The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Klarna Founder: From $0 to $46 Billion: Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Sebastian Siemiatkowski is one of the most successful businessmen in Europe. He is the founder of Klarna, a company that is now worth an incredible $46 billion. Sebastian himself is now worth over $3.6 billion, and what’s more, he’s only just getting started. Sebastian has been incredibly honest with us on what it takes to succeed and the burdens that come with it. Sebastian started Klarna when he was just 23, he hadn’t finished university and he gave up everything when he promised himself that his business would be the only thing in his life for 6 months. He’s much older and much wiser now, and Klarna has had incredible growth to become one of the highest valued tech companies in Europe. Today he tells all about his incredible journey and how he got there, opens up on the criticism he’s received, and where Klarna goes from here. Follow Sebastian: Twitter - https://twitter.com/klarnaseb Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sebastiansiemiatkowski Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. He had a discussion with me. We're sleeping in the street, dead scared, like, be careful with who you're listening to. Have they really contributed to success? Have they really built success? Or have they simply been in a company that was successful? Afterwards, I've heard from journalists that like a ton of emails were coming from banks because they simply, you know, they're threatened by our existence. And so the kind of articles and the writing about us shifted from

they're here to screw customers over, to do bad things. And that was tough. I went home, I had dinner with my wife and we talked about it. And I was like, no, this time around I should probably help him. I decided and I tried to call him and he didn't answer. And I emailed, he didn't answer. And morning my mother called and said he was dead. Sebastian Chemiatkovsky. He's the CEO and founder of Europe's most highly valued

fintech privately held company. His company is worth $45 billion. Sebastian isn't a guy that comes from a stable household or a silver spoon. It's very much the opposite. The stories you're going to hear about his home life, his family, his father might just bring you to tears because that's the effect they had on me. He came from incredibly, incredibly humble beginnings and he's built a company in an industry where he was not qualified, where he didn't have technical expertise, where he couldn't code, that has completely revolutionized an industry. He is humble, he is honest, and he's willing to tell you the truth. And that's why

it's such a pleasure to sit here with him today and uncover what it takes and who it took to build such a revolutionary pioneering business. So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Sebastian, one of the things that I've come to learn from speaking to a wide array of guests on this podcast, from sports athletes to, you know, really successful CEOs, is how often our childhood and our early years shape our adult foundations. And whenever I meet someone like you that's achieved really remarkable things in any,

in whatever discipline they're in. My first question always becomes, what was it that made them remarkably unique in their early years? What was the experience, the cauldron that shaped them into who they are today? Right. It's kind of funny you asked that because like, I don't necessarily feel that I was remarkably unique in my early days. I, a friend of mine, their son turned out to be blind but he has perfect pitch and he's now 8 years old and he's sitting and playing the piano and singing and

that is to me a remarkable and I was thinking about that that was me when I was a kid look I mean my parents were from Poland they moved to Sweden about a year before I was born. I was born in the northern part of Sweden.

They were, you know, basically immigrants because they didn't see a future in the communist Poland, you know, which was the case at that point in time. And so, you know, they came to Sweden, but obviously as it was back then, it was very hard to integrate into Swedish society. You know, English wasn't as profound as it is today. And there was, you know, a lot of language barriers.

At that point in time, it was also like a lot of, I would say, skepticism about people with Polish name and Polish backgrounds was hard to get a job. If you had a foreign sounding name, there was a lot of these biases. So my parents struggled quite a lot to integrate. My mother was an early retiree and my father kind of jumped from job to job,

was unemployed for quite a long period of time, drove a cab for multiple years, did a lot of different things, right? And so I think that like, I do think that there's something to the fact that as an immigrant kid with parents that still intellectually had academical backgrounds and had studied at universities and stuff like that and never basically were able

to live up fully to their potential, I do think that that creates some kind of you feel like that's unfair and you're going to try to fix that somehow. I was growing up among swedish friends who just had better economical standards than we had and i was obviously longing for what they had um you know i remember that in with my mom like there were weeks when you know we were eating pancakes every day and i thought that was great but now i realized it was because there was

nothing left that was the only thing we had like flour and milk and so forth so like so i think that like uh i do think that that kind of setting and there's obviously some research that suggests that in silicon valley more than 50 of the companies are you know started by immigrant backgrounds i do think that that kind of setting of, you know, having a lot of the intellectual capacity and all these things and then the kind of prerequisites potentially to do something different. And at the same time, this kind of drive of like, you kind of almost feel like it's unfair. Life isn't necessarily fair, but like you feel like this is not fair. We should have like been able to have something different than this. And maybe also to some degree, I don't know to

what degree that's on an emotional level. I don't know to what degree that's, on an emotional level, I don't think on a rational level, but on an emotional level also like, your parents really sacrificed their lives. Like I think it's hard for people that are not immigrants to understand the consequences

of not having the friends from school, not having the understanding of how society works, which school is better, which is worse, how do you interact with government, how does the system work, all these things. That total lack of understanding of a specific society that it means to shift like my parents did in their late 20s, early 30s,

and how difficult that means for your own ability to kind of do something with your life. I think that's something that's underestimated. So you have the kind of emotional thing that you want to, you know, you feel that they did a massive sacrifice in some due regards for your behalf, right? Yeah. And that feels like a tremendous privilege. I wanted to ask you, because I can relate a lot to that. I'm an immigrant myself, born in, you know, Africa, in Botswana. And my parents came over here. My mom can't read or write. Fantastic country, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. Beautiful, beautiful place. But I moved to the southwest of the UK where I was in an all-white school of 1,500 white kids, and it was me. And we were also the poorest people in a middle-class area. So I felt different all the time. Yeah, yeah. And did you feel that way?

Yeah, absolutely. Very much so. I mean, even the time. Yeah, yeah. And did you feel that way? Yeah, absolutely. Very much so. I mean, even the fact that we were Catholics, now I'm not a very religious person today necessarily, but we were Catholics and my parents, we went to church every Sunday and stuff like that in a very non-religious society like Sweden. That was in itself very odd.

And I remember people like saying, you know, Jesus wasn't, you know, the son of God and stuff like that, which at that point in time, like today, I wouldn't necessarily come into that to be, but at that point in time, it was like, you know, somebody was like, you know, saying things like that. And then also the view of Poland at that point in time

was that there was this country behind the Iron Curtain that was spewing out, you know, toxic waste into the Baltic. And so there was a lot of like, you know, Polish and jokes about Polish people and stuff like that. So I mean, all of this, like I took heart. I wouldn't say I was bullied. That would be, in my opinion, take it too far

because people, I know people that have been bullied for real. And I don't think I was, but there was like that, you know, the sense of being different, of not necessarily, you know, both not having the same prerequisites, but also getting some like quite a lot like sometimes getting quite hard time over these things right and when you were a kid because because i know i did i developed a very naive thesis as to how i would escape this

scenario oh what was that money yeah and success yeah because it was the pain in my household the lack of so i thought well that will fix it Did you develop your own thesis of how to? No, yes, very similar to yours, right? Because also what happened in my life was that my parents divorced when I was about eight years old, right? And so, and they had a lot of conflicts, right? On different topics. And I think to your point, like as a child,

an interpretation of the reason for that conflict was the lack of money. Like, because that was what they were talking about all the time you were hearing that. Now I do today probably have a slightly different view of whether that was the only explanation for their inability to be a couple and be together. But at that point in time, I agree with you.

