvidia. He's also a buyer, right? So it's a little bit, it's a little bit circular, but.

Yeah, I was thinking about that dinner that Mark Zuckerberg had with Donald Trump, where he sort of announced his own internal backlog of what was it, $600 billion. And so if you think about, if you think about meta is both the, the, the, the, the, the Pax investor and the buyer of that capacity, they basically said that they have a backlog of $600 billion of. Yeah. Yeah, so the RPO, the list of RPO's, Amazon, $195 billion, Microsoft $315 billion, Google at $106 billion, and Oracle at $455 billion. Yeah. A lot of revenue. Where is it going to come from?

The real AI, the real, like, if you're incredibly AGI-I-pilled, you're going to come out of this and being like, that's effectively spend that might have gone to labor that's going to be rerouted to, to basically inference. There's also a lot of robotics, obviously, self-driving cars, things like that coming online. There's a lot of potential demand, and we are seeing exponential usage in tokens, but still, yeah, we're starting to get into... I mean, work through those one at a time. It's like Amazon is probably going to be sending that to Anthropic, which cloud code, the revenue numbers are insane. And Claude is growing very fast. So you have a situation.

Microsoft's at $315 billion, probably clipy. I mean, but legitimately like upselling co-pilot features into their existing enterprise customers. So it gets diffused over a really large revenue base over the next decade. And maybe there's, you know, some sort of a hit while they roll out all that CAPEX. But who's not on that RPO, I feel like is meta. Because they don't have this idea of building the AI resources they're going to resell, right? Whatever they're building, they're consuming internally.

But you should think about it in the same logic, in the same way. They're also building servers. The question is for Oracle, can you just underwrite that as Open AI? Like, is Open AI driving that? And that's another reason for somebody to be a little bit wary of these projections because it's assuming, you know, Open AI just came out and said, hey, we're going to burn an extra $80 billion. Where is that burn going? Maybe to Oracle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe to Oracle, right? Uncle Larry. And so if you sum up all those losses and you look at them, does that match Oracle's projected growth? Well, that would be less than 20% of what Oracle's projected backlog is. Well, the backlog is over five years and it was like $80 billion in one year was the loss. So the total loss over the next five years for Open AI might be similar.

But if this backlog is like really real, the demand is there, it's going to pan out. It's going to be a contingent on Open AI continuing to just raise more and more and more. capital. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And other players. I haven't had trouble yet. So yeah. Greatest. We'll continue. I do, I do wonder if you should be looking at like the, there is a consumer app sized. There's a trillion dollar consumer app sized hole in the data center cap X world that will be filled by someone who's going to serve Open AI. And so you can think about Google's investing. Obviously, this is diffuse across all the different businesses. But like, Google's going to be supporting AI with their with their CAPEX.

Microsoft, obviously the same thing. Amazon with Anthropic. But OpenAI needs to build out not just a cloud business, but also a... Who? Let's bring them in. We have our second guest. We have the CEO of Klarna. Here he is.

How are you doing? Welcome to the show. In person. Thank you so much for taking the time. It was so boring. Yeah. It was late your time. Yes.

But we appreciate you staying up and we appreciate you coming on the show today. Yes, good you seem relaxed. Just a regular day. You're posting yesterday if you should just document it. We're going to be vibe coding. Yeah, I'm glad you put down the vibe coding. I'm still getting stressed when it's not coding. And I know it's like sitting and waiting for my input.

Yeah. Well, hopefully I do too much waiting today. What's the process been like? What time did you wake up? Take me through the day. Yeah, yeah. I woke up at 6. Which isn't that bad because I'm a little still just.

light so it's fine and then you know we went that took a shower nice get dressed was like should I wear this cap or another cap okay it's a blockbuster IPO I know I know thank you for recognizing it everyone's like why are you wearing a cap it's obvious but anyways no and then like you know we took took a cab here and came in here and then they were like oh hello hello and then some breakfast and you have to have some speech and you have to say some nice words yeah had to ring the bell ring the bell but I'll tell you actually honestly that to me the biggest thing today was sir Michael Moritz my chairman yeah who's a legend yeah you know Google and YouTube and everything that he's been doing he has never been at an IPO of any of his companies what ever what was he doing ever no he just like you know

he's a West Coast yeah he's a more West Coast guy yeah so this was actually his first wow his first my second and his first so I thank you for for Of course we, we know, but I was very, very happy that he did it because I had to be a little bit persistent, like, please Michael join. What's it like working with him on the board? Fantastic. I mean, how would you characterize him relative to other board members? What's his style? What I tell you is, what's amazing about that man is that I say this a little bit laughingly, but I say, look, never into the details, always right.

Most people have to really be into all details, like, you know, to have the DB, right? This guy's intuition and business acumen and just sharp, immediate understanding of anything you put in front of him. He is so brilliant. It is fantastic. Yeah, take me through him, you, the rest of the board, processing the last few years. What were the crucible moments to put it in Sequoia's language? Just a few. Just a few.

Spin of a roller coaster. People will be familiar with what you're referring to. But I imagine the roller coaster started on. day one. It always does. Yeah. What was the first roller coaster moment? Oh, there were tons, you know, like the funny thing is that obviously since we're a factoring company, meaning that like we first thing we were like, first time we were ever giving people credit, we were just like, let's wait and see if somebody actually pays. You know, like we were sitting there. I remember first week's like, oh, oh, one or now, now they're supposed to pay. Hopefully some money

comes in. Yeah, they're paying. It works. Yeah. So that was important. Then there was like, you know, Christmas sales came and we're just like, oh my God, we're supposed to pay out so much money. And you have, and you need to get, you need to pay for that. Yeah, exactly. Cash crunch. You have a crash crunch and not almost. There was a real cash crunch. I remember sitting, this is 20 years ago, but I remember sitting there and it's like calling

some of our employees and like, hey, I think something's wrong with the, with the bank. So your salary may come a little bit late. May come a little bit late. Yeah, it's a bank problem. Yeah, it's a bank problem, you know? So those are like early crucial moments. But obviously since then, we've had a good roller coaster anyways. Well, speaking of fact, during you have a partnership with Chipotle.

We wanted you, we wanted to celebrate by getting you to sign a Chipotle Burrito. Would you mind autographing our Chipotle Barrio? I love it. I love it. We're building the Museum of Business. Exactly. And then we're going to, we're going to. Oh, sorry.

It's fine. No, it's perfect. It's perfect. It's authentic. Thank you. What, uh, yeah, what, give it, walk us through like the past like few months. Well, no, it's been interesting. Actually, I must say, you know, we, um, obviously, um, been.

So to be a little bit serious, the point was that me and Michael always felt that the Google IPO was like the IPO. Like that's how you're supposed to do it. You have a globally successful company that's profitable. But at the same point of time I have IPOs and has so many years of growth ahead of themselves, so much success and so forth. So we thought like, okay, that's the time you want to do it. And for us being from Europe, to be global, you have to be successful in the US.

Like otherwise you're not global. Yeah. So and then you have to be profitable in the US. And these things were achieved. last year. When they were achieved, then we're like, okay, now we're starting to get ready, and we think we have decades of growth ahead of ourselves. And then it's more to the bankers and the timing and the market. And, you know, I was very fortunate that your beloved president and things happened, which meant that I was on vacation with my kids in Easter. It wasn't really

the plan back then. My kids were very happy. And then the app you all happened now. That's great. amazing. So yeah, walk me through the long term. How does, what does the company look like in a decade? I'm wondering how, how oligopolistic is this category? Is their plan to expand into a financial super app? Like, what does the far future look like? Sure. Because that Google example, they've been building, what, two decades in the public market. Yep, yep, yep. No, I think that is, so it actually started 10 years ago when we pivoted. So we used to be a competitor of Stripe and Adi. but we realized they were beating the shit out of us, to be honest. So we were like, let's not do that.

But let's learn from that and realize like, what could we have done better? And then let's go for the consumer side instead. And in 15, we sat down and we said the future of financial services is going to be somewhere in the future. You're going to have like a digital financial system, wakes you up in the morning and say, hi, analyze your mortgage. I realize I could save you $20 on your mortgage. And the only thing you need to do is say yes, and I'll do all the paperwork for you. And so we're like, yeah, that sounds like that's what's going to happen eventually. So it's a bit like self-driving cars.

I don't know when, but we know that it will happen. Yeah. And then, you know, suddenly I'm in San Francisco doing a Waymo and I'm like, wow, it's actually happening, right? Future's here. So the same will happen here. When ChachypT came along, we're like, okay, it's going to happen faster than we thought. But still, directionally, that's it. So you want to be a digital financial system, save people time, save people money, make sure that they are in control of their finances.

And then the next question was, okay, if that seems likely, not unlikely, it seems very likely, that's going to be a very valuable position to be in. And it's going to be a big global company. But like, why Klauna? Why us? Why would we be the ones that accomplish this thing? And then we said, well, there are few things. One, you have to be global. So we've achieved that.

U.S., Canada, Europe and so forth. That's critical. You have to be scale. 111 million users. We're now, you know, 111 million users. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. That's important.

So those two are critical. And you have to find a way to kind of grow the brand. And thanks to our amazing partners with Macy's and Sephora and Walmart and all. You know, that's growing the network. And then the next thing is now to offer more financial services. So we launched a card here in the U.S. 700,000 people sign up in six weeks. Five million people on the waiting list.

So we feel like it's going. So that's kind of how we're going to grow into the full retail banking offer. And I think that's the future to be that. Yeah. Can you explain to me how some of those partners you mentioned, they might have their own credit card. It was always powered by Visa. What does the partnership look like with a large retailer over time? Do they have a white-labeled product?

Do they never do that? Do they try and grow their own and compete with you? For sure. That doesn't seem super smart. I mean, sometimes it happens that, you know, some merchants has done that. Our experience from Europe is that over time, it's a little bit like, you know, there will be co-branding stuff happening. Our deal with Walmart is very much a co-branding deal. It's not that different than what Amex would do with your local airline.

