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

(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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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVBN. Today is Wednesday, September 10, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange, the East Coast Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  And we have a special guest with us opening the show. Introduce yourself for the stream.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Peter Tuchman. I'm known as the Einstein of Wall Street.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  I'm the Einstein of Wall Street. And I'm not that smart.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  I just look at you.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Who was the first person? Did you give yourself that nickname?

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Erin 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 leader, the new sheriff in town.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  The terror tantrum.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Correct. She called me in. So she used to work on the floor with CNBC.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  And she nicknamed it probably 20 years ago and called me Einstein and that sort of picked up.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  But your latest, your latest collaborator is not on TV, but on streaming, correct?

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Correct. So I had the fortunality of actually meeting I Show Speed.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  We know Adam. He came to our, he came to our event. We were here about a month and a half ago. He came to a party.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Really? So Adam, Adam's 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.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  And we did this whole TikTok thing called Einstein Elementary. It 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 he 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 and said, we're going to be at the Bowl. Yeah. He's going to be at the Bowl. 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 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.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  And then instead of, you know, buying the next iPhone, he could probably buy a couple of shares of Apple. And then maybe, you know, he could invest in his future, besides the amazing futures. How do you receive it? He received it, totally. He talked about it a couple of days down the road. So I got the message across and, uh, and I've blown up. I've got literally Yeah, give us the number. Two hundred. 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. Uh, what was the first stock you ever bought? You know what? I very rare, I did not ever buy a share of stock until recently.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  I went through most of my career because I'm a registered trader, uh, 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 and P 500, based on information that I have as a broker on the floor. And I trade all 347 names in the S and 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 going to 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, they both graduated without any debt and that's where my money went. What about some of the first stocks that you were brokering?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  First stocks that I brokered, 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, how amazing the enthusiasm around an IPO. Cause it's based on confidence, right? Nobody knows it. And then, and so one of, I've, 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 IPOs here take probably Four or five hours. We just opened Klarna, right?

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  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 customers. 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 port 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 marketplace. Here, it's different. So then you're going to see what you see in NASDAQ.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  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 I 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 financially. Because he became a very wealthy guy again on that day.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Someone on our team actually was here for the IPO as well.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Amazing time. And then we've had, look, then, you know, the whole landscape has changed when WeWork completely blew up the whole IPO market. And that affected-

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Tell us that story because I remember the S1 going out, but then did they get out? What happened?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  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, now, 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 smoke and mirrors and he had spent all the money on prostitutes and blow. And that the company had nothing, 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.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  For years.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  It literally, everyone said-

• 6:08John Coogan?

  I hear windows closed. That's what closed it.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  That's what closed it. It was the fact that we-

• 6:12John Coogan?

  On Mad Money was saying, "We don't want this. We don't want this."

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so to think that you know something about what's going on and we didn't know anything, 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 stocks, they would open the huge premiums. We were trading 10 IPOs a day.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  Give us a quick history on Klarna, right? Because Klarna has tried to get out a couple times.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  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 a stock when it opens, right? There was enough stock at 52 bid on balance, which is what it's called. So stocks pair off that are priced accordingly. So 4-point-something million shares open, that means that they were market orders. They had no limits to them, and that's they that was they paired themselves off. It was a 52 bid for 300,000 on balance meant that there was a stabilizing bid, whether it was by Goldman

• 7:23Speaker 02

  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 bid, 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. Figma and Bullish.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  So but all three of these are relatively, like, is there a specific strategy that these IPOs have had in terms of like pricing at a at what feels like a very reasonable like?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  So you know what? They're they're pricing it based on the reaction to to what the what the investment community is willing to give. It is. So some of the other ones got priced at 30. There was over supply, over demand at 30. They upped it to 32, 35. That's how it will go. So the night, the last night, when they go out to the roadshow 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 stock on money on the table, as did those other IPOs. The other ones opened at 90 and went to 117. That was that was bullish. And Figma also traded at a huge premium. is that the sectors that they were in, there's a lot of pressure on this sector right now.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  And so those, those sectors were more iCloud and, and, and AI based, right? And so I think that's why there was a little more pop to it.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Well, we know you have to get out of here. Thank you so much for stopping by the show.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  I'm so glad.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  We'd love to have you back sometime.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Anytime. I'm always here.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  We can talk for another two hours.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Head of the moon. Let's go.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Love it. Amazing.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  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.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Double earnings miss.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  But a massive spike in the share price due to a large cloud backlog. Is that correct?