That was like one of my interpretations was like, yes, it would be nice to have, you know, monetary success in life and that would solve some of these problems for sure. For sure, I do agree with that. But I also, at least in my life, there was in addition to that something else, which I can't really explain, which was that I was always intrigued

and like thought it was interesting to kind of do business. Like it's very nerdy and I can't explain it. Like I remember reading like richard branson's book when i was like 13 years old like and i think it was like super interesting or the founder of ikea ingvar kamprad it was a big big thing in sweden obviously because it's a swedish so like i remember reading up on these stories and i also remember like trying to start businesses very early so i had like i did a lot of different things in like trying to start it was everything from like gathering some of my friends

and we would go to the apartments where we were living, the kind of the story buildings. There was this bus stop where all the people were coming and we would go there and offer us to carry groceries and stuff like that for a return from my, like all that kind of stuff, just finding different ways of trying to do things. There's something really intriguing about that in my mind

because as you've highlighted, immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial generally. And in the situation you're brought up in, and I reflect on my own situation, because of the circumstance, I had made this connection that if I was to have anything or become anything, it would be a direct consequence of my own actions and then i think maybe entrepreneurship appealed to me because it was i knew i wasn't going to do great in the conventional route but then this but it was this really nice route to potentially huge success um um and it was all kind of centered on what i did it was gonna be me and i think you know from hearing about the scenario you were in with your parents and your upbringing and being an immigrant, entrepreneurship was something that maybe you could control. No, but I think you're right in the sense that like, I think definitely in that environment growing up in that setting, you know that like, there's nobody who's going to help you.

Like there's nothing, you're not going to get anything from anyone, right? It's just going to be, either you do it or it doesn't happen. Those are the two options. Like it doesn't happen or you do it yourself. those are the options i think if i look at my own kids there's a lot of things that happens in their lives that fit into a third category it happens because that a mom helped out and you know whatever there's a lot of other things that happens uh but here was like you know if i want to have an adventure if i want to go and see the

other part of the city i bike there i have to go there myself nobody's going to drive me like you know just like and I do think that there's some lack of like healthiness to that as well right where it's like it kind of educates you and I haven't thought about it but now as you're saying it I actually kind of thought about it that it does help you but I would also say on the immigrants side what you said

like they are more commonly among entrepreneurs but I also think that like when I look at like you know when we have problems in neighborhoods with a lot of immigrants and so forth, I think that to me, it's almost like, I wish that society would realize that like, there's going to be a lot of frustration,

a lot of people with like, you know, energy, they want something different. They want something, a change. They don't want things to be the way they are. That's kind of where you're coming from. And then it's just society's ability to try to showcase that that energy can be used to become Zlatan Ibrahimović. It can be used to become, you know, a music artist. It can be used to become an entrepreneur. It's that energy. Or if we fail to offer those opportunities or showcase that those alternatives,

they may come out as burning cars and doing other things that are less, less, you know, less productive, right? Yeah. So I think it's really that, you know, to me today, I was just like, wish that society would really see it as like, how do we help showcase and show that there are these great options for that, like, build up energy of wanting something to be different, right? And for that, you need sort of great empathy and to understand that people are different shapes and sizes and that kind of brings me nicely to the the education system and your your personal experience with the education system and do you think it did you served you well or did it fail you well i think it did one thing that to

your point which you were describing as well in your own history is that i i one thing that i do worry for today compared to me was that I was in a school with mixed. I would still say 70-80% were Swedish. 20% at that point in time had different immigrant backgrounds. If they would have been only immigrants in that, I would not have anything to compare to, right? So I do think that the school system at that point in time was less segregated than it is currently, at least in Swedeneden i'm not that familiar with the uk current situation but i

think that was that was a case so in that case now were the teachers that amazing and like you know like you know there was a mix like some were good some were bad right um so and i remember like you know i i was one of the kids who had very easy at school i learned to read quickly and and so forth right and i believe to some degree then i became slightly bored because the swedish school system at that point of time was very much set up as like everyone equal so if you were like ahead in math or in head in reading or whatever i i literally still remember from like you know second grade which is eight years old in Sweden, when you're eight years old, you know, we were having like reading, which meant that everyone was reading from a book.

And like some kids, unfortunately for them, like they were still struggling reading, right? And I had already read the whole book. So I was quite bored sitting there, listening to the story that I already read. And then I started disturbing the lesson because that was kind of... So I became a person that was quite problematic for the teacher because I was just like I was so under stimulated

and that I think is a little bit sad that I hope that like schooling has become better in like you know actually you know understanding that all pupils are different and need different support and you know can get a different challenge because you all need to have like a continuous challenge right and those that lesson there you learn about that need for challenge. You're now the headmaster of a school that has thousands and thousands of employees in it. Yeah. And that point about making sure that the people that attend your institution

are also challenged must still sort of be important to you, right? Absolutely. I think it's like, actually, you know, and in a way, especially in Swedish society, which I, you know, the Swedish culture is very much just saying that, Alla ska med, which means that everyone should join, like everyone should be part of this. And that's a fantastic ambition and vision for a society that like no man left behind is kind of a different translation of it or no woman left behind. But, and for a while that was creating a conflict

because Klana as a company, we have very high aspirations. We want to do something very different. We want to, you know, really, as I say, sometimes play in Champions League. And then, you know, the problem is that's not true for everyone in the work world. Some people are fine with playing Kids League

and so forth, right? So it took us some time to dare to say that Klana is not for everyone, that Klana is actually a company that wants to attract people that want to make a real impact, make a real difference, that want to learn, that want to be challenged.

And that took some time and it might sound odd, but for us, at least in the Swedish cultural context, it took some time to get to that, where we started saying, you know what? Klona isn't for everyone. Not everyone is going to enjoy this environment because not everyone is willing. A lot of people will say,

it's amazing to climb Mount Everest. Did you climb Mount Everest? Fantastic. That's one thing, but it's a to climb Mount Everest. Did you climb Mount Everest? Fantastic. That's one thing, but it's a very different thing that how many people are really willing to freeze their fingers off, train for four years, all the things that you need to do to climb that mountain. Then the number of people that check the box and say,

I want to do that, becomes massively smaller. And I think the same applies for companies. A lot of people will say, I want to work for a successful growth company doing things that's really cool like climbing my nerves but then the question is like are you willing to do all these things like that that that that that that means that you need to do in order to be able to accomplish that right and and um so so yeah to your point like i think the challenge today i always tell that people like when they you know when, when I interviewed them,

or I was just like, just be like, be aware. Like this is, you're going to be very challenged. This is not going to be a place where like, it's just going to go easy. You're going to be very, very challenged here. What's the perfect balance of challenge between being too challenged that they, you know, they end up in the, I don't know, burnt out or something.

Or under challenged that they lose motivation like you did as a kid reading the book. No, it's super difficult, right? And I think that's why it has to be about encouraging them and seeing like each individual by individual where they are, right? Think about a great personal trainer, right? When you go to the gym, you know,

how do they find the balance of, you know, how much to push you and when to kind of hold off a little bit, let you breathe and so forth, right? Actually, it's kind of interesting because my kids have this swim teacher, her name is Petra. And I can sometimes just sit and watch her

when she's training my kids swimming because she has that perfect balance. I've never seen a teacher that finds that perfect balance as well as she does. So she pushes my kids exactly to the point where they're like dead scared, like almost like they're almost there where they're like gonna want to,

they want to give up and get out of that, but they're doing it. And then they're proud of what they accomplished. And that to me, to your point, that's almost like a piece of magic that a teacher has like the best teachers can spot that in their pupils can spot that and really find that perfect balance right but it's very difficult and it's obviously difficult in a company with 4 000 people like how do you try to put mechanism in place to ensure that you that you find that balance right and that And that you really allow people to get to that perfect spot

where they develop heavily, but at the same time doesn't move, you know, ahead and just bang their heads to the wall and feel, give up or, you know. To your point then as well about, it took you a long amount of time to realize that you wanted to just say to the world and to anyone that was considering joining your company,

we're not for everyone. The pandemic happened. And what I saw was leaders were kind of forced in this wave of virtue signaling to say, everyone can work from home forever. If you didn't say that, now you're a bit of an asshole company. And as I reflect on that, and as it went through, I started to reject that narrative because I think that the culture of the company should be determined by the mission. And also the other thing was, I actually think that companies, as you said, should have really clear communication at all stages about who we are, how we work and what our culture is and allowing it to be kind of, you decide. I actually think it's, for me, super weak as leadership, but I also think it will have an adverse effect on the ability for the company to achieve its mission,

but also the company culture, people knowing like what's expected of them. But now it seems to have become really like politically acceptable to just say, our employees will do whatever they want. How do you feel about all of that? It's a very complex topic. But I think, look, I think that the,

look, I give you an example, right? Is that previously, which you might find odd, Klana was not really following kind of agile work tactics. And then a few years into Klana's development, we realized that some aspects of agile, like daily standups, weekly retros, working as small teams on specific topics, there were some aspects of these that are very productive

and really help productivity, help us achieve our goals and so forth. So then what we did is we said, okay, now all teams within Klana should do daily stand-ups, should do weekly retros. And I think currently when we look at our data, about 50% of teams are following this, right? So then the question is like, how do you then approach that? Because you feel yourself very convinced that, for example,

the idea of daily stand-ups is helping to be productive. But if you enforce that, if you simply go and say, everyone has to do this, period, like check the box. The problem is like, you can do daily standups in very productive ways

where you're engaged, the whole team is engaged, you're discussing, what can we do? How can we move faster? Et cetera, et cetera. Or you can do daily standups only to check the boxes.