Like, you know, that's also a co-brand deal, right? It's just going to be Delta, but with Amex and stuff like that. And that's very similar with some of the bigger brands. It's more of a co-brandt. While more for the like maybe more smaller merchants just Clana. But yeah, there's going to be some of that good. That makes a lot of sense. What's the number one thing that people misunderstand about the core by now pay later

product? I think the key thing is obviously, you know, there was a lot of like burritos on installments and stuff like that going on and we don't necessarily mind but it is a misunderstanding it's just because in Europe clonnas used for all categories it's like your PayPal wallet you use it for everything yeah and here in the US we were so successful with buy now pay later so it's a little bit of like a blessing but also curse yeah so then I talked to like the head of payments at OPI and I was like you should do clana and he's like why buy now pay later on

subscriptions why you know like yeah but we work with Disney Plus we work with Spotify you know we have tons of solution for subscriptions for virtual. It's just that people don't know it yet here in the US. And especially for like Uber and DoorDash, it's not that they want to put things on installments. What they want us to help them do is think about ways to aggregate payments, to drive down the payments cost.

Payments cost is a huge issue and you have an average order value of $20, $30. Visa charges a fixed payment fee for every transaction. So they want to find ways to, that's why, you know, somebody like Uber will always ask you, hey, upload $100. Why are you doing that? Because that lowers their payments cost, right? Yeah, that makes sense.

So we've helped them build products that helped them try to do that. It's still very early, still early, but like, there's, so there's, so much there. Yeah, but that's a source of the compounding advantage. You're over time, you have more and more data on how to underwrite people and then also more and more ACH integration. Exactly. Customers can pay with lower rates.

And this came up with a lot of investors because the point was on the roadshow, because what I was I told them, look, we're coming from Europe. Yep. Where payments is regulated. I'm competing with companies that has 20 bibs for debit, 40 bibs for cruise for That's the fees that we're seeing. Here in the US, people are paying 200 for credit cards, right? And 100 bibs for debits, because even if it's officially regulated, all the banks have circumvented it.

So to me, I'm coming from like low cost, low cost structure. We know how to run this at scale. You actually have very, very low. Yeah, we're coming into this rich market called the US where the margins are just, you know, gigantic. Yeah, yeah. I want to hit the size going, how much did you raise today? This is a fundraising event for you, right? Yeah. Not that big, actually.

We did only $200 million. That's pretty big. But the full round was like, I think, 1.6 or something, billion. Wait, so what is the structure of that? No, because the company... How do you think about that? The company didn't need to raise much money. I mean, we were very efficient with our capital,

and we've been close to profitability for a while. So this was more a secondary event. Okay, sure. But we wanted to make sure there's enough liquidity in the stock, so we were very happy some shareholders sold some pair of the stock, and that ended up, I think, in total, there was a second. up I think in total there was like 1.6 billion or something like that. Sure if I'm saying the wrong numbers. But it's around that number. It's evolving. But the primer itself was quite limited.

Yeah, yeah. And I didn't sell a single sock. Oh, there we go. There we go. Let's see it. Amazing. Bet on yourself. So yeah, what do you think you'll be investing in? Do you think there's going to be anything that might dip into, hey, we want to go harder, we're going to start burning again or we're just going to be investing more? Is there? Because I imagine that there's, there's a lot of opportunity to save with AI, but then there's also some, you could throw some really diesel inference at things and throw a reasoning model at every single transaction and all of a sudden you're like, my cloud bill is really expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the truth is, if you look at, I sometimes joke that at the end there was only going to be a bill for an Amazon and one from,

you know, Claude. Sure. That's the only thing the whole company would be two bills. And they might be the same company. Yeah, exactly. It's like running on the same servers. But I think, I mean, you looked Oracle today was insane. Yeah. But I think that the, no, I think, Look, I think we may be in the last two years slightly over-indexed on AI and efficiency. We were so like, oh, wow, look, we can get rid of all the SaaS. We can get rid of Salesforce. Yeah, remember you built your own CX tool just directly with OpenAI, right?

Yep, yep, yep. So we've took out 1,200 SaaS software out of it. But to be honest, like, Salesforce, $2 million in license fees, it's nice, but on a P&L of $3 billion, it's not like... It doesn't make much of it, right? Yeah. So it was much more. about how do you consolidate all the data, how do you standardize it so you don't spread it out on all these systems, you get this mess. Because the less of a mess, the easier it is,

both for a human and for AI, to use it to something productive, right? And so that's been kind of the key thing. But I would say we over index slightly on productivity. And now we are indexing more on growth. And unfortunately for human labor, which I find unfortunate, it's like we don't feel we need more people. Sure. Like we are already gone from 7,400 to 3,000. I think one of the most shocking things people saw the investors were like how come you're growing your revenue so much and your OPEC's just coming down it's like the opposite what you're supposed to be talking about but in our case we haven't laid off people we have just relied on attrition so 20% of the workforce leaves every year naturally because they go on for other adventures and we just rely

on that and then we become fewer and fewer and we get more and more done which is amazing so the only thing we could ever consider where I would say it makes sense potentially to spend more money is marketing but right now we're very happy to do within the budgets we have. Yeah, we talked to Alex. Yeah, he was saying the exact same thing. Very similar thing. Yeah. What about, I'm interested to hear, so I understand the over indexing on productivity that may be pulling back, but it feels like two years ago, every company was kind of seeing AI as a hammer. All you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so every single business process, every single thing is like, can we throw AI? Can we throw AI? And a lot of consultants

made a lot of money selling slide decks doing that. I feel like we are now in the scalpel era, and there are incredible use cases for LLMs, maybe within software that you're already paying for, and you're not even implementing it, maybe to glue two systems together. Are there any standout examples of, like, AI as a scalpel that you're seeing these days that you think, like,

yeah, it's a little bit narrower than just, like, do everything. But it's something that you're, that you're, that you're excited about the early glimpse of what's possible there? I think more recently I've gotten all the senior managers at Klauna to start using cursor regularly. And I still think that there's like, there I am still unfortunately quite negative on SaaS, because the point is that all these tools, internal tools that were built, today we can go to Kursor and like write me stuff, fix me things. It's almost becoming your internal terminal for interacting with your data.

for interacting with you know stuff like that especially since you're not putting it in production you're not externalizing it yeah you don't need to be as nervous about the same aspects that you do anything put things in production so I am as hyped as ever on AI from that perspective well and in your position of getting all the benefits of AI but not having not being threatened in the same way that other you know you guys make software but your payments company yeah I think that's partially true somebody can't go in a cursor be like build me Klarna don't make mistakes right like

Like, it's like, there's like, or get a bunch of data on whether or not we should underwrite this person's risk profile. How have you been seeing, um, uh, there's historically, you know, anytime people are borrowing money, they get a bunch of loan documentation. And it, and it ultimately is like a lot of, it's a lot of legal mumbo jumbo. It's confusing. Uh, people that have more resources might go to a lawyer and say, can you help me understand this.

Now people can drop those into chat chp.T. That ends up being good for simple financial products like Klarna. where people can easily understand. I'm getting this product today and then I'm going to pay it in these parts. Do you think that lending broadly is in for a reckoning as everyday consumers start to get access to, again, Chachipiti is not advertising itself as a legal tool,

but you can get a lot of insight from loan documents. It comes back to what I said about, you know, that vision we had 10 years ago about... Overnight systems. Exactly. Which we're still on, which is just like digital financial system. So what I believe is that if you look at a lot of industries, they are making excess profits because of the switching costs. So we customers are just not that keen of switching, especially when it comes to banking, but also electricity, carriers, all these things.

It's not like I really love my carrier, phone carrier that much. It's just that I don't bother to switch, right? And that allows them to charge more, allows them to pay, you know, to have lower quality services at higher cost. So when you imagine a world where you have a digital financial system, it's like, let me do that for you. And you start trusting them. Like, let me go and fix your carrier bill. Let me go and fix your electricity. Let me renegotiate that thing for you.

That, it must lead to a weather functioning economy with less success profits, especially in this. It doesn't matter for Prada. Or sorry, I mean, I shouldn't say this is Prada. For whatever it might be. The man of taste. Yeah, thank you. For Prada, LVM. age, it doesn't matter, irrelevant. For the brands, for Nike, irrelevant, for utilities.

And so what is banking then? I would say it's a mix. It's a little bit of a mix. It has both some aspects of trust and customer preference and so forth, but there is also a utilistic aspect to it. So I believe that all of the excess profits we've seen in banking are going to come down. And I've been very clear with our investors that if you're investing in Klanah, you're investing in the fact that we will be one of the forces that drive that change. And hopefully, as we're a consequence of that get a bigger piece of what will be a smaller pot yeah what's next for you are you gonna stay running the company yeah I hope so I hope so I mean I I've only been doing this for two decades come on just like just getting

started I mean at this point are you you seem me incredibly common it does feel like it's just another day for you it is crazy partially another day for me but I think that's special day yeah it's good yeah it's good to be in that Look, as I said, like, I tell you, emotionally, going to Bentonville, Arkansas, standing at the grave of Sam Wharton, and being at the cusp of working with what, to me, was like, the company that I was most excited about when I was a kid, I was reading about it, like the entrepreneurial story. The greatest retailers of all time. It is fantastic. That to me was, I'm sorry, like, I love this, but emotionally, that was bringing tears. That was very special.

Just reading that air. Yeah. You know, it's also very like Scandinavian type of, culture in the Midwest. There's a lot of similarities. So I think this is cool, but that was special. Was there anyone 20 years ago that believed that you'd take it all the way here? Apart from myself. Exactly. Apart for myself. Look, I guess. Because by the time Sequoia is investing, then everyone's like, okay, they'll be at the, they'll be a nice seat soon enough. It seems inevitable.