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Okay, so take us through some of the posts. Give me some of the facts.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  This, this, you know, just sort of joking around here, but this, this reminded me of a company that, 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 missed. But, but like, just, just look out here. Like, look, look, look at these big numbers coming down. Their horizon. So they basically reported on their backlog for the next five years, which is.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  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.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  That they can just chip away at for years.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Unclear how exactly how binding those, those contracts are, but yes.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  From the transcript, we expect Oracle cloud infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to 18 billion this fiscal year, then increase to 32, then 73, then 114, and then 144 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.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, people, the stock's obviously up tremendously. Larry Ellison is currently the richest man in the world.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Oh, he is. He beat Elon today because of the stock pop.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  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, to hold. And, but yeah, a lot of this.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  King, bet on yourself.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  He's betting on, 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 dot com era, there were a number of class action lawsuits against Oracle, just due to the way in which they were reporting around

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Revenue.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Reporting revenue effectively, like basically reporting like forecasted revenue.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  This is so funny because didn't we all just go through this with CARR in the startup world? Like contracted ARR?

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Like we, like two demo days ago, I think we were talking to Gary Tan about, hey,

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  That was last demo day.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe last demo day. I think we talked to Gary Tan and we were like, hey, it 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, if it's a contract and it's non-binding, make that clear. If it's contracted 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.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  And so it's funny that we went through this. We saw the kind of the correction to understanding metrics in the, in the, in the startup world. And now we're having a reconciliation.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 12:32John Coogan?

  What happened after 1999?

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  And of course.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  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?

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Zero Hedge was posting a trillion dollar company trading like a penny stock. We do need to have the conversation of, of expanding the mag seven, right?

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Broadcom.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  The elite eight.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Talents.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Or.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  I think we're going to 12.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  We're going to 12.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Maybe 50, who knows? Fascinating.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so anyways, Marco Kalanovic was saying yesterday, Oracle was looking like a great short. Hopefully.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Hopefully it didn't get blown out.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully it didn't get blown out.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Or people throwing intelligent investors in the trash?

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the real thing is, is if you were, I mean, brutal for anybody that was was short, Oracle going into earnings because, yeah.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were right on the earnings call, but missed the overall narrative.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  What I thought was interesting was Meta sort of...

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  People are like, people are, the self-proclaimed smart money is like really pissed off about this.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  Because just come in, miss earnings, and then say, oh, don't worry about it. We have a half trillion dollar backlog. And that's like, okay, it's a lot of billions, right? Where's that? Like, there's not that many, and it's from a very concentrated group of customers.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's only so many customers that are growing. And a lot of them have dance partners.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nvidia sells GPUs to Oracle. Oracle builds a cloud and then is actually renting and then is like providing,

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  providing that cloud, basically selling that cloud back to Nvidia.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Who's also a buyer, right? So it's a little bit, it's a little bit circular, but...

• 14:17John Coogan?

  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 capex investor and a buyer of that capacity. They basically said that they have a backlog of $600 billion of capex to justify, right?

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  The list of RPOs, Amazon, $195 billion, Microsoft, $315 billion, Google at $106 billion, and Oracle at $455 billion.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Lot of revenue. Where is it going to come from? The real, the real AI, the real...

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  Like, like, i- if you're incredibly AGI-pilled, you're gonna come out this and being like, that's, that's effectively spend that might have gone to labor, that's gonna be like rerouted to, to basically inference.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  There's also a lot of robotics, obviously self-driving cars, things like that coming online.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of potential demand, and we are seeing exponential usage in tokens, but still,

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  yeah, we're starting to get into.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  I mean, work through those one at a time. It's like, Amazon is probably going to be sending that to Anthropic.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Which Claude code, the revenue numbers are insane, and Claude is growing very fast. And so, you have a situation.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft at 315 billion, probably Clippy.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  I mean, but legitimately like up-selling copilot 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 gonna resell, right? Whatever they're building, they're consuming internally, and, but you should think about it in the same, in the same logic, in the same way. They're also building servers.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  The question is for Oracle. Can you just underwrite that as OpenAI? Like, is that, i- i- is, is OpenAI driving that?

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  And that's, that's another reason for somebody to be a little bit wary of these projections, because it's assuming, you know, OpenAI just came out and said, hey, we're gonna burn an extra $80 billion over the next.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  Where's that burn going? Maybe to Oracle.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Maybe to Oracle, right?

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  Uncle Larry.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  And so if you, if you sum up all those losses, and you look at them, does that match Oracle's projected growth?