Like there are different ways. And that applies to almost all such rules and concepts within companies. So I think that like what I'm still, and I still, I don't feel that I entirely figure this out, but there's a balance in an organization around like when are we prescriptive and mandating things?

And when are we suggesting and highlighting? Because in the end, the reason I believe in daily style so much is because of my own experience of that. But there was also something that I seeked up myself. There was a willingness to, I was interested in trying to find out better ways to working.

I learned about this. I saw it in practice being done in a good way. And then my conclusion was that this was that. So if you think about my learning process, my personal learning process in that situation, it was driven by my interest, my passion. And then I accomplished. That's a very different thing to if my board

suddenly would have dialed me up one day and said, everyone has to do daily stand-ups, period. Because it would not have given me the opportunity to learn and reflect on it. That's when I, so a lot when i think about learning within an organization i think about like the karate masters and the japanese they kind of like they remember all these like karate kid and everything like how they learn in those environments it is like obviously at the beginning there has to be an interest by the individual self to try to

learn but then the master doesn't always tell you like exactly what to do. They like, they provoke you to try to learn yourselves, right? There's an excellent example from the Toyota way on that topic where like some of the like masters of Toyota way within Toyota would like take a lot of their senior managers and they would draw a circle on the factory floor within Toyota factory.

And then the managers would have to stand there and observe the manufacturing of the cars. And then by the end of the day, the totally silent teacher would come and say, okay, so tell me, what have you observed? And then the senior managers within the circle have been standing there the whole day, had to say, well, we saw this, we saw that.

And then he would look at them, the senior kind of Shenzhen, he would be like, no, another day. So they have to do another day. And as he provoked them, the senior, you know, senior kind of Shenzhen, like the senior, he would be like, no, another day, you know, so they have to do another day. And as they like provoke them, because I think that's the, and it's very, learning is such a difficult thing, right? Because you don't, as much as we think that learning is sitting in a room and listening to somebody, that is, you know, a very inefficient way of learning. We learn by doing, uh, by doing things ourselves, right? Uh, that's really, uh, that's the truth. And I think that COVID is such a good example of that because we had a lot of experiences that we've never had before. And they taught us a

lot about our life, our priorities. A lot of people talk about that today because we were forced to do things differently, not because we read about COVID and we read about, you know, how things can be different because suddenly we had to experience it. And when you experience, that's when you truly, that can impact your behaviors, can change your ways. So, the kind of, it's a very difficult balance in these companies, consistently from a culture perspective. Like, how do I

encourage and kind of push people to go and find out, like, you know, try to experience that and learn for it, but not trying to enforce it too much. And that's a balance game, right? You cannot be entirely without rules, to your point, because, like, if you join a soccer team,

like, there are some rules. Like, you come in to exercise every morning. If you just don't come to exercise, well, like, okay, look, you know, maybe you have a different philosophy about how you're going to become a great soccer player, but, like, I just don't believe in your philosophy. Like, it's not going to work.

So, like, if you want to go and believe that you never have to exercise to become a great soccer player, you do that, but you can't believe in your flow. Like, it's not going to work. So like, if you want to go and believe that you never have to exercise to become a great soccer player, you do that, but you can't do it on my team. So there is obviously some selection criteria we have to decide within our ecosystem, within our company, these are the rules that will apply.

And because we just feel that they're so fundamental and so important. But once you be on that level, then it's more like, how do I intrigue you? How do I challenge you be on that level then it's more like how do i intrigue you how do i challenge you to develop that insight for yourself so that you really come to embrace those ways of working and really make them your own and really expedite them i think and i haven't solved all of this to be very you know honestly i think we have lots to learn still with clona but i think that

that just that is a very interesting sorry it was a long answer but it's amazing it's really really thought-provoking and I was I was thinking yeah I don't think a lot of people would have given that answer but I feel it's the the right one for so many reasons especially as it relates to the process of learning I think the things that I was most successful at in all facets of my life were things that started with with interest yeah and the things that I had an allergic reaction to in terms of topics in school yeah were the things that there wasn't that fundamental curiosity so I was kicked out of school but in if you look at business and psychology like I was I would have gone to more lessons yeah I was 30% attendance in these other subjects and that's and that's so true so it's um it provides a different way to I

think and I would say one more thing on your specific like work from home thing which is also another thing to take into consideration, is that what ends up happening, and this is not a problem when you're 10, 20 people in the startup, but when you start becoming 4,000 people, what ends up happening is you have, obviously, unfortunately, that's the only way to describe it, layers of management, and then you have the people actually doing it.

And that's just how most organizations are structured. But what ends up happening is, okay, how are we going to do with this work-from-home? What are the rules that are going to be set? And there is a tendency for people to go and say, management team, the top people have to tell us what the rules are. And if you write those rules, the problem is like, look at Klana, we're active in like 40 offices across, you know, 20 countries, each one, which will be in a different phase of COVID or not and stuff like that, right? So try to write a rule that is applicable for each team. And then you're going to have

individuals, maybe some individuals have immune diseases and are extremely worried about, you know, moving into that environment or more careful than others. Maybe you're going to have like, you know, some people that have religious concerns somehow tied to this, you know, you're going to have a flora because you have so many people, you have so many different individuals with different perspectives. So what you then sometimes need to do, in my opinion, is you need to say, look, you will decide for yourselves. And what then ends up happening is,

in my opinion, what happens is that the people actually doing the work, they usually find that quite attractive, that they can take that decision. So the managers of those people, they may find it's more difficult because to them it's nicer that the top management team has written a policy

and they can say like, this is the rules. But why? Why these rules? Because it was said so, right? And so then they can hide behind that, right? And if you don't allow them to hide behind that, they will actually have to motivate

why are we going to do like this? We've decided in this team that we're going to work in office, so we're going to do this. And that forces them to do that, which is good for them. They need to do that. They need to provoke that. But there's always a risk when you write two strict rules on the top, is that they're being used and then there's just management said so. And that is just so bad for the culture and everything. You want to provoke an environment where people feel like the rules are there, they were well-intent, they had a good purpose, but they also need to be challenged.

If they, on a specific individual, on a specific situation, do not apply, there needs to be a mechanism where those rules comes back and say, what if we were in this? And in the end, rules can never be an excuse for not thinking for yourself, right? That never happens.

And they always have to be. There's going to be exceptions in a large company. There has to be exceptions because those are healthy signs of the fact that people are thinking for themselves and judging by themselves and not just hiding behind the rules. I always reflect on the,

that made me reflect then on the example of the, someone told me a certain country, I think it might be Germany, where pilots were having a huge amount of crashes. And it was because the the culture was you don't challenge the pilot so even when the co-pilot knew there was I think it was South Korea South Korea yeah I think it was yeah the planes were crashing but because the co-pilot didn't challenge yeah I think that's a sort of a analogous to what you were saying there

I have to go back and and hear about the start of of Clarnac you know one of the things that really intrigued me and made me feel a lot of respect towards you was that you're not technical as a co-founder. Unfortunately, no. So you built this mega tech company, but you're not technical. And I know I tried when I was 18. That was my first failure.