It's funny. I found this old email I wrote like five, six months into it, where I wrote to my co-founder and the email goes something like, I'm sitting here alone in the middle of the night and I started thinking like, what if we would like expand this beyond Sweden into more markets and start going off to the banks and become global, you know,

and it's like, wouldn't that be awesome? And I found this by coincidence a few months ago when I was just going through some old stuff. And I was like, wow, it's kind of crazy. You should screenshot it and share it. Yeah, exactly. That's like, you know, I actually predict it. But I think it's a little bit like, you know,

if you ask a soccer player or a football player or something, like do you want to play Champions League? Do you want to play the NFL? Do you want to play the finals? You know, like, of course you do. Of course as a founder, I was dreaming of being here. In the league? Of course.

Of course. Like, does that mean that I knew? No, of course I didn't know. But I hoped and I knew I was going to do everything that I could and, you know, all the energy and all the hours spent and all the sacrifices, right? Feels like the biggest misunderstanding of this company broadly is just like your intention. around building this, right? Of like actually trying to build

fair, transparent products that are going after those excess profits like you described. Thank you. I'm happy to hear that. But I think actually we had one slide on the road show that shows a study from 2015 by McKinsey actually. I love McKinsey

sometimes I hate McKinsey, but let's give it up for McKinsey. They don't get enough luck. And they did a study here in 15 where they basically, and they were trying to sell it to credit card companies, say, like, guys, there's an untapped market. And this is not people without money. They actually have quite good money. But these are people they called self-aware avoiders. There were people that saw their parents getting stuck in credit card debt, 07.

They tried a credit card themselves because they were supposed to get a good scoring. And then suddenly they find themselves with $4,000 worth of debt, paying 25 interest, you know, present interest on it or whatever. And they're like, what is this? This is the product of the devil. Get me rid of this. And they pay down the depth. And they're like, I don't want to use that. And that group, they don't want the air part launches.

They don't want the loyalty points or the cashback. That's not them. Those are the prosperous and content, the Amex users, the CHSci, sci-fire card. That's a different group. This group wants fixed installments, zero percent interest, budgeting tools, clarity, honesty, no overdraft fees, no negative surprises.

Just give me like a robust, solid product that I can use for my purchases debit and then occasionally when I needed credit but with zero fees right but it turned out in that study 20% of the American population falls into that self-aware avoider group 20% of the households all the people creating credit card programs to sit here in Manhattan they do program for themselves they want the loyalty points they want the you know the cash back programs they're doing them for themselves you have to ask your customer what does my customer want and not everyone wants that right like it's fine the other people want it and that's okay but for this group it's something different right um and that's what we're trying to okay last question

you're wearing the last blockbuster hat what's your favorite movie that's a good move like i have to tell you recently uh my son who loves star wars yeah so you got to watch mandolian and i was like okay but how good can it be it was awesome that's great it was awesome so um so that is probably but did you bring that did you bring the family today no i didn't know i have to see this is just another business trip this was I did a road trip I'm gonna go to Wall Street I'll be back in a few days we made a road trip with the kids from Boise Idaho yeah to San Francisco we stopped in Bend Oregon to go and visit the last blockbuster I really recommend everyone going to this is from the store not from the movie this is from the store this is from the store you

should go there 50% of their revenue is still DVD rentals so and it's fantastic experience here we have a new hat oh I'm not gonna have this one now so that's yeah Thank you so. Last question, last question. Last last final, final question. Is your profile picture AI or is it real? Oh, yeah. Are you that flight?

Are you that? Photoshop. It's all right. Handmade. Well, your stock chart looks like that. Hey. Anyway, thank you so much for coming. Thank you guys.

The whole team. You're the man. We'll see you later. Have a good one. What a legend. Just another, another day. Just another day. Yeah, no.

I just got to go take my company public. There's a business trip. I'll be right back. Just raising. I'm not even selling shares. Yeah, I'm not selling shares. I mean, yeah, I do think people have this massive miss. Come on the show.

Welcome. How are you doing? I'm pretty good. Hi. I'm David. Just pretty good. It's just pretty good. It's fantastic. I'm fantastic.

I am. Let's get you fired up. How are you doing? We got lots of, lots of sound effects here. I'll miss yourself for the story. I am David Sandstrom, I'm the CMO at Klarna. How did you get introduced to Klarna? How did you meet Sebastian?

I used to run one of the biggest ad agencies in the Nordics in Europe, and we actually started to do the Klarna transformation from this blue, boring B2B company into this consumer franchise. I started out agency side, and after a couple of months, Sebastian was like, why don't you do that here? What was your bread and butter when you were in the ad world prior to Klarna? Were you doing big brand? brand marketing projects or were you doing because there's so many different niches you could be

video you could be billboards you know there's a whole bunch of things you can do now we I did it all of the above you did no but I'm I'm this strategy is probably my thing right I'm super interested in consumer behavior like why do people pick a coke over a Pepsi why do people walk into a McDonald's versus a Burger King like the science yeah the science behind something that cannot be science right yeah the thing that that really intrigues me like the psychology part of like the La Buba thing now, right? Yeah. How does that, how does that happen?

Yeah. How do people fall in love with ugly plastic dolls and like, we've been asking, uh, we were asking the same question on the show two weeks ago. We tried to get through. And those things intrigue me. And I do think marketing done well and done correctly isn't that, you know, is, isn't that vicinity of being, you know, psychology you make money for.

Whose idea was pink? That, that was actually my idea. I knew it. I knew it. Well, the thing, so the thing about ideas, guys, you know, marketers, you know, marketers, is like you can sometimes you just have a great idea and it's incredibly simple. And that one idea ends up paying just massive, massive dividends, which I feel like Klarna is just consistently so recognizable and really owns the color.

Yeah, we do. But I think looking back at what we've done, everything, the strategy, everything has been fairly easy and simple, right? There's nothing complex about it. Pink is just a, it's a result of us understanding that banks and the financial industry is one of the most distrusted and hated industries in the world. Everyone is blue. Like everyone is blue. Just put the logos up, everyone is blue. Someone sprinkled some black on top, but everyone is blue.

And we knew that, you know, only politicians and social media were more disliked than financial institutions. So it's at the absolute bottom of trust. So I just said, like, what's not blue? Like what's the opposite of blue? Very inverted. Here we have it. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, where was the Klarna brand before you came in?

Who was it catering to? What was the key oversight that it was more... It was just fully B2B? Fully B2B? Is that the... No, it wasn't, but it wasn't a brand. It was a fantastic product. Yep.

Guess the color? Blue. Blue, of course. Blue logo. Of course, very... You know, as a lot of tech companies start out, very like square, very broish, very male biased, fairly boring, bureaucratic, nothing you want to engage with, no emotional component to it, nothing. You transact, right? It's a transaction. And that is what we

tried to change, like in everything and what we did with Snoop and Paris and Aesab Rocky and the pink and how we show up. Talk about the cultural differences between the European market and then coming to America because I feel like they from my perspective and from the financial perspective the big big difference is that US is a credit heavy market everyone under we love to spend money but yeah probably love the credit cards love credit cards but also understand credits yes like if you ask a random European like what is APR like nothing nothing really and and Europe is a debit market right and understanding those dynamics how that works

the power of credit cards in the US and the stronghold they have versus Europe that is a debit market different different what we see now also the digitalization like I haven't seen cash or a car like a physical card and I don't know five 10 years I just haven't seen it yeah that's the only thing I always forget when coming to the US my physical card so I show up no hotel they're like you need a card to put on file yeah you're like what's going on yeah so that's the biggest difference but then I mean I love the US. I love the spirit in the US. The American consumer is undefeated.

Everything is bigger, nothing is impossible. Like, there's just this, I think, greatness to think, that that is the soundtrack of the US. So I absolutely love it. And also, like, one big difference from my perspective is in the US, people appreciate marketing, and they appreciate people making money. So in Europe, when we do a partnership with a celebrity, They're like, you're a sellout. Really? I was about to ask.

You're a celebrity. Exactly. You're a sellout. Why do you do this? You only want to make money. In the U.S. when someone does something where they're like, you're the best, make as much money as you can. This is awesome. There's a huge difference in that as well.

Yeah. No, I feel like Shaquille O'Neal in particular has built a whole brand around like being just everywhere in every ad possible. And some of the folks that you've worked have done the same thing. I've seen Snoop all over the place. I love it. It is like, if you paint me, I'm down. Yeah, it becomes their, it becomes like another piece of their content strategy almost. And you're like, oh, have you seen the latest, you know, Paris Hilton promotion?

Yeah. Because it's like part of her brand world. Yeah. Fantastic. You can't even guess the next partnership. What about in terms of actual, like, the distribution of marketing materials? Is there any difference? In America, you know, there's this power law in TV advertising around the Super Bowl.

There's obviously a ton of stuff going. on social media, podcasts, live streams. We have a bunch of advertisers. Where is there a difference between where the actual ad impressions are coming from? Is there any difference or is it pretty much the same? I think the interesting thing with the US is that you still have these tent pole moments.

Like the Super Bowl, you have that thing, everyone gathers and you have these like, not millions of years, but tens and hundreds of millions of viewers. In Europe, everything is so distributed. Digital is very strong. So it's hard to build a brand. when you don't have these ten-pole moments because a brand is very much about like you and I have seen the same thing Yep and we think it's cool

Yeah, when every ad is personalized. I don't know like have you seen the clon ad? I saw it But that was kid that was only on my TikTok algorithm It could almost be a bad circle if everyone saw the same ad Because you know why it's going viral That was the power of TV once upon a time You knew that everyone had seen that or missed it or whatever it is Kardashians like I saw the last episode like I'm in You know I'm part of the culture exactly part of the culture Exactly. Part of the country, and you don't have that in Europe.