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, that would be less than 20% of what Oracle's projected backlog is.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Well, the backlog's over five years, and the, and it was like 80 billion in one year was the loss.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  So the total loss over the next five years for OpenAI might be similar.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  But, but if, if this backlog is like really real, and the demand is there, and it's gonna pan out, it's gonna be a contingent on OpenAI continuing to just raise more and more and more capital, right?

• 17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  And and other players.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Haven't had trouble yet, so.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  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 capex world that will be filled by someone who's going to serve OpenAI. 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 not just a cloud business, but also a. Let's bring them in. We have our second guest. We have the CEO of Klarna.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was late your time.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  But we appreciate you staying up and we appreciate you coming on the show today.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  You seem relaxed. Just a regular day. You're posting. You're posting yesterday if you should just document.

• 18:18Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I'm glad you. Exactly.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm glad you put down the vibe coding.

• 18:22Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I'm still getting stressed when it's not coding. And I know it's like sitting and waiting for my input.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, hopefully I didn't do too much waiting today. What's the process been like? What time did you wake up? What? Take me through the day.

• 18:34Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I woke up at six, which isn't that bad because I'm a little still jet lagged, so it's fine. And then, you know, we went took a shower.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 18:43Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Get dressed. Was like, should I wear this cap or another cap?

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  It's a blockbuster IPO.

• 18:48Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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 had to have some speech and you have to say some nice words.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Had to ring the bell.

• 19:06Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Ring the bell?

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Ring the bell.

• 19:07Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But I'll tell you, actually, honestly, to me, the biggest thing today was Sir Michael Moritz, my chairman, who's a legend, you know, Google and YouTube and everything that he's been doing. He has never been at an IPO of any of his companies.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 19:25Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Ever.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  What was he doing?

• 19:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Ever. No, he's just like, you know.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  He's joined the West Coast.

• 19:29Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  He's a more West Coast guy.

• 19:31Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah. So this was actually his first.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:34Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  His first, my second and his first.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Did he thank you for, for giving him?

• 19:38Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Of course, we, you know, we, no, but I was very, very happy that he did it because I had to like be a little bit persistent, like, please, Michael, join.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  What's it like working with him on the board?

• 19:47Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Fantastic. I mean.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  How would you characterize him relative to other board members? What's his style?

• 19:52Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  What I tell you is, what's amazing about that man is that I, I, I say this a little bit laughingly, but I say, look, never into the details, always right. It's like, most people have to really be into all these, it's like, you know, to have to be 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, it is fantastic.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  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?

• 20:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Just a few.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Just a few.

• 20:29Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It's been a roller coaster.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  People will be familiar with what you're referring to, but I imagine the roller coaster started on day one. It always does.

• 20:37Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  What was the first roller coaster moment?

• 20:39Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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, I remember first weeks like, oh, oh, one, the now, now they're supposed to pay. Hopefully some money comes in. Yeah, they're paying. It works. Um, 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.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  And you have, and you need to get, you need to pay for that.

• 21:06Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Cash crunch.

• 21:08Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  You have a cash crunch and not, not all of it. 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, um, with the bank. So your salary may come a little bit late. May come a little bit late.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a bank's problem.

• 21:25Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, it's a bank problem, you know, like, so those are like early crucible moments. But obviously, since then, we've had a good roller coaster anyways.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of factoring, you have a partnership with Chipotle. We wanted you, we want to celebrate by getting you to sign a Chipotle burrito.

• 21:39Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Oh.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Would you mind autographing?

• 21:41Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Our Chipotle burrito.

• 21:43Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I love it.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  We're building the museum of business.

• 21:46Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Exactly.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  And then we're gonna, we're gonna.

• 21:48Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Oh, sorry.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  No, it's perfect. It's perfect. It's authentic.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, yeah, walk us through like the past like few months.

• 21:59Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Well, no, it's been interesting. Actually, I must say, you know, we obviously been planning, 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.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:17Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But at the same time, 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.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So, and then you have to be profitable in the US. And these things were achieved last year. Uh, 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

• 22:49Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  and a lot of things happened, which meant that I was on vacation with my kids in Easter. It wasn't really the plan back then, but that happened. My kids were very happy and we, and then the IPO happened now.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 22:59Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It's amazing.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  So, yeah, walk me through the long term. How does, uh, what does the company look like in a decade? I'm, I'm wondering how oligopolistic is this category? Is there a plan to expand into a financial super app? Like what does the far future look like?

• 23:17Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Sure.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Because that Google example, they've been building, what, two decades in the public market?