But I found that really just horrifying and respectful. Yeah. So tell me, so how did it start? And where did you find the courage? Sure. No, so look, as I i said previously like it's kind of ironic i always had tons of business ideas and i even remember like when i uh when i was like probably 13 or something uh in sweden was the first time we had private radios private radio stations and i thought the one in my home city of upsala sucked so i kind of wrote the business plan for, how they should change the shows and the intent.

And I actually called them and tried to convince them to change. At 13? Yeah, 13. I can imagine they were like laughing their guts off, like this 13 years old is calling us like, you should do this programming instead. You should have a show about this and that. I bet they gutted now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So for whatever reason, I always had this like inclination to wanting to do something. And then I did two years at Stockholm School of Economics, which is one of the like top schools in Sweden around, if you're, you know, want to study in an economical direction.

Everyone at that point, this is 2000, everyone wanted to work at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey. That was really the vibe. It's actually interesting because they had a survey where they said like, at that point of time when they asked students, 7% wanted to start their own company.

Today it's 70%. It just gives you like how much of a shift there's been during that period of time. But anyways, and then in 2002, because I went directly from college to university, I was like, okay, I just got to do something else. I mean, all my friends had like backpacked and stuff like that. So ended up me and actually what became my co-founder, Nicholas, we went backpacking,

which at that point in time, because we always wanted to do something that was a little bit different. We ended up going around the world without flying, which was a lot of fun. So if you want to go to YouTube,

you'll find the videos when we were like from the script. Oh, really? You're a YouTuber. Yeah, because we had this idea that we were, this was just at the beginning of all these like, you know,

Big Brother and all these like, you know, documentaries and stuff. So we thought that we we're gonna like we we recorded the whole thing and we did let's we thought we were gonna like air this as a tv show that's a very funny i need to ask you one question about that how did you get to australia without flying um yeah so you had to uh we took a cargo ship from singapore to brisbane okay and then we had a cargo ship from sydney over new zealand up to Mexico. So that's how we did it. And then we actually took the QE2, Q&A Elizabeth for a second, between New York and Southampton. So that was kind of, we did that. Those were the expensive parts of the trip. I

mean, we did it on an extremely low budget. I think on average, we spent like $10 a day. Like we spent, you know, we're sleeping in the streets. I actually slept on Piccadilly Circus on the street when we were in London that night and we were passing through London. And then I went, we went to Hyde Park when, when the sun had risen and slept because you don't sleep really well in Piccadilly Circus at 4am, I tell you. So like you can imagine how, you know, the vibe there at that point in time. But anyways, so we came back and then I missed to start my semester. And so instead I was like on the second sabbatical year

that I hadn't expected. And it was 2003 and I was looking for a job in my home city of Uppsala and I couldn't get a job. I was actually on welfare for a time because I just couldn't get any jobs. It was a low economy, it was very hard.

Eventually ended up working at this account receivables factoring firm, which was like the last place in the world I ever thought, as a sales guy. And I was like, okay, but now I'm here, I'm going to do the most out of this, right? So I started calling and trying to sell these services. And then it was very difficult

to sell such services to companies because they're all like, yeah, you can save me 400 pounds a year, but I don't really care because we worked with this other company for 15 years and they're great and whatever. But then I started talking to entrepreneurs and these entrepreneurs were starting small e-commerce companies because some of them had figured out at that point in time you could buy google adwords super cheap because no one was buying them and then you can get some

traffic and you can sell some stuff and like it was like it was all kinds of stuff right so you started talking to them and they were really keen oh i can save 400 pounds a month a year that's awesome i'm gonna worry with you guys So then I started like thinking about payment services and I was asking them, what are your problems? What are the things that you would like to be solved? So that was kind of where the idea came from. But then a year had passed and I want to go back to school. So I came back to the Stockholm School of Economics

to start my third year. I left my job. But there was an incubator at the school. And it was very early at this point in time. Now everyone has an incubator, but at that point in time it wasn't that common. So I went to the CEO of the incubator at the school. And it was very early at this point of time. Now everyone has an incubator, but at that point of time, it wasn't that common. So I went to the CEO of the incubator and I said, hey, you know, I have this idea,

it's kind of payments, offering buy now, pay later services. It would look like this and, you know, whatever. And she was like, this is awesome. You have to do this. And when she said so, I was a little bit like, now I can't just like give up on this, you know? So I was kind of looking around and then I stumbled into one old friend of mine, Victor, who I knew a little bit like, now I can't just like give up on this, you know? So I was kind of looking around and then I stumbled into one old friend of mine, Victor,

who I knew a little bit. And he was like, because I was sitting in the cafeteria of the school and I was telling some friends like, I want to do this company. He's going to do this. And everyone was like, yeah, good luck to you, man. Kind of like patronizing? Yes, patronizing and like, you do that and I'm going to go to Morgan Stanley and make all my golf courses. Like that was like kind of the perception. So that was kind of fun. But Victor then was the only one who was like, wow do that and I'm going to go to Morgan Stanley and make all my goals. Like that was like

kind of the perception. So let's get back. But Victor then was the only one that was like, wow, that's awesome. I'm with you if you do it, right? So I was like,

okay, that's cool. Let's do it together. We didn't know each other that well. And I had Nicholas who was an old friend of mine who I did the trip around the world with. So we kind of joined forces.

But it was still like a huge decision to us like starting a company at that point in time felt like, wow, crazy. Are we giving up on careers? What's going to happen? You know? So it was only when we came to the conclusion, we were like, okay, you know what? Let's not think about this as a lifelong decision. Let's think

about this as a six month decision. I often tell this to people today. Like we said, like, we're going to do this for six months, but if we do it for six months, we're going to do like all of our energy, all of our time is going to be this for the next six months. So we even had like a rule. We had to eat breakfast in the office. We had to be there. We were counting the hours

who everyone else was there. So it's fair. So we were like, we were living in the office for the first six months and we were just like focused on that and nothing else. And, but it was when we decided

it was going to be a six months and then we're going to evaluate, then we kind of was easier to take a decision because you're like, yeah, six months, whatever, that's fine. Right. So, so we got off. And then what we did, we realized that we couldn't code to your point, right? We couldn't code. We needed a system, right? So we're like, how are we going to solve that? So are we going to raise money, try to pay some engineers and hire them? What are we going to do? And eventually we ended up, the incubator we we're in they had this like Christmas drinks thing

where they invited some business angels and they invited the companies that were in the incubator to pitch and so Niklas my co-founder did like a 30 second pitch and after that a woman called Jane Valerud kind of approached us and she was like

you know she almost like pushed me up to a corner she's like this is awesome tell me what you're going to do she was like she just heard that pitch and she was like, you know, she almost like pushed me up to a corner. She's like, this is awesome. Tell me what you're going to do. She was like, she just heard that pitch and she was like, I like this business idea. And she told us, look, I have these engineers and they're like the best engineers. There's amazing. Cause she had actually done one of the few really successful exits during dot com area where they had sold a company for 150 million pounds. Um, and so she had money from that and she had the engineering team from that. So she said, I'm going to connect you with those guys.

And so we sat down with those engineering guys and they were much more senior than us. They were like in their 40s and we were 20s. And there, unfortunately, a misunderstanding arose, right? Where our understanding was that these five engineers or four engineers, they really were, they were going to join us full-time and work on this and continue developing the company with us, right?

Their understanding was they were going to give us some source code, some code and a system that works and then they're off and doing something else. And so, but, you know, as it is, and I now try to tell other founders this today, like if you found friends and you want to start a company together, don't only talk about all the amazing stuff you're going to do and everything you're going to accomplish.

Also sit down and ask, like, how many hours per week are you going to spend on this versus because you love exercising and you love, you know, hanging out with your friends and so forth. Just so like, not that, you know, you can do it on 30 hours a week or you could do it on 80, but just so you're can't be too big disalignment it can be one person doing 30 another one doing 80 make it super concrete exactly what expectations you have on each other because otherwise there's just such a big risk of like misalignment and resentment comes quickly doesn't it right so then what we did so we brought those engineers on board and they started coding

and they were excellent they were amazing engineers and they started coding and they were excellent. They were amazing engineers. So they started coding the system in December. In April, four months later, we launched with the first customer. So it's four months and they put together a lot of the fundamentals that actually still, you know, today are part of what Klon offers as a service. So they were super proud.