How involved did you get on the roadshow side? Clarnas is an interesting place where the consumer brand, I feel like, is almost different than the brand within tech, for example. Right? Because, like, in our world, a lot of our audience that are high earners, founders, investors, executives at technology companies, they maybe aren't using Klarna nearly as much as the average American, let's say. how what's the what's kind of like the disconnect between those those I mean sometimes that's a difficult bridge to gap a lot of our investors don't use the product on a daily basis right if you look at a Spotify for example from Stockholm

as well like the investors might might use that on a day exactly totally totally I think that was a thing with Figma right totally fantastic company investors don't know how to design right they haven't used that yeah but but even different the only thing different there is an investor knows that every one of their portfolio companies use as Figma every day, right? Exactly. But that has been the story to tell, right? Because, like, Klarna does a lot of amazing things,

but you could boil it down to, it's just a better alternative to credit cards, right? And everyone understands credit cards, how that works, with points, and that's the story to tell, right? And I usually talk about, like, I do think this is a seismic shift where we've gone from gold to cash,

from cash to credit cards, and now from credit cards to the next generation of things, where Klarna is the lead. some of our competitors as well, of course, but I do think that's the story to tell, right? And we're seeing that shift amongst consumer as well. Like they're sick and tired of being screwed over by their credit card, like companies, high fees, predatory APRs, all of that. So I think we're seeing that seismic shift, and that has been a very important piece

for us to tell that story from a consumer perspective, working a lot with testimonials, our own customers, but you're completely right. What about going more multi-product? You guys have ambitions. You have multiple products already. Sebastian was telling us about the card product and the credible wait list. But how are you thinking about going multi-product

in the U.S. market specifically? I mean, the strategy is basically growing with our consumer engagement, right? So we have 111 million consumers. I think we have the north of 30 million consumer. Boom. North of 30 million. North of 30 million consumers in the U.S.

Yeah. They love Klarna. So they keep telling us, hey, I use Krona online all the time. Why can't I use Klarna in store? Sure. Okay, that's the idea of the credit card. Hey, I love Klarna, but I want to pay with debit from time to time. Well, okay, that's the start of the balance.

And that is how we grow, right? I mean, Amazon. But I want to make 30 years of monthly payments. I mean, Amazon started out as a bookstore and now it's the everything store. And we started out with payments and now we're the everything company. We're excited to keep following the journey. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for having me.

Congratulations. Really quickly before our next guest, let's tell you about some of our sponsors. This stream, of course, is made possible by ramp.com. Figma, which Jority just mentioned, Vanta, Linear, and Eight Sleep. We will tell you more about our sponsors after our next guest. We just wanted to shout out to some of that. If you're just tuning in for the first time, I just wanted to share. We have a game-signed burrito by Sebastian.

It's actually, it's not just any burrito. It's a chip-a-chipo. Polet Barreto and Klarna does have a partnership. And this will be going in the Business Hall of Fame that we're putting together. Let's bring in our next. Let's bring in our next guest. Oh, it has been, it has been too long. Great to see you. I bring you some sweets.

I do. No way. I feel like when you came on the show, it was Monday, I told you don't be a stranger. And then I don't hear from you for. Klarna owns pink. And here you are. Clarnah owns pink. No other brands.

It's got to be here and see you guys again. This is nice, too. Thank you. Yeah, pink, pink. It's really, we're taking the whole the trading floor. Yeah. How did you become a board member? How did you meet Sebastian?

So I joined the board recently. I joined earlier this year. Of course, Klarna is investing heavily into AI and figuring out how to combine the best experience with a lot of the AI innovation. And that's how Sebastian and I met. And now over a year back, started speaking about AI, how we can innovate, to build the financial assistant of the future. Was the actual intro through like Secoil? through like Sequoia folks or something?

It was initially we met on the event of Sequoia's event. Sure. I was on one of the panels. Sebastian asked the question. This AISN? It was the Europe 100. Okay, previous. Which is another, of course, amazing thing about kind of the connection where

Klarna is one of the few European companies that started in Europe and built a global brand and everybody recognizes. Even today, earlier, working for the trading floor, the best feeling was a lot of the people coming by. It's like I'm the Clarena user. It's like 110 million active customers, which is, of course, as another founder that started a company in Europe and is trying to build global business, Sebastian and I got along well

and started speaking about this. Yeah. How did you explain your business to him at the time? Was it in the context of a partnership or just kind of life lessons learned and understanding of your understanding of AI could potentially get him up to speed on what was coming? It's a good combination of both. I think there's one piece which, you know, Sebastian is just, such a trailblazer and quick to a lot of the adoption.

He was one of the first to jump into the AI, start figuring out how you can deploy agents in customer service. Few hundred people work could be elevated through the AI work and eventually optimized on the bottom line as well. And we started speaking about a lot of other ideas of what could happen, what is possible. Working in voice, of course, there's an interesting angle

of how you can combine the part of voice experience across the customer service, where people, can call in whether it's a claim, whether it's to understand a little bit more. Sure. What about on the B-to-B side? Klarna is unique because they have a brand with consumers, but then they also sell to customers or to enterprises and businesses.

Have you thought or have you seen any glimmers of, we've heard some sort of, maybe it's a little bit too early to have AI in charge of the outbound sales. They're not robots buying state dinners for folks just yet. But there's a lot of companies where they need a phone number, where if somebody wants to get more information. They currently put in a form and then maybe there's a phone line where some sales reps can pick up, internal sales. But that could be AI in the mix, voice agents in the mix. Have you seen that in other companies? Are you optimistic about that? I'm optimistic for like a scenario where you have like LARNA, a lot of inbound, a lot of partners that want to work with you.

Now a lot of the requests, you need to figure out the smarter way to handle those requests. So instead of waiting for a longer time to speak with a human, could you validate the workforce? within voice agent and go through that quicker. We've actually seen and deployed that for ourselves, where if you want to accelerate the pipeline, you can speak with the voice agent and tell a little bit about the use case. And actually what happened is that a lot

are more keen to tell you a lot more than they would otherwise. But then there's so many other areas where that's relevant. A good example is training people internally. So whether you are on the talent team, and I think that's how a lot of people in Plarn are thinking about on the talent team, whether it's you're actually, you're actually on the sales team, how can I get better? And then whether it's the agent, on the tech side,

where it's voice agent, you can actually learn and do that better. And then there's of course the last angle, which is the easiest one, but only easy if everybody adopts it, is how you can use AI in the internal process, and internal tooling. We actually just spoke with one of the execs across the C-Suite at Klarna, who is now deploying herself some of the AI tooling to improve the switch from,

to-do into the actual actual project management flow with the right metadata, with who is the specific tasks for. So it auto fills a lot of the information that otherwise would be manual and take a long time. So that's kind of those all three domains, whether it's delivering better customer experience with AI, whether it's improving how you actually get customers through the flow and how you train the staff internally or optimize process internally. I think all are so relevant with that work. Yeah, it feels like it's part of this like narrative that we're seeing where for a lot of

companies, AI was just kind of like, okay, get a big deck from a consulting firm and it's going to do everything, it's going to replace everyone. But now we're in kind of more the AI as a scalpel era and plugging in a frontier voice model into something that might be generated. I don't even know what technology was used to generate voices before transformer-based models, but it was rough and you hear it all the time. You were like a stitch up of effectively phonies to like your voice work. Yeah. But I think is the other thing that is clearly seen across the companies is that the best mixes, you have. have AI to automate the easier manual tasks,

but then you supplement with the highest experts you can in the field, and that's what Klarna did. Even outside of voice, as you think about text, just people that can handle the really tricky cases. Specialists are there, Clarnas actively hiring on that side, but then the easy 80% of the task, whether it's just getting information, getting more product delivery through that first steps in the flow

are happening all the day. Is there some sort of parallel to draw between the fact that I feel like both Klarna and 11 labs are not the, like do everything all at once? It's like do one thing really, really well, grow, own that and then maybe expand. Is that, am I jumping to conclusions there? Does that feel like something that you and Sebastian

can kind of bond over? And we spoke of course briefly about, before the first, before the show as well where I think it's very important to go deep and understand the customer, understand domain, and work backwards from there. I think Karnah did it incredibly well, being so early in the e-commerce, then digital payments now with so many of the AI innovations. And I think understanding the customer working backwards and then expanding is the right move.

At 11 laps here, of course, trying to do the same with going deep in media space now with a lot of the telco space and then working on how you can build a platform out of that. So I think there is a parallel and I think the kind of a common theme, like you need to really deliver the best experience for a specific, specific segment. Very cool. What's coming down the pipeline in Europe? Are there exciting companies that I'm sure you guys, when a company starts showing promise, I'm sure you and Sebastian get hit up pretty quickly?

What should we expect? Yeah, yeah, the godfathers. We've probably seen the Sweden is booming. Of course, Clarna now, Spotify in the past, so many other, amazing companies with lovable, Lagora and others. So there's definitely an ecosystem there. Sebastian has also a little bit of Polish roots as well where I'm from. Poland is also very excited for Sebastian, for Clarna.

So I think this is another ecosystem to watch out for and see how that stretches. And these are like two good hubs. Of course, London is also trying to get there. We've seen a little bit in France. So I think these four regions are really going to go for it. Lots more to do, I think, to bring it to the level. to the US innovation, but the energy is there. That's very clear.

The founders are realizing that, you know, you, real path. Real path, and you should, even if you start from Europe, you can build a global company. And I think that realization wasn't there five, 10 years back. Totally. And now it's like, you should start thinking about a global space from the start. And it's possible examples like Sebastian are great examples, being out of it for 20 years.

And it's just now kind of going once again, as you think about in reinventing Klarna for the next 20 years and expanding all the work. So I think that's a good inspiration for all the founders there too. Yeah, it is a different story. I mean, I feel like New Bank has not expanded into the US in any meaningful way. They build a fantastic business, a corner company, obviously. Fendix are amazing in Europe. In Poland, it's...

But there's something special that you and Klarna, like, starting not in America, but actually being able to get a strong foothold, where you haven't seen that from, like, there's that Indian company Flipkart and like, fantastically successful but not coming to the United States in a meaningful way. 100%. I think you need to from the start think globally. And especially now, like if you are starting a company, I mean, practically like tactically advice for like, you know, small founder with some product market fit in Europe.

What does that look like? Would you recommend, okay, San Francisco office at 50 employees or 200 employees or or quarterly trips or make sure you have someone on your cap table in Sandhill? Like, how can you concretize? I mean, without making too many generalizations. I think the first piece would be you, even without the physical presence, you should be reaching out to people writing the newsletters. Sure.

A lot of the AI people that are active on social media. And don't try to pitch them on the work. Show them the samples. Show them the product. Let them test it. If they like it, that's a cracked for the first. Just be a live player in the community online. And you need to go direct.

You need to show them the work. You don't want to go the fluff way of the promise of the future. Sure. So I think this is like the very concrete thing that worked really well for us and I think for a lot of other companies we see currently. And second to your other point, you do want people on the ground in US sooner rather than later. The ecosystem is thriving there. You want at least few people that can be in Silicon Valley or they can be in New York and spend time with other companies and make sure that they are building with that technology or you understand their needs before. Yeah, you don't want your competitor or a competitor going through YC Demo Day and signing up. you know half the batch before exactly you need to be with the YC companies before before any other player 100% what's the fundraising environment out like uh in europe like i think the you know you can get

capital now i think in europe and u.s if you are building for that scale you can you can you can really do it their capital is plenty it's more about the usual get the smart capital get the smart investors that will help you scale to us that will help you get the talent yeah um that uh that are in there with you for the highs, but are also there when you are low. That would be like on the practical side, one of the key things to check across any of the investors. But I think 100% there is a lot of capital of money that everybody can get it.

And I think surely you're seeing a lot of European companies are going with pretty great funding grounds as well, especially in the recent. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we, Delhi and Aspero from the time found on the show, and he invested in was it in Durosat, the satellite? satellite bus company.

Helsing and it's just like a crazy, crazy company out in Eastern Europe that's just built like a phenomenal business in hard tech, which is like total narrative violation. And yeah, there's definitely stuff all over the place. Exactly. And then we might have seen N8N, which is another of the agenda workflow builders, which everybody uses across the engineers to go-to-market teams, which is another great example. And of course, lovable, we spoke about it. So, I mean, we have to ask.

You came on the show on Monday. You announced some fundraising. It sounded like you weren't in a position where you needed a ton of primary capital. Are we going to see you out here soon? That's the hope. We are building to, you know, to create a generational company. That tender offers exactly for that to get people liquidity so they can focus on that long term. So that's the hope.

We'd love to, of course, be here and follow Clareness Path one day. Well, hopefully we'll be there. And thank you. We love to ask that so we can get a sheepish denial and then play the clip when it happens in a couple of years. Yeah, you're two, year or two from now. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Yeah, we'll see you guys again. Cheers. Legend. Just coming in the studio. Who we got? Who we got about some more advertisements. Careful with that burrito. That is a piece of business history. TVVM is made possible by Wander. Find your happy place.

Also, add quick. We mentioned billboards earlier. I didn't get an ad quick. ad read in, but there's a lot of billboards over here. Billboards all over New York City. Go to adquick.com. Also, Bezell, you'll notice a lot of people show up to the New York Stock Exchange wearing a fantastic luxury watch. You can shop over 25,000 luxury watches at getbezzle.com. Also, numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot.

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And lastly, before we bring in our next guest, we have fin.a.i, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. heard Mati talking about how Klarna has been using AI in their customer

service organization. If you want to bring AI to bear in your customer service organization, go to thin.a.i. And we will bring in our next guest. Who we got? We have the next person. We have two minutes. Two minutes. We get to hang out. We get to hang out. Let's play some soundboard. Let's amp it up.

Easy, Josh. First time on the soundboard. Yeah. If you put this thing within within striking distance with me. I'm going to have some fun. Anyway. It is one of the most beautiful views in the world. He really is the Fortress of Finance, the East Coast edition. Also, they outtruss us too. We got to be trust. Oh yeah, the trust is really, really good. But this thing is just a real monument. It's fantastic. And I see Andrew Reid down there. Look, look. There he is. There he is. Hey, there he is. Come on up. Come on up.

He's working on it. He's working on it. He's on the schedule. Andrew Reed will be. Yeah, we'll bring I think we have them on it. I think we have them on a theory. But yeah, it's great. Can we see Kramer? Is Kramer around? I don't know. I do believe we're going to be able to think about us.

I do see CNBC over there. But yeah, what I was, I mean, the whole floor is buzzing and it's, obviously Klarna IPO is a big deal. But just seeing all the different pods, everything is really cooking today. The IPO market's fully backing swing. There's something like seven IPOs this week. Yeah, I mean, we were talking about like, like, Like there were other companies that were like, is that going to go out the same day? And like, should we try and have that CEO on?

There is a lot going on. Yeah, there's figure in the works. Stubhub. It's in the works. It's not figure the robotics company. It's figure the blockchain company. Is that correct? Blockchain lending.

Yes, blockchain lending. Okay. We will have to get sharp on figure at some point. Yep. We're working on getting the founder on. In the timeline? I don't have Wi-Fi. So I am guessing, but you can pull up the timeline.

Daniel Prong. says skepticism is gone from the market. Oracle is saying it will basically build, listen to this, Oracle is saying it will basically build AWS in five years, and no one seems to be stopping to ask how. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, meta are all struggling to build enough

infrastructure. How does Oracle plan to do so? So he is a little skeptical of Larry. Yeah, it's a big, it's a big backlog. It's a big backlog. It better be heavy open AI. Well, well, this question is just asking

what, like, how do you plan to physically build, like, assume the demand is there. Yeah. How do you, how are you physically going to build it? You're going to need a bigger tent. It's going to be a lot of tents. It's going to be a lot of tents. I mean, how much is, how much are they spending on, I mean, Stargate 500 billion supposedly, and like Zoc is penciling out $10 billion clusters, a trillion dollar cluster?

I mean, like, if you talk to the folks at situational awareness, anthropic, like, these numbers, line up with straight lines on log on log graphs yeah so that you know um it it is it is sort of like somewhat unexpected from uh from oracle specifically here he is here he is how you doing the man of the hour boom throwing on the hat here we go fourth or fifth time second IPO great to see you how you do it how you feel thank you really you they really treat you like the mayor around here sorry from sorry for being late i was picking up some market color okay what's that the the the four traders You know, I feel like I needed to accumulate a little bit more. Okay.

I need to know where rates are headed. Okay. Yeah. I need to know where interest rates are going. What did you get for us? What do you get for us? What's the market color? Okay.

Yeah, yeah. I was very excited. What about interest rates? Anyone? That's proprietary. Propitory. Okay. Priotary alpha.

Yeah. Yeah, it really is great seeing you back here. I love hanging out in the stock exchange. That's fantastic. I also love hanging out in the stock exchange. Tell us the initial story. How did you initially wind up investing in Well, when Sequoia first invested in Klarna, I was a sophomore at Amherst College.

I think I probably could have pointed roughly where Sweden was on a map, but I certainly never been there. And Mike Moritz, who had famously invested in PayPal and Google and a bunch of other great companies, and got in Chris Olson, who's now at a firm called Drive Capital, worked together. And Pat Grady, by the way, also did some of the initial financial modeling when he was a legend. A green associate. Yeah.

And, you know, we invested in 2010, in a company that was a Swedish alternative. Jump scare. Whoa. It was, you know, Swedish slash maybe Pan Nordic alternative payment company for e-commerce where, you know, you wouldn't pay until the thing arrived. So you knew you're going to get what you were getting. I mean, a lot of Europe at that point was e-commerce, and the internet was there, but they didn't have the payment rail. So it was like, you pay cash to the delivery driver.

And Klarna was like some, it was like powering that and building on top of that, those rails. Yeah. Like not even, I don't even know, you can call them rails. Hands. And you go into the, you know, you go into the memos from back in the day. It was, you know, how might Klarna find success in making its next hop? Yeah. So it was Germany and the Netherlands.

And we had this incredible detail and like, might they succeed? in Germany and demographics and Germany and competitive landscape and the Netherlands seemed like, oh, you know, if they do that, we're, you know, we're money good. Yeah. And one thing sort of led to another, and Sebastian just put his head down and 15 years later with all of the ups and downs and twists and turns. Really? Yeah.

Sebastian, Sebastian, he has that dog in him. He does. Truly. It's crazy. Yeah. I can see that. I mean, he comes through incredibly, incredibly relaxed. But it says a lot.

It says a lot that he's here. He's like, he has a, he said today, he didn't sell a single share. No. Like, he's all in. He is all in. No, he's, and he. And the other thing that stood out to me, I just thought this was hilarious. He said he didn't bring his family here.

It's just like a work trip. He just came to Wall Street to IPO. It's just another, another week. Yeah, he is very eager. He's very eager to get back to. back to work. Yeah, he's, but Nicholas, the CFO, I don't know, have you, has anyone to shout out Nicholas? No. Legend, Nicholas Negleen, Karnas CFO. Probably incredibly been important for this business. He has been, yeah, for all the reasons you might imagine. Because it's not just fundraise and pay

some salaries. Exactly. You can get into cash crunch. And he was describing that in the early days. Christmas came and they had a ton of cash that needed to go out the door. Yeah. Nicholas is, I'm pretty sure, taking a nap right now. I think he is, in fact, I can guarantee you that he's Taking a nap right now before dinner is right. A little bit more. I'm going to take his hat off a little tight. Yeah, you're good. Okay.

Yeah. I'll put it back on a little time to leave. Yeah. Where I guess like walk through by the time they were going to enter the U.S. market, you were on Team Sequoia, right? Yes. You were able to witness that. Yeah.

I guess like give us a backstory there because I think that the level of traction they have in the U.S. market was, I don't even know if you could have underwrote that as they were starting. Yeah. When I joined Sequoia in 2014, Klarna was still blue Klarna. They had not yet made the transition to the pink Klarna. And the logo did feel a lot like PayPal or a firm or Jacob Morgan Chase, you know, sort of felt like that sort of a company, but coming from Northern Europe. And in the mid-2010s, you know, the whole brand of the company was repositioning much more consumer first, different, you know, we're going to go after the retail banks and not just try to build like a nice profitable compounding, you know, pan-European business.

And one of the things, one of the reasons to do that was to expand into the U.S. Yeah. And it was around this time that the term BNPL, you know, BNPL wasn't a term until probably 2017. You know, Sebastian had been doing this since 2005, right? So it became a big thing. And after pay started taking a lot of share and a firm obviously was doing tremendously well. And the thing with like Clarnet's business, obviously, is, you know, Each country is different, right?