But then, you know, after that, they were like, good luck, guys. See you later. And we were like, no, no, no, that's not what we agreed. And then we looked into the contract and we had given off 37% of the company to them for the technology. And then we had given 10% to Jane as a business agent, but she gave us 60,000 pounds, right? And so each one of us then had equal so we had 17 each um and so that was kind of the setup after that and then we had basically given away now all these percentages to these engineers and they just left us and so that became a quite tough conflict obviously but

legally speaking they had followed the contract so there was nothing for us to go into contracts and say you know whatever because the contract was the contract was, we just hadn't talked about this and we were on the different assumptions of what the contract meant. The contract was just there. Like we didn't think about this consequence. So they ended up leaving us and it was kind of funny because in that room at one point in time, in the boardroom, one person said, well, you know what, just so you know, Sebastian, you have to calm down on this topic. Klana is never going to be the size of a company where it's going to need four great engineers like this. It's kind of funny.

I almost laughed at that. It's kind of funny now as I think back about it. Did you ever resolve that? Sorry? Did you ever buy them out? No. So what ended up happening is, to some degree, I think,

just because they didn't understand the potential of what they had built together with us, they also sold much too early. So as a consequence, I mean, they sold at a very early day when maybe the company was $10 million worth or something. Oh, God, that's awful. Yeah. Well, it's not awful in a sense, because to me, it feels a bit fair. Yes, they got the upside of what they did. If they would have participated longer and so forth, they would have seen a very different upside. And they would have built a company with us. But this was a challenge for us as a consequence, to your point, because at least what it allowed us to do is very quickly get a system live and get something going.

But then as they left, I needed to figure out, okay, I need to hire engineers. And I have no clue how to code and how do I evaluate a good engineer for a bad engineer? I have no clue. You're like, architecture? What is that? You know, like there was like zero knowledge, right? So you, and that is one of the biggest challenge,

I think for a lot of people, like managing people that do the same thing that you know yourself is one thing. Trying to manage somebody that does something that you have no clue how to do is very, very difficult. How did you, I was in the same place. I was, I knew I needed to build a website, not technical, went on Google,

just started looking at their own websites. Right using that as a yeah this this is cool this animation looks good i will hire them so how did you solve that problem of not knowing what good looks like well first and foremost i think unfortunately um you know in what ended up happening in our situation was that um one of the guys from this engineering team stayed on because they were still shareholders for a period of time, right? So he stayed on as an advisor. And we started hiring some engineers and some of which were better, some of which were worse.

And, you know, as you will always have a mix. And we also got a CTO eventually who came in. And he as a CTO was an amazing programming developer, but he wasn't necessarily the CTO that would hire the right talent, build it. He wasn't business oriented. He was very much like technically interested and wanted to build like really beautiful code bases

and stuff like that, which some engineers tend to have more of that tendencies. And what was a frustration to me is that for a long period of time, and this was a challenge in Sweden and Stockholm at that point in time, the advisors that we had around us, none of them had built a $45 billion company like we are today. None of them had that experience. But they were senior in our opinion compared to myself.

They had done great corporate big jobs. We had like, you know, advisors and board members that had corporate backgrounds and been in big institutions and so forth. And so they were giving us a lot of advice on topics like, is this the system that you're building? Is this fast enough? Should you be able to build it faster or slower, like the progress and things? And so when they were giving us that advice, it was bad advice. But we were too young and too inexperienced to be able to recognize that. And so unfortunately, it took us

some time and it created a lot of frustration because I was always sitting there like, does it really need to take this long time to build something? Like, and is it really unfair of me to expect that the engineers are like a little bit interested in the product they're building as well and the business side of it or are they only always going to be interested in the coding itself and the technical challenge like shouldn't i be able to engage with them on

the product side as well like and a lot of times we were like they were like oh we want to build this product you need to give us more clear specifications and i was like but if i write those specifications what's left to do Like that's part of the creative process to sit together and create these. So, you know, you get stuck in a lot of these things. And then eventually, I remember I was very frustrated

because one day when Sequoia invested, and that was why Sequoia was so important to us because in 2009, we got Sequoia to invest in the company. Michael Morris joined our board. And one of the ambitions we had with that was to get some kind of contact point to somebody that had actually seen

large tech companies grow, had seen real success of a tech company and start understanding their mindset. And at that point in time, I unfortunately concluded that like, it was not going to work with our CTO because he didn't have that right mindset for it. And he was interested in something very different.

He's a great guy in many ways, but he wasn't the that right mindset for it. And he was interested in something very different. He's a great guy in many ways, but he wasn't the person that would be able to allow us to build our engineering organization and bring us to become a true tech company and be really technology driven. And I remember going into the board eventually and saying like, and at that point of time, the representative of the engineers

that build the original system who was on my board, he had been telling me over and over again, like, I was like, I'm a little bit worried should it really be this slow and he was like yeah you know it's different there's this and that and then eventually i came to him one day and said look now i've taken a decision unfortunately i have to change cto and he was like good decision and i was like i almost wanted to smack him in the face i was like for four years you were telling me that this is okay and now you now I'm doing this change and you're saying good decision. Like that's not like you should have said you're wrong.

That would have been respecting him more, right? So there was in that setting we were coming up for, there was a, it really nowadays, I appreciate much more like how I have to really look through a person and ask myself, is this a believable person? Is there somebody I should really take advice from? And I think a lot of entrepreneurs that will listen to this and startup people,

like be careful with who you're listening to. Have they really contributed to success? Have they really built success? Or have they simply been in a company that was successful? Like those are very different aspects, right? So being very careful about who you get advice from. But that's kind of how we solved it. So it was just like, we had to learn, have tests.

And then the last piece of very practical advice that we did, which was one of the best things I ever did, was because I was so mixed up, like engineering, whatever, what does it mean? And then I said to my CTO, a very practical thing, I was like, hey, can you show me how you fix a bug? And so we sat down together by his screen, and he basically took one bug that we had and he started searching in the code

and then he wrote the fix and then he wrote a test case for the fix. And just sitting and watching him do that made a huge difference for my understanding of how long to... So I think as much as sometimes you may feel like very... Whatever you're managing that you don't understand, you may feel like, oh my God, so difficult.

And to talk about all these technical terms and so forth. Sit down next to them, spend half a day, spend a day. Just look at when they're doing it, a designer or whatever it is, something that you don't know how to do yourself. Just sit next to them, see them do it. And that already will at least put you at a different level of understanding of the job and so forth. So there are practical ways in which you can try to gap that, you know, bridge that gap.

So important, because again, it comes back to communication. And I had the exact same thing. And I think in my first tech business, I wish I'd done exactly that. I wish I'd taken the time to go and build empathy towards the role of my CTO and understand what his job was and I guess how I can make it easier. But also to, I really also should have had an objective outsider come in and do an assessment

on how he was working, how I was working and everything in between. I think entrepreneurs don't do that. They, I think because they don't know what they don't know. You don't know that. So that's the biggest curse in business. And it's not only entrepreneurs, it's great managers and leaders and people as well i think to your point the really tricky thing is to know what good looks like yeah right what

does good look like right oh god yeah that's different like when you judge some work like what would great look work work look like and it's when you've established that understanding whether it's in communications marketing you know whatever you know what good looks like then your job becomes so much easier. But the only way to find that out, obviously to your point, is introducing external people, talking to people, comparing.

We also did that actually with my CTO at that point in time, which was one of the things we actually did that led me to conclude that I had to let him go, was that I said, because I was having a lot of dialogue, like should this take this long time and so forth. So one thing I eventually said was, you know what we do? We booked meetings with five other CTOs

in five large Swedish companies. So among them were like Ericsson, the more traditional ones, but it was also like a gambling company that was doing fantastic. There was a gaming company, Dice, you know, stuff like that. And we went and had meetings with them.