Like right now, a huge portion of the Swedish population uses Klarna every month. And, you know, for those customers, you know, Klarna has seen them a zillion times by now, right? Like, you know, when they're underwriting a transaction, it's the, you know, zillionth transaction for that customer. Going to a new market, right, you're having a lot more first-time customers. So the business model is very different country by country by country. And just cultural, yeah, cultural differences between the U.S. consumer and merchants and exactly. Frequency. Yeah, American consumers don't have.

have the same like loyalty to Clarnet, right? It's not like a national champion. No, even heard of us. Yeah, exactly. But then you know, Clona got into the US in the end of 20, I think, probably said it on 2017-2018 and then really during COVID, when e-commerce obviously was, you know, booming.

That's when they really, you know, got their foot in the door with the big US merchants. But amazingly, if you look at the momentum now, in the F-1, I hope we get these numbers right. You know, Q1. year-over-year growth in the U.S. was 33%, Q2 was 38%. So like the actual like forward-looking momentum or not forward-looking statements. The real-time momentum for Q2 is very, very impressive.

Yeah. How do you think about the long-term structure of the fintech market broadly? It feels like there's a ton of companies that I can think of that are like big scale decoorns or almost 100 billion. You're invested in many of them. founder-led, big markets already, but going into super apps and everything apps,

but at the same time throughout history, going back to Goldman and JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. We've always lived in this world of oligopolis. Should we be thinking about long-term fintech? It's like hyperscalar clouds. It'll be competitive, but everyone will still make money. Or is there a winner-take-all world in point solutions? How do you think about the market in the long-term?

The thing I find most in, interesting about fintech, especially for a company like clarna, you know, which has its, um, which has footprint across Europe and the U.S. Like fintech penetration in Europe is actually quite high. You know, if you think about revolutes market share in some of these European countries or trade republic for trading. Yep. Or clara for payments.

Yep. Um, and, you know, they've really started to make a dent on the legacy retail banks. In the U.S., fintech market share is still tiny. Yeah. Right. And that's where they're eating from. And I think the U.S. market, which obviously is the biggest profit pool in the world. That's right.

It's still pretty much, it's Jacob, it's Fargo, and the Citigroup. And then that huge long tale of, you know, from the next tier down to the credit unions. And also, I mean, with the ECH, like Visa and MasterCard, there's also market share to take from that. Yeah. And, you know, not to mention silicoins and there's so much things about having in U.S. FinTech and somehow US FinTech is like lower penetration than Europe FinTech and I think of a company like Klarna which is obviously going to be growing here. How are you thinking about early stage fintech?

Because with that frame of mind of like if I'm going to be a fintech founder, I'm going up against Sebastian from Klarna, you know, Max Levchins is an active founder. You got Brian and Coinbase Vlad at Robin Hood. Yeah, I've seen that the YouTube video dog. You got Eric. You got Eric. It's just like every category has like a serious person with like a billion dollars on the balance sheet and they're ready to go and they're bought in and they're not asleep at the wheel at all. It's not the early days of like enterprise software was like, oh yeah, like there's some integrator that did this in the 60s with paper and like you're just going to take everything.

So have you been how do you think the next wave of fintech at the early stage looks? Is it just yeah? Yeah, the last, you know, like I dabble in fintech. I wouldn't say I'm, you know, compared to some like Roloff, who knows everything about everything, I'm certainly not a specialist. The last fintech investment that I led was in a company called Phantom wallet. Oh, yeah.

Which is, you know, it's sort of the, you need a discontinuous shift in the market. It needs something meaningful to be, to differentiate yourself along. So, Phantom, it was centralized to decentralized wallets. Yeah, and then benefiting from Solana, like timing, picking the right chain to originally, Yeah, to get out of the gate, now it's multi-chain, and it's all non-custodial, and it's a different business model, a different footprint. That to me is the sort of market change you need to be, like, to plant your flag and go up and compete against people who have big footprints. Because you're right. The founders you just mentioned, the boundaries you just mentioned are incredible.

They're not asleep at the wheel. They're just not asleep at the wheel. And so it feels dangerous to go like head-to-head with any of these guys. But, yeah, something completely different counterposition like that. You carve out. you can weave and build and eat off of someone else's plate entirely. It makes a ton of sense. What was going on in 2021 and 2022 when Square bought afterpay for now?

If you just look at the transaction value, it's like I think it's like 65, 70% of their current market cap. Yeah. Or their current market cap. What, why do you think, yeah, was that just like fintech overheated broadly? Also, I think there were a few of these stock for stock deals during that era. I think Octa Athe Zero is another one, you know, where the actual mark to market value of the transaction was just different than what was reported at the time. Yeah. I think, like, you know that Peter Thiel thing about how in 1999 there's a moment of peak clarity at some level where, like, you know, we saw the future perfectly.

We just totally overestimated how fast it would come. I think a lot of the e-commerce things in 21 remind me something of that where we were on a straight shot. There's so much demand. It was also the, you know, the crazy pole for. e-commerce and it was a you know and i think we just actually got back to the same level of e-com penetration that we had in like 2020 2020 yeah we're back to the same original growth trajectory not growth trajectory but i think overall penetration yeah but the way like i think about that trend is you know in 2021 it was obvious that we were headed towards 50% plus e-commerce penetration

cross-categories and and it's happening so quickly and then 2022-23 the narrative was like e-commerce is dead it was all pulled forward you know and then sure enough like no we are in fact headed towards e-commerce penetration we're so clerks in those levels yeah and now you look at like you know the Shopify numbers that came out um their quarter was incredible right like on top line and everything else so it's like yeah e-commerce is still a long-term trend and that's even during this rocky year with with tariffs and uncertainty on the vendor side or on the merchant side yeah uh anything else um here we have some people waiting yeah okay i have a bunch more questions but come on the show again. I'll be I'll thank you for being here. I'm sure we'll be back here. I meet you guys at the

stock exchange. It's fantastic. It's the best place to hang out. Thank you. Thank you. The mayor of nicey. Let's bring in Marcus. What? Okay. That's not really some breaking news. One second. Yeah, we're okay. Let's let's bring in Marcus. Yeah. And. Hey, Marcus, good to meet you in person. Absolutely. Likewise. Great to hear you. Please take a seat. Would you mind introducing yourself for the stream and then we can talk about everything? Sure.

Hey, I'm Mark Svillig, founder and CEO of Bolt. Do you remember the first time we interacted online? I do. I made a YouTube video essay all about Bolt. I had a friend on my team who was obsessed from Estonia. And I dug in and it was the most fascinating story. And I remember asking you, like, so did I get the story, like roughly correctly? I should have just asked you because I was doing video essays, like blog posts instead of,

blog posts instead of like actual interviews, but here we are interviewing. Anyway, tell us your story of how you got involved in Clarnet. Sure, so I started Bolt as an entrepreneur when I was 19 years old back in 2013, and back then I was looking at our neighboring country of Sweden, where Clarnham already back then was one of the biggest tech companies. So I was always following it when we were building Bolt from Estonia. Just as like a role model. Exactly. So I mean I saw they were obviously in a very competitive space, very tightly regulated,

complex and I saw they were doing well in Europe and then over time they started obviously expanding outside as well yeah so that was big role for us so that's how I sort of started following the company yeah and and walk me through a little bit of your journey what how long did it take you to expand like take me through the first couple eras and the acts sure sure so I mean with with Bolt we took I think a lot of lessons from what Klarna has done as well so we first focused on winning in our home market sure and obviously our product set is a bit different there and I think same applies to Klarna where like the products they offer in Europe are a lot more

comprehensive than they already do in the US sure and then we just first saturated the home markets and then started expanding and I think Klarna has done the same strategy really well that's fantastic is this your first IPO first public company board it is actually so for the 12 years I've only been focused on bolts I haven't wanted to take on any distractions but we're on to known Sebastian and the Klarna team over the years and I was always really impressed. So earlier this year when Sebastian reached out that would I be open to joining, I thought about it for a couple of hours, but it made a lot of sense.

Only took a couple hours. What are the benefits of being a founder, CEO on a board? I know that there's people that do public company board work and that's how they pay the bills, but for you it must be more about the connections and the industry insights. Is that something? How do you think about it? Absolutely. So actually, I mean, Sebastian pitched really well to me. So I was like, hey, like, I think there's three unique angles here. A, we're one of the largest European technology companies with 110 million customers, so I think you can learn a lot from what we've done. Second, they're one of the few European companies that's really made it big in the US.

And obviously for any company in the world, like coming to the largest market and succeeding here is a big lesson to learn from. And third, he was like, we're going to have a blockbuster IPO. So you want to join and see how that's done. And I think all of those three things have proven to be true over the last year. What is Klarna getting right about running a company that's sort of a two-sided marketplace? They have customers that need to implement Klarna and then customers that use it to check out. And you're in a similar business where you have drivers and riders.

What lessons have you learned from their branding, their business, their marketing, anything like that? I'd actually say that building a payments network and building a right-sharing network actually have a lot of similarities in terms of how we build a two-sided marketplace. And what we found is that it always starts off on the supply side because unless you have the right supply available, like there's a little value for the consumer. And I think that's actually what Klarna has always got right. They're very customer obsessed,

and they wanted to go and make sure they get the best merchants all around the world to sign up with them, so you can use Klarna as a payment method. And then once you have that supply base and you have a great product offering, then it makes sense to start to focus on the consumer side. Otherwise, you know, you can bring millions of consumers to the platform if they can't use it to pay anywhere,

it's useless. Yeah, that makes sense. Talk to me about the state of ride sharing and Bolt's business. In San Francisco, everyone's obsessed with Waymo. Elon's talking a big game about Robotaxie rolling out. What do things look like in your business? And where do you see things going?

So, first of all, I think it's great. Self-driving cars are completely going to revolutionize cities. I think for Bolt specifically, we're really well positioned to this kind of 100x, the size of the business. And we're really looking forward to the next decade. On the other hand, though, we've got to be a bit more realistic. And I mean, I'm always the pragmatic guy in the room. So when I look at the numbers, like,

We gotta admit, like these things are still a number of years before the commercial unit economics makes sense. Sure. I think it's one thing to put a couple of thousand cars on roads. And I think what Waymo has done is absolutely unique and impressive. But they are operating only in the wealthiest cities in the world. It's still going to take a number of years before the costs come down to a level where you can actually offer this in most cities, not to mention in Europe, but in emerging markets as well. So in that sense, I think Paul's business is quite well insulated. Like we have five to ten years before this is going to have a major impact in terms of any downside or risk to our business.

Yeah, I think the bull case for at least Uber in the era of self-driving is that Darcoshaari ran, was it TripAdvisor before? Expedia. Expedia. And that is an aggregation platform. They don't own any planes. They don't own any airlines. They route you to the correct airline. Are you thinking about the business similarly?

If there's an owner of a self-driving car in 10 years from now and they want to bring their cap-backs or their assets, to the Bolt network, you act as an aggregator for customer demand for them? So is that the correct partnership? I think the industry is for sure going to evolve over time and it's still not clear how it's going to end up 10 years from now. But I think in the short term, we're absolutely ready to own the cars and no room balance sheet as well. Oh, interesting. So do you own anything right now, scooters or anything?

We do actually. So I think that's a core distinction both has versus any other right sharing company in the world. This is the craziest thing. Like, you went into scooters and you didn't get destroyed. But to me, to me, that feels like, again, something we've been asking some of the other guests is, like cultural differences between the American consumer and maybe the European consumer in America. I was living in L.A. during the bird scooter era, the Lyme scooter era, and people used to destroy scooters for sport. It was like, it was a past time. Wait till you see what happened in Paris.

So, I mean, they were like, we were at some point losing 2% of the fleet each week. What are they doing? Throwing it in a pond or something? Literally into the river. Into the river. Into the chancel Lise. But there are markets that it work where people respect the robots and they take care of it. Absolutely.

And I think overall though, when we just like compare the journeys of Bolt and Klarna, I think there's a lot of similarities with how these European companies are built. I mean, generally we start off not having access to the same amount of capital. So that forces us to be a lot more frugal and more efficient in how we operate. You don't want to lose 2% of the fleet weekly for that long. No, no, exactly. We didn't raise hundreds of millions for the squatter business. We had to be very clever in how we operated.

So I think overall, I mean, what we've done is that we've operated some of these hardware Cappex-heavy business as well, whether it's scooters or we have a car-sharing business with thousands of cars. We operate in more than a dozen cities around Europe. So in that sense, like we're not really afraid to similarly operate self-drawing cars if need be in the early stages of the market. Long term, once this gets into hundreds of thousands of cars, obviously the industry is going to pay out differently. How did the initial Sequoia deal come together for you? because I don't think they have an office in Estonia, but it's through the Strait Mafia or the Skype Mafia? So actually, I mean, Sequoia, back when they invested in us, back in 2021, they hadn't made too many European investments.

I think actually Klarna was probably the first one they did a long time ago, and I think that was a successful one, so they started looking around more in Europe. Okay. And actually, funny enough, I met with two of the strike founders. Really? They actually, so they came to Estonia. It was a great fun time catching up with them years ago. And then actually they went back to Silicon Valley and then they were chatting with Sequoia about what are some interesting startups they've seen in Europe and then the bolt came up and that's where the original interest came from. What's the state of the Estonian early stage startup scene? It's fantastic. Honestly, I think the Estonian startup scene per capita is the best in the world. Tallinn is half a million people. We got 11 unicorn companies.

So for sure there's something in the blood in the Nordics when we look at Tallinn or we look at Stockholm. They're just absolutely per capita better than almost any city in the world. And when we look at just a number of entrepreneurs coming out of these companies, whether it's Bolt or Klarna as well, it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, this is booming now the second and third generation of companies. A couple of the narratives that I've heard thrown around about why Estonia punches way above its weight relative to population size is a huge investment in high-speed internet early on. And then also just the geopolitical situation of becoming an independent country and having the entire population animated, hey, we got to take this stuff seriously, guys. Do those two narratives sit well with you?

Does that sound about right? Those are absolutely true. I mean, again, when we look at, I mean, Estonia was under Russian occupation for 50 years. And during the communism era, entrepreneurship was literally banned. So you had all this bottled up energy for decades where people wanted to build businesses in the current. So when in 91, Estonia regained its independence, we had this massive entrepreneurial boom where everybody wanted to build a company. So that's the environment I grew up in. But that actually a third very important factor that I think is same for Sweden and Estonia,

is that we have some of the best education in the world. So when you look at all the PISA rankings, et cetera, Estonia is always at the top and so is Sweden. And I think that's the other thing that's fueling all the technology company creation in both countries. How are you thinking about artificial intelligence, just AI generally, either applying it to your business or this idea of building a data center? We've heard from two CEOs, two public company CEOs in the last week, that they are happy to not grow headcount, but they're certainly growing revenue, right?

So that's Alex Carp over Palantir, and then obviously Sebastian here at Clarnon. Is that a similar approach that you're taking in terms of finding what that balance is? Absolutely. So actually, it's very similar, I think, with us and with Clarno over the last couple of years. So Clarnon, I think, even better than what we have. They've actually reduced headcount meaningfully over the last couple of years, partially by just improving efficiency, through conventional means,

partially by AI. And it's been the same with us. We've now been massively growing the business the last three years, and the headcount has been completely flat. So the only department that's been growing has effectively been in tech, and in every other department,

we're just finding more efficiencies. Yeah. What about a data center, a national champion, an AI national champion in Estonia? Do you think we'll see it? Do you think that there's, is there a potential for, even if it's like latent capacity,

There's just like a cheap data center down the street from the school. And we get another wave of that story of the fast internet. And there's a 13-year-old kid who's like, yeah, I'm going to fine-tune a Lama 4 or something. And you get the next generation of entrepreneurs. Do you think that's possible? I wouldn't rule it out, honestly, because when we look at where is the biggest concentration of data centers in Europe,

it's usually in the places that have a very good grid connectivity, that have cheap power, stable internet, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, Nordics has been one of the most dominant places for it. Yeah, Nebius is, I guess, main data centers in Finland, right? Exactly, which is literally between Sweden and Estonia. Yeah. And I mean, you saw the announcement probably today from them. So overall, like, we're not ruling it out that very likely they want to expand in the region,

setting up more data centers both in Sweden and Estonia. Yeah. What about the geographic footprint of both now? I know there were experiments or business expansion into Africa. How are you thinking about conquering the globe, playing the game of risk internationally? So again, for us, the first priority was we needed to win in the core markets. We needed to have a home base that was generating enough cash low so we could offset the costs and actually generate us some actual capital we could use for expansion.

So we did that first in Central East in Europe, which we're now by far the number one player in. Then after that, we looked at the emerging markets. So Africa was top of the list, but also some markets like Paraguay, Mexico, Thailand, where we're again now doing extremely well. And then actually we did this a bit unconventional story where then after that we went into more established markets like Western Europe and Nordics. And funny enough, actually, it was a very easy expansion then for us because we started off in these low-cost markets that were hard to compete in.

Same same same with with Klarna. Exactly. So that was what I was about to get to that like if you're able to operate with very low ASPs in very difficult markets, then actually later going into high ASP much more wealthy markets like the US is significantly easier. And I think that's why also Klarna has been taking so much share here and then winning the market. Yeah. Do you think that you'll expand in the US or has the capital fight already played out. Is there any opportunity left? Not something I can disclose today, but keep watching us, and there's probably going to be some

news in the future. We will definitely be following. Very excited. Well, thank you so much for joining. This was a pleasure. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Come back on the show anytime. Absolutely. Zoom you in. Some crazy news hitting the timeline. I don't know if you saw apparently Charlie Kirk was shot at an event. It's unclear yet. If he is alive or dead but absolutely tragic otherwise

Sam Altman was on Tucker Sam Altman was confronted by Tucker about the death of the opening I whistleblower Sue cheer Sam Altman says I haven't done too many interviews where I've been accused of murder I mean that makes sense yeah crazy that is a crazy crazy story

Oracle and OpenAI have signed a $300 billion computing deal. So you basically called this earlier in the show. Yeah. Where is that? Where's that revenue ramp going to come? Open AI and it has to be underwritten on the growth of Open AI's cloud business. Opening AI's losses. Opening AI's losses are Larry's.

Yeah, yeah, his revenue. And then, but Open AI, yeah, I mean, they should be losing burning as they grow. But, you know, they will still be bringing in a ton and ton of revenue on top of this, both on the business to business side, which they're taking more seriously. In the provision of tokens, they're starting to take coding more seriously. This has been kind of the narrative around GPD5 was that GPD5 was them, you know, kind of redoubling their efforts in just selling, being token sales for B2B. And so my, you know, the thesis that everyone's been kicking around is basically we could

see an oligopoly in Frontier Model inference sort of play out. You have GCP with Gemini rolling out. You have, you have Anthropic obviously teamed up with Amazon and then you have OpenAI teamed up with Microsoft but also needing to scale their own business. They've been hitting rate limits. Ben Thompson's been talking for a long time about why do I have a rate limit on my consumer app? Your consumer app is fantastic. Pull back on the business to business side. Well, if Oracle can deliver the massive tents of H100 equivalents, they're good to go. And Open AI has been co-developing chips with Nvidia, put those, you know, but you need someone that's like

a hyperscaler like Oracle to actually go and implement that. Anyway, our next next will be here in a few minutes. Do you have any other? Prayers. Yeah, this is some shocking news. For Charlie Kirk regardless of your political beliefs. It's absolutely tragic. I feel like X needs to figure out some type of give people content warnings.

There's been a lot of videos floating around, but absolutely tragic. Yeah. Insane. Well, anything else, we have Lynn Martin from the New York Stock Exchange joining in just four minutes. We will bring her on to the stream. Let's see what the chat has to say. We miss you guys. Yes, we've been on the road for two days.