And in those meetings, I started raising my concerns and stuff like that. And I was listening to the other company ctos answering to the same discussions comparing it to the answer of my cto and in that conversation i really saw the difference in how they were attacking these problems and what their philosophy is and you know and the level of optimism in which they approach problems yes for sure because that's for me has been the biggest differentiator between the really exceptional CTOs I've worked with in San Francisco

when I was there versus bad ones is they have a everything is possible attitude, right? And those people are an absolute joy to work with. Speed and optimism in a CTO is just makes your life... For sure. And again, I just want to highlight here that like my CTO wasn't bad.

He wasn't bad. He was totally fine and okay okay but he wasn't the right person for this to build a 45 million dollar company yeah like that was just like those are two different things right there's not many of those no no exactly right so he wasn't exceptional and he didn't have the right mentality yeah to to do what we're doing now pain yeah part of the reason i started this podcast was because and why it's called the driver ceo is i wanted to show um i wanted to really give a fair impression of the other side of entrepreneurship it's been super glamorized probably why you know that stat you shared where

it went from seven to seventy percent that's probably why it's now seen as a very sort of glamorous thing and i wanted to create a bit of a platform to share some of the harder parts of business and listen you've built a company worth $45 billion. Like I know that it was painful. So talk to me about the pain and the unexpected pain that might've put you off starting this, had you known it, had you been, had you not been naive enough to realize

how painful it is at times? Well, I think that like my my a lot of my pain i would feel equals when i see athletes you know trying to throw or trying to jump and then failing and the frustration that you see in them when they cannot achieve what they want to accomplish i feel that's a lot of the pain that i've experienced so like my a lot of my frustration and pain has been associated with like, oh, you know, I know we can do this. I know we have the opportunity to do this. And we're just not getting there. We're not getting there. It's not getting through. It's not happening the way it could be. I think that's a big piece of a pain for me is that lack of like ah so frustrating to feel like you're so close something

could be there but it's not that um i think that that's one part then i mean another part is obviously um you know when things go wrong and you're frustrated because you know you wanted something to be better and it didn't work out and stuff like that. So you're very like, you're challenged by those situations. In terms of stress, how do you feel that and how have you dealt with that? I am not that stressed, to be honest. I don't know why. It's almost like, to some degree, I'm almost more stressed when things are good. No, because like, when we have some crisis or something happens, right?

Like, you know, we had an incident with some breach of data, for example, a few months ago, right? In those situations, as much as it's painful that something's happened and I'm sad about potential consequences for individuals that we might have made some errors, I feel like it all becomes like execution mode. We bring everyone into room. It's just like, what do we do?

What do we do now? And I kind of, in a way, enjoy that work. It's very concrete. It's very like, you know, focused. And you're like, there's nothing else. You have to do only this now. Let's see about what can we do about this problem? How are we going to fix it?

Who's doing what? You know, and so forth. In in those situations i don't feel that stressed actually i can even feel an adrenaline in that situation as much as it's painful to me to see the consequences like if you're an adrenaline and like let's get this to work let's do this let's you know let's take on this challenge that has suddenly arised um it's funny the best leaders and i'm sure you'll find this even in your company all seem to speak to that they all seem to be really emotionless in those the absolute chaos moments right and it becomes a you know a methodical process of how to solve the problem yeah versus and and i do think again as much as you know i don't want to obviously i feel a lot

of pain from the perspective of like if we've done a mistake or done something wrong as a company, it might have had implications for our customers or whatever. That's very painful. But at the same point of time, those incidents or the situations when you've gone through something that was very chaotic or very challenging are the moments that have created the strongest relationships within the companies,

have shown some amazing talent stepping up to... It's a little bit like you go on a vacation, it's just sunny, you don't really remember it. But if you had like a thunderstorm, you'll talk about it for years, right? So like there's something to that. So I think my stress may actually more come from sometimes when I feel like we're all kind of happy,

we all feel like it's going well. Like it cannot be true. There must be something that's wrong. And I think Alex sitting over there will kind of smile now. I guess he'll recognize this. So I think that's where I actually more get stressed from. Like, are we doing fast enough? Is this good enough?

That's really interesting. It also relates to your point about needing to be challenged. You talked about in school when you'd read the book and you got bored. And that it's funny because I, I was writing my book and I finished writing my book recently and it was published. And one of the paragraphs in it talks about how I used to believe that my life was the pursuit of trying to get to stability.

But in fact, when you look at when people arrive at a point of stability, everything is fine. When they've won the gold medal, then they descend into chaos. Then they get depression and they get, they lose their sense of medal, then they descend into chaos. Then they get depression and they lose their sense of purpose. And then they get irritable.

So I flipped it and thought, you know, my life is actually the pursuit of staying in chaos because chaos is my stability. And if I ever get to stability, completed goals, nothing to strive for, then I descend into chaos. And it sounds exactly like what you've described there.

What inspiring and working for things is so motivating, important. I think to some degree, degree as much as Klana had a lot of success in Europe there's a kind of funny story around this topic because um you know we were doing really well in Europe and developing our services but there wasn't necessarily that much fierce competition from one perspective right and then as we were moving into the US market there's this company in Australia called Afterpay run by Nick. Oh, yeah. And they are competing head on with us, right?

And they were doing really well. This is back in like 2018. And I was like, ah, this is so annoying. They're coming in here. They're taking our market share. They're doing our product. They're copying us. You know, all this frustration building up.

And the funny thing is I happened at that point in time to be visiting with Mahmood who runs Boohoo, right? Oh, good friend of mine. Yeah. So I'm sitting down with Mahmoud and I'm like complaining to him. And I'm like, look, Mahmoud, it's a little bit like, you know,

you know the Olympics when there's this guy who's been like, this is his fourth Olympic and everyone knows like now finally he's going to get the gold medal because he's been training like this. And then this young guy comes from nowhere and like, but that's so unfair. This is my fourth Olympic and this guy comes in.

And Mahmoud looks at me and he's just like, Sebastian, shut up. Stop whining. Stop whining. And like, this is going to make you so much better. You have been not having proper competition. You now have proper competition. And it is so true.

Klana in the last three years thanks to the competition with afterpay in the u.s has become such a much better company it has helped us so much to improve to get focused like and it was just so funny when he was just like stop whining and i can't you know he will speak his manchester i can't do that won't be able to try to to replicate how you express this but i thought it was really well that's my mood i remember the first time i met him, I was in his office four days that week and he insulted me several times,

but in the most loving way. It was like, you remember him smashing his pen on the desk and telling me how stupid I was because of a decision I was going to make. And I've been like good family friends with the whole family for a very, very long time. Yeah, he's there. Just on that point then,

what was the toughest moment in your clan journey a moment you think that was that was the worst fucking day i think maybe one of the toughest was that um similar to there's been some media scrutiny of us in the uk we had a similar experience in in sweden but a few years earlier which was in around 2012 and 13 and and like it started off with this like media inquiry about what we were doing because we were, you know,

first just like, oh, it's an amazing, successful company. And then once we were like, oh, we're actually doing credit and what does that mean?

Stuff like that. And so there started to be quite a lot of like, and it actually started with a mistake that we had done internally. It was an operational mistake. We had done a stupid thing.

And that had resulted into a lot of customer complaints and stuff, which was our own fault. But that was the beginning of it. And I think through that process, when the paper started writing about us in a negative way, I kind of jumped in.

And it's kind of funny because I was actually, at that point in time, I had comments fields on the articles. So I would go into the comments field and write my responses in real time, and then other consumers and readers would answer, and then I would answer them. And even the newspapers started writing about like, look, Sebastian CEO is on our forum discussing the topics. So I was very engaged.