We will be back in the TB in Ultradome tomorrow. A little bit more travel coming up. but hopefully the great lock-in begins in full the following week and I yeah the chat is also talking about this news very very sad very rough yeah everyone's saying don't open X so if you're watching this on X I guess stay over to YouTube I guess over to YouTube or log off well rough well well We have two or three minutes until our next guest is joining. We are going to be hanging out here. We are, again, if you're just tuning in live from the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, Manhattan.

If you couldn't tell, if you've been, maybe you're listening to the audio, you know. Yeah. And we're at the Klarna IPO. We've interviewed the CEO and other folks board members today, Marcus Villeg. Marcus Villagic is such a wild entrepreneur. The clickbait title that I used or my team used on his video essay was Europe's youngest billionaire, and it ripped. It has a million views on YouTube.

Ripper. Absolutely ripper. Seems like a Chad. Yeah, he's a killer entrepreneur. Started the business very young in a very contrarian market. There's this massive capital war going on over in America, Lyft and Uber, of course. And he's just like, I'm going to work. myself. I'm going to be over in Europe building.

Anyway, anything else you want to talk about? Really, nothing like a shooting to kill the vibe. Incredibly vibe killing. I agree. I agree. Still unclear what is happening. I'm sure the story will develop over the next 24 hours. hours. Hopefully there will be some good reporting from the folks who cover this sort of stuff. It is a thankless job. Not our wheelhouse. Not our wheelhouse at all. Anyways. We're hanging out. Yeah, it's tough. We like to have fun on this show, but it doesn't feel right

when a tragedy like this strikes. It is rough. Yeah, I feel bad for people that people are sharing around a close-up video of the shooting, which is like, rough. Seems like I'm sure Nikita can figure out a solution so that people. X does have the ability to add a sensitive content warning. Yeah, but who's an image? But I don't know. Also, I'm not exactly. I've seen people use it as like a meme.

As a meme. So it must be a button that you can click, but I have yet to actually see that used. If it kills your reach in the algorithm, people won't do it because they want to grow their accounts no matter what. Very, very rough. Tough day in the news business. Well, on some other good news, in 10 days, Jason Carman will premiere his first sci-fi film, Planet. Come see it. He's playing at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and you can go and get tickets.

So if you're in San Francisco and you want to see Jason Carlin's latest work. This morning, Bucco Capital. blokes said my timeline is literally just Oracle earnings and a woman being murdered. Obviously the yes yes yes the other murder. Really really tragic. We condemn all violence of all forms of course. Yeah and it's just you violence generates more violence. It's very bad. Very rough. out in just a minute. In the meantime, let me, there is a lot of news. We've been, we've, we've unfortunately been missing a few big fundraising as announcements, but we'll be catching up with tons of founders tomorrow. Be sure to tune in. And we'll also be taking you through, hopefully

a bigger deep dive. I would love to go deeper on the iPhone. I don't know if you saw that X-ray photo of the iPhone air, but folks were speculating that this looks like. The future. Coming over. Fantastic. Oh, she has her hat on. She has her hat on. She has her hat on already.

Welcome to the stream. There you go. Good to see you again. Hey. Good to see you. How you good? Thank you so much for hosting us once again. Got the hat.

You got the hat. Thank you for wearing it. Walk us through the day. Yeah. How did today go? Great. Today went great. I mean, just since we saw you,

How busy have you been? I feel like when we left, we were like, we'll be back for the next one. And then I think the next one happened like literally the next day. So there's been a number of IPOs, right? There's been a number. Walk us through the last couple weeks. Like what's been big? There's been a bunch.

There's been bullish. Yeah. That was big. There's been quite a few that have been coming out. I mean, I know we talked about, we're obviously here for Figma Day. Yep. That's fantastic. We have Klarna today.

We got VIA on Friday. We're excited about that one. Very cool. Next week. It's going to be busy too. So we got the market is open. You know what? I really feel like the market's open because the traditional media just said, yeah, the IPO window's open. It's been open.

It's like it. Yes, it is. It is. Yeah. Yeah, it certainly felt like that. Today feels even Sebastian himself was like remarkably like calm and collected. And when you look at like the process this morning, I'm sure I don't know what was happening behind the scenes, but it felt like this is just another day at the office.

us for you guys. It went very smoothly. It went very smoothly and this IPO had a different pop, but it's it stayed there, which is good. It's still healthy. It was like a textbook IPO. Traditionally you want to see like that 20% pop and that's kind of where they are. I think they're about 25% maybe 30%. So that was, it was great. It was great. It was great. It was great. But I mean, this this deal has been thinking about going. public for a couple of years now. It's been rumored for a couple of years. I've been working with them for a couple of years on IPO readiness. Everybody had to be patient.

Everyone had to be patient. But now that this one went well, I think the next few are going to go, touchwood, okay as well. Give us your thoughts on the market overall right now. Obviously, yesterday was crazy Oracle earnings. I was going to say, this is kind of a. huge day here as well. I mean, we're so proud to be partnered with Oracle and Oracle will be one of our our list of companies. Last I checked, it was up 35% which gets more than that now. It is because they just announced the partnership with

open AI. It's like everyone was wondering, okay, where that's your, plus good news, plus good news. That's a lot of RPO. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, thrilled for them. Yeah. And I'm thrilled to see the market rewarding them too because that's been a deliberate strategy that they've employed. They've stayed focused on rolling out that strategy, and now they're seeing success from it, which is great. It's good to see Larry finally get a win. He's been a bit of an overnight success.

He's been working at Oracle. Decades in the making. Griding away for decades. Give us the update on Texas. Yes, please. Yeah. So we announced NYSC, Texas, February 11th, 12th, 10th, something like. that opened on March 31st and now have just over 50 listed companies and 13 listed

ETFs. So incredibly excited. We just had a big launch party at the Star at Dallas Cowboys Stadium, although I'm a Giants fan. Although Sunday was rough for the New York Giants. I don't know if you watched it. What goes into the decision to go to Texas instead of New York for a company? Yeah, so the reason we launched NYSE, Texas, was because of the amazing pro-business legislation that Governor Abbott's been pushing forward. Really filling a gap around company governance and a variety of other measures.

It's been met with tremendous positive reception. You see companies moving their headquarters, changing where they're incorporated from. state that you all are based in California in particular to Texas but also some of the New York companies have built huge presences yeah Joe Lonsdale at 8vc's talked about it a lot Elon Musk's talked about it a lot absolutely star base is a company town now it's become a whole economy unto its own I know I know to friend who went and toured it and they have their own shops and their own housing yeah everything it's become this massive movement over yeah and Illinois as well as a lot of companies have moved out of Illinois to to NY to Texas

So we were just being responsive to our customers. So this listing in Texas, does that just align you with being registered as a business in Texas? It allows you to benefit from some of the pro-business legislation. And is it, but is it a prerequisite to be headquartered in Texas? You don't have to be headquartered. It's an or. Okay, it's an or. And cool.

Yeah, actually, our first, our first company to do a list on us was Trump Media and technology. Okay. which is based in Florida. Sure. So they're not even based in Texas, but they were such proponents of the pro-business mentality, the pro-business legislation that was going through. Yep. Taking a step back, what is the right profile of a business for in the current IPO market?

I think that there's so much capital available in the private markets. We haven't seen as many. I would have thought we'd maybe see some AI companies getting out with like 50, you know, sub-nine figures of revenue. We haven't seen that, at least from our view, a ton so far. So what is the right, what does the investment banking community see as like the right profile for a company today? I mean, there's always the question around the rule of 40. I think the companies there are being rewarded are the ones with a very deliberate strategy

that they've had a track record of success with. not a strategy that is throwing a bunch of spaghetti against a wall and seeing which of these products winds up sticking, staying very focused on the strategy and telling the story of, okay, here's the core products, and then here are the additional products that we're layering onto those products. There was a question for a while of whether a company

needed to be profitable or not to go public. I don't think you do. I think you need to have a path to profit that you can articulate to an investor, but you don't have to be 30% EBITDA margins, things of that nature to go public. Yeah. Do you think it's helpful? I mean, how helpful is it that a firm reported earnings like a couple weeks ago did very well? I think people woke up to the, you know, that felt like kind of a turning point in people, in the way that people were kind of viewing PNPL as a category. Is that help at all with the road with, with, with, uh, you know, Klarna's roadshow and give people more confidence in the category? I think the, probably one of the success points for Klarna's road show was the expansion that they've been able to do, not just in Europe, but also outside of Europe into the U.S. market.

I'm sure that was something that resonated with investors. Macroeconomic environments also tend to factor into a lot of these road shows as well. What do you think changed that sentiment about profitability to go public? Is it okay to chop that up to what Jeff Bezos did for so long with Amazon? Just like not really delivering profits to shareholders, reinvesting them again and again and again. Is that you think the story that people should be telling? Are there other companies that have done it really well?

Yeah, I think when you're with an investor, they're asking you what you're going to do with your capital. Are you going to use it to pay down debt? Yep. Are you going to return it to shareholders or are you going to reinvest in the business? I think any of those answers are good, particularly with companies during an IPO process. Investors do want to many investors, not all, but many investors want a medium to long-term growth story. And that's going to involve reinvestment in the business.

but there needs to be a clearly articulated story about where you're investing and why you're investing and how it's going to make your business stronger or provide a really unique entry point into another tangential area to your business. Well, thank you so much for coming on the stream. Thanks for having me. Don't put my hat back on. There you go. Thank you for representing.

Yeah, and thanks for having us. Always great to be here. Great to be here with you, Seth. we'll be back soon. Hope to have you back soon. Absolutely. Let's keep us window. Well,

it's open. It's open. We'll come find you after that. All right. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. And on that note,

I think we can wrap it up. Wrap it up. Thank you so much for tuning in to our live stream from the New York Stock Exchange. We will be live from the TBPN Ultradome in Hollywood, California,

tomorrow. So, tune in and we will bring you thoughts and prayers to Charlie Kirk and his family and loved ones. Absolutely tragic. Thank you for watching. Thank you for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.