I was sitting like working 24 hour and I was thinking about like, how do we give? Because quickly the media went out of control and there was a lot of bias and inaccurate reporting and just like a lot of things. Some were accurate and some was fair, but a lot of it was, you know, inaccurate reporting and just like a lot of things. Some were accurate and some was fair, but a lot of it was also like out there. And then obviously the banks, because we are a big threat to the establishment banks. So even, you know, afterwards I've heard

from journalists that like a ton of emails were coming from banks saying like, oh, you know, they're bad, they're this, they're that or whatever, because they simply, you know, they're threatened by our existence. And so there was that going on. But I remember what was the hardest thing to me to point is that that situation itself was fine. But at some point in time, the kind of articles and the writing about us shifted from they're bad, they've done these mistakes, to they have bad intent.

They're here to screw customers over, to do bad things, right? And that was tough. That was really tough because I know that wasn't true. And I know that we have good intentions and we're trying to do that. We have done mistakes and we can fix things, but being judged and questioned on your intentions of what you do. Your character. Yes. That hurt a lot. And I took that very hard. And I took that to heart. So that was very, very challenging to cope with. When those things happen,

what kind of partner do you become to your romantic partner? Your wife? You've got a wife? Yeah. She knows that I'm like extremely passionate about Klana and the company. And I think that she's, she knows that like a lot of my thought process will be here all the time, company. And I think that she knows that a lot of my

thought process will be here all the time. But I'm very lucky in the sense that Nina is an amazing person herself. She's done amazing things. And now she's running a startup with 30 people. So that helps because she has her own things things. And actually we can come together at dinner table and we can, you know, we can talk about the challenges and the things that we face and we can exchange thoughts about that. So we have three kids as well, right? I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old

and a seven-year-old. So I actually, you know, as much as I live my life, I try to work really hard and then come home, turn off the phone, be very present with the kids. And then they go to sleep and I get to work some more. And then me and my wife has a very like, which is I think maybe most families with kids our age, but you have a very strict,

you always thought that that wasn't gonna happen. You're gonna stay spontaneous and all that. You end up having an extremely strict calendar where it's like Wednesday is dinner night. Me nina have dinner together tuesday we're working like nights and so forth so it's extremely strict calendars to make that work you were you were you know grew up from very humble beginnings with an immigrant family as you've said and because of the success of klana that's now made you very wealthy and it's something wealth beyond probably you've ever imagined i don't know how ambitious you are, but what role does that play now in your life

in terms of your relationship with money? It was the thing that, as you say, you thought might've been liberation from a lot of pain and heartache. And what role does the financial side of it, success come in your life? I think it's an interesting topic. And, you know, I've been asked sometimes like the classic question, like, does money make you happy, right? And, you know, I understand why some people try to say,

no, it doesn't. Because to some degree, like you're the same person, even if you have a different income level and wealth than you used to have. So you're the same person. You still get angry at things and sad at things. You know, still things happens. You lose a relative or something happens in your life, you know, you go up and down. So from one perspective, I can understand why people, but I've stopped saying

that, because I actually think that it's slightly out of touch. I mean, there are elements in my life I don't have to worry about. Like, I can still remember the feeling of like, you know, I used to go into 7-Eleven and I would be like, I would just love to have orange juice, but I can't afford it. Or I would just love to have a sneakers. Or I would just like, like, and I remember the day coming in into 7-Eleven, like, it doesn't matter. I can buy whatever I like in this store. It will have no impact. And that is a difference. And I just, you know, I think it's a little bit like out of touch to say that that doesn't impact you i don't have to worry i never worry about finances like it's all taken care of right and that obviously creates a different life it gives you a different thing then i'm not a big like i don't like have 10 cars or anything like that i'm not a

big interested in cars like i don't like i'm not necessarily the person. I have a couple of things. Like I have, for example, I'm very, very proud that I bought a Steinway piano that is self-playing. Oh, perfect. So you actually have this like app, like Spotify, you can go in and select. Perfect. And you can sit there and do the video.

Yeah, exactly. Pretend that I have learned to play piano as well. So like I have some like luxuries that I've really afforded myself that I think, and we have a beautiful house and things like that. But, you know, but I still think that like, the key thing is I don't worry about it. And I know that most people,

and I remember myself worrying about it, right? Worrying about next month, end of, you know, end of these things. And that is a difference in life, obviously, right? So that has changed. I read something which was quite difficult to read, actually, which was about your father and his response to your success yeah not being not being particularly proud necessarily of your success yeah but that also comes back to alcoholics like because so what ended up happening in my um my life right is that

my grandpa unfortunately drank himself to death and And then when I was growing up, my father was very conservative and I never saw alcohol in our house. He barely had a bad glass of wine. And unfortunately that started changing in my like teens. So I started discovering bottles of vodka at home and so forth. And then over time,

there were instances where I would come home and dad would be quite drunk and act in a very irrational way. And then over time, there were instances where I would come home and dad would be quite drunk and act in a very irrational way. And he became more aggressive and so forth. And this was at a point in time where I was still out partying and drinking and so forth. And it was interesting because at that point in time, and that just tells you about, you know,

the problems of alcohol addiction. I never reflected that maybe I have a problem as well. All right, that was like out of, of course not. Like there was my father who had an issue, right? And, but he unfortunately found himself in a spiral in his life where, and I think it's almost like people find themselves in a positive spiral,

negative spiral. The positive spiral is like, you know what? I can actually affect my own life. And now I'm going to try it a little bit. Ooh, things got better. You know what? I can maybe do even more. I can do even more. And then some people are on that positive spiral. What other people find themselves in a negative spiral is like, I have found myself in this. It's not my fault. It's everything else's fault. And then, you know, things get even worse. And they just found themselves in a very negative spiral. And obviously I'm simplifying.

People are different in all these situations, but there's something to that. And that found itself in that spiral where it was everyone else. And alcohol tends to extrapolate that and make it even stronger that you basically blame everything else and you don't take the responsibility.

That's the beginning of the 12 steps of the Anonymous Alcala is actually to take responsibility for your own actions. And so, unfortunately, it went as far as, you know, he lost his job, he lost his apartment. And I found myself in a very tricky situation because at the same point in time, my economical situation was improving heavily. And I was trying to figure out what do I do now? Because he could call me and he would ask for money. And I would be like, well, of course I want to help my father. And so I would help him. And then if I did that,

I didn't hear from him for a couple of days and then he would call me super drunk or text me something very you know nasty and so it was very difficult because and then I started seeing counselors and understanding that like maybe actually in the situation I needed to put like limits you know and ask him to not to say look I'm not going to do this unless you know you do this and stuff like, which was kind of the right way to deal with it. But very, very obviously tricky. And unfortunately, in my situation, it didn't work. So at the end, there was a situation where he was about to lose his apartment and he had a discussion with me and I was very ambiguous.

Should I help him? Should I help him and on? And then it was an evening in the office and he had a discussion with me and I was very like ambiguous. Should I help him? Should I help him and on? And then it was an evening in the office and suddenly I see my phone's phone number. He's calling me on the phone and I was like, I don't know yet what the right answer is. Should I help him or not? What should I do?

It's difficult. So I was like, I'm going to call him later. So I didn't answer the phone. I went home, I had dinner with my wife and we talked about it. And then I was like, no, this time around, I should probably help him. I decided and I tried to call him and he didn't answer.

And I emailed, he didn't answer. And I was like, okay, fine. Maybe you just, you know, whatever. And then in the morning, my mother called and said he was dead, right? So it was, so that was like a very, very obviously dramatic moment in my life and very difficult from that perspective. So he was so smart.

He was so thoughtful. He had gone to the places we had worked. He had tried to do things better and so forth, but he had been in normal places where if, you know, I remember him working for the municipality, for example, and he integrated, like he created some Excel systems that would rationalize everybody's work. And nobody wanted to rationalize their work because that meant that they would have less to do. And maybe somebody would lose their jobs. So he's doing all these things and nobody was showing

gratitude to his attempts of trying to fix things and things. Similarities to what I'm doing, I could see him having those things, but because of his background, because of his situation, and to some degree, probably because of his addiction, he just found himself in this negative spiral rather than the positive spiral that I found myself in. And it just made him more and more depressed. And that made him also very difficult for him to relate to me. Because in one way, I must believe and hope that at some point in time, he was proud and happy about how things have evolved in my life. But at the same point in time, it was very clear that he felt frustrated

by the fact that what he had gotten and how his life had turned out compared to mine. As crazy as it might seem that your father would relate in those terms, but I think unfortunately that was part of the case. So it's very tricky and difficult. But I'm unfortunately that was part of the case. So, you know, it's very tricky and difficult. But I'm very happy at least that I stopped drinking and I'm a sober alcoholic since nine years now.

Amazing. Well done. My last question then, that was incredibly, you know, incredibly moving for so many reasons. And I think it's really also inspiring that you have that sense of sort of empathy to be able to look back on your father and understand that a lot of his circumstances came from his own pain. And that was a generational cycle.

Yes. One that you have the power to stop, per se. And also to kind of, it sounds like you've kind of forgiven him. Yeah, because look, I think, you know, I don't think people still fully understand alcoholism. In my opinion, it is a disease. He was sick. He had an addiction.

Yes, was he, does that mean that he couldn't cure himself? No, he could cure himself. If he would have found himself on a positive spiral, he might have been able to cure himself. That doesn't mean he wasn't sick. The father that I had last years was not my true father. Those are not the memories that I have from my youth when he would bring me into the forest outside Uppsala and we would go on long walks together

and we would fantasize about being space explorers or he would introduce me to amazing science fiction literature or what are these things. There are different memories of my father that was my true father. That was a sick man. And that's just unfortunately like how things develop right so i know you're a father um three beautiful kids um what matters to you in terms of the the principles in which you you hope to raise them and obviously now as we

talked about at the start of this podcast um much of the the i guess the the circumstances that created you were because you went without and you didn't have things handed to you. And you formed that connection that if I'm going to be, then it's going to be a direct result of my actions. So what's your thinking and what do you want to impart on them? And it's a topic I tend to talk a lot about with my wife. And that's very difficult.

I mean, it's a mix right because first and foremost like obviously my kids are not gonna have the same upbringing that i had like there is a massive difference like you know look at our vacations look at our summer house look at like all the things they're just like there's no way i'm gonna be able to ever like recreate any of that but um but that's you know that's part of it and i but i do think also like when it comes to being spoiled, like to some degree, to be entirely fair, like, and I love my mother, she's amazing, but she did spoil me.

She had a very hard time saying no. And if we were in this grocery store and there was some candy and I would be like, I want candy. She tended to give me the candy. So I'm a pretty spoiled person by my upbringing, even though we didn't have that much financial means. Now she wouldn't buy the candy if there was no money left,

but if there was money left, she tended to buy it. candy if there was no money left. But if there was money left, she'd send it to buy it and then there was no money left for something else, right? So like she had, especially my mom, had a very hard time putting no's to me. And she would say yes to basically everything as long as she could basically, right? So you can't spoil somebody without having financial means to some degree, right?

Now, so that's one thing. But there is something where I've, you know, and it was funny because now it's like, my son was invited to like a party, a birthday party with some of his friends, like six years old, right? And you're standing and talking to the parents and we have this amazing school.

It's not a private, it is a private school, but it's not kind of though like upper class private schools. It's actually a really nice school with a good mix of people from all types of society and stuff and but very ambitious teachers and and a good school and and we're starting that and the other parents are a little bit like complaining about like you know oh this could be better and this could be better and i it's not like i didn't agree with them that some things were um couldn't be improved in our school as well as there always

can be but then i told them to i i didn't like stop them a little bit and said, you know what, to be honest, like for myself, if I think about the schools that I went to and the environment I brought up into, I sometimes wonder whether I want my kids to continue going to this very good school or whether maybe when they're like 12 or 13, I'm going to try to find the worst school in Sweden

and put them in there for three years just to create a little bit of resistance, like to get something like a different perspective on like be in an environment where it's very difficult. And like, I was like, because I really want them to get the resistance. I want them to get to know themselves and get to know that they can actually fend for themselves,

that they can solve these problems for themselves. I don't want them to be without resistance. And I feel like all of our parenting today is about like removal resistance. And I'm like, no, no, I want some resistance. And the funny thing is I'm telling this to the other parents and they're all looking at me like, is he stupid? Is he wacko? Like what's wrong with him? Like, you know, it was like, no, no, no. I want some resistance. Right. And I remember that just to, to round off, look, when we did that round the world trip, uh, we had very little money on that trip. And at some point in time, we arrived from Singapore to, to, to, uh, Brisbane and we were going down to Sydney and we were actually supposed to take the cargo ship the next day to go to US already. So we were only going to stay one day

in Australia, but we missed the boat. We had an unfortunate event that we came too late and the cargo ship was not going to wait for two passengers, I promise you. So they just left. And we went to the firm that helped us find these cargo ship trips. And they said, sorry, next boat is in a month.

And we're like, okay, but we don't have any budget, no money. And now we're like stuck in Australia for a month. Obviously quite a nice place to be stuck, honestly. but still like, and I remember walking down the street, I think it was Elizabeth street or something in, in Sydney. And I remember that like, I have no job, I have no money, I have nowhere to stay. I have only my backpack. And you were like, and we're going to stay here for a month. Let's try to start a life. And we had to find a place to live that was affordable. And we had to find a job. And we actually going to stay here for a month. Let's try to start a life. And we had to find a place to live that was affordable. And we had to find a job.

And we actually started working as furniture movers for a company called CityMove. Everyone who worked there called it ShittyMove because they had this or not. But it was like, yeah, and we were in. But the point is that like, it taught me, I can fend for myself. I'll survive.

And like, it's only dependent on me. And that resistance created a sense of like, you know, I can do this and so forth, right? And that's what I hope to give my children somehow. But how do you do that if you pass them your wealth? Well, I'm not sure I'm going to pass them the wealth. So I actually have officially said in some interviews in Sweden that I am,

and my wife and me are still not entirely aligned on this topic, but I have actually said I'm not going to give them anything. And I tell them in that. And it was even funny because, you know, in Sweden, I'm quite well known. So even the fact that I said so on public TV, then my kids heard from their friends,

like, dad, you said on TV that you're not going to give us anything. That's unfair. We were like, I don't like stuff. No, but I've been telling you consistently, like when you're 18 years old, you're on your own. And then my wife always goes, but we may buy an apartment for them, right?

And I was like, I'm not sure. Let's see. Like, I just, there is to your point, like, I mean, I don't want to like, and in Sweden also, it's a little bit provocative for somebody with money to say, I'm not going to give anything because I don't, I'm not saying I don't believe in welfare.

I think sometimes you need to support people in difficult situations and so forth. So I said, look, I'm not talking about people in general. I'm only talking I don't believe in welfare. I think sometimes you need to support people in difficult situations and so forth. So I said, look, I'm not talking about people in general. I'm only talking about my kids. But for my own kids, I'm not convinced that giving them all of this is going to make them happier. And I meet a lot of people from family wealth that have inherited wealth that are extremely unhappy

with the pressure and the expectations that comes with that. So as much as, and again, I'm not saying that money doesn't make you happy. We've already talked about it, but like there are some aspects of it that are very difficult. And I think that like in general, building a person's own self-confidence and belief in their own abilities

to actually have a positive impact on their lives, I still think that that is the key, you know, path to happiness. I agree. Listen, Sebastian, thank you so much for your time and your honesty and your humility. And you're a massive inspiration to me for so many reasons, not least for your business success. But I really do come back to that point about you building such a great tech company without technical expertise. I hear it all day, every day from entrepreneurs. I felt it myself. I think I've told myself that there's certain industries I can't build in because of that because i lack fundamental expertise there

um and i think you you kind of bucked that trend and proved to me and entrepreneurs listening that you can um if you have the drive and determination and that's so underlying self-belief to get there what you've done is just absolutely phenomenal thank you very much unbelievably pleasant human being as well and um you're very sort of very, very honest. And I think that's a gift that I'm glad you shared with us. Thank you. But yeah, thank you so much for your time.

And I can't wait to continue to watch your journey. It's been a pleasure. It's going to be exciting. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for watching!