• 23:21Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yep, yep, yep. No, I think that is, um, so it actually started 10 years ago when we pivoted. So we used to be a competitor of Stripe and Adyen, um, 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 fifteen, we sat down, we said, the future of financial services is going to be somewhere in the future, you're gonna have like a digital financial assistant wakes you up in the morning, say, hi, analyze your mortgage. I realize I could save you twenty bucks 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 gonna happen eventually. So it's a bit like self-driving cars. I don't know when, but we know that it will happen.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:06Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And then, you know, suddenly I'm in San Francisco doing a Waymo and I'm like, wow, it's actually happening, right? So the same will happen here. When ChatGPT came along, we're like, okay, it's gonna happen faster than we thought. But still, directionally, that's it. So you wanna be a digital financial assistant, 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 gonna be a very valuable position to be in. And it's gonna be a big global company, but like, why Klarna? Why us? Why would we be the ones that accomplish this thing? And then we said, well, a few things. One, you have to be global. So we've achieved that, US, Canada, Europe and so forth, that's critical.

• 24:47Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  You have to be scaled, one hundred and eleven million users we're now, you know, one hundred and eleven 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, you know, 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 US. Seven hundred thousand 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 gonna grow into the full retail banking offer. And I think that's the future, to be that.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  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, do they never do that? Do they try and roll their own and compete with you?

• 25:40Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  For sure.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  Doesn't seem super smart, but.

• 25:42Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Though, I mean, sometimes it happens that, you know, some merchants have 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. Like, 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 gonna be Delta but with Amex and stuff like that. And that's very similar to what Klarna does with some of the bigger brands. It's more of a co-brand.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:09Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  While more for the, like, maybe more smaller merchants, just Klarna. But, yeah, there's gonna be some of that going.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  What's the number one thing that people misunderstand about the core buy-now-pay-later product?

• 26:22Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, I think the key thing is, obviously, you know, there was a lot of, like, burritos on installments and stuff like that going on. We don't necessarily mind, but it is a misunderstanding. It's just because in Europe, Klarna is used for all categories. It's like your PayPal wallet. You use it for everything.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:36Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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 a curse.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So then I talked to, like, the head of payments at OpenAI, and I was like, you should do Klarna. And he's like, why? Buy-now-pay-later on subscriptions? Why?

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a lot.

• 26:50Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And I'm like, yeah, but we work with Disney Plus. We work with Spotify. You know, we have tons of solutions 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 wanna 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 when you have an average order value of twenty, thirty dollars. Visa charges a fixed payment fee for every transaction.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 27:16Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So they wanna find ways to... That's why, you know, somebody like Uber will always ask you, hey, upload a hundred bucks. Why are they doing that? Because that lowers their payments cost, right?

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 27:24Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So we've helped them build products that helped them try to do that. Still very early, still early, but like, there's... So there's just so much there.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  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 integrations.

• 27:38Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Exactly.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  More and more customers that can pay with lower rates.

• 27:41Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:47Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Where payments is regulated. I'm competing with companies that has twenty bips for debit, forty bips for credit. That's the fees that we're seeing. Here in the US, people are paying two hundred for credit cards, right? And a hundred bips 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, you know, at scale.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  You actually have a very, very low one.

• 28:12Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, we're coming into this rich market called the US, where, like, the margins are just, you know, gigantic.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I want to hit the size going, how much did you raise today? This is a fundraising event for you, right?

• 28:23Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, not that big, actually. We did only $200 million.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  That's pretty big.

• 28:30Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But the full round was like, I think, 1.6 or something billion.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Wait, so what is the structure of that? That happen before?

• 28:35Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  No, because the company

• 28:36John Coogan?

  How do you think about that?

• 28:37Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  The company didn't need to raise much money. I mean, we're very efficient with our capital. You know, we've been close to profitability for a while. So this was more a secondary event.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  OK, sure.

• 28:48Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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, it was like 1.6 billion or something like that. Sorry if I'm saying the wrong numbers. But it's around that number.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  It's evolving.

• 29:00Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But the primer itself was quite limited, actually. And I didn't sell a single stock.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 29:05Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  There we go.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  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 dip, we're going to start burning again? Or we're just going to be investing more? Is there? Because I imagine that there's a lot of opportunities saved 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.

• 29:33Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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. That's the only thing, the whole company would be two bills.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  And they might be the same company.

• 29:44Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  It's like running on the same server.

• 29:48Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But I think, I mean, you looked oracle today, it was insane.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember you built your own CX tool just directly with OpenAI, right?

• 30:06Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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 and L of three billion dollars.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It's not like. 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 in all these systems. You get this mess.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Because the less of a mess, the easier it is both for a human and for AI.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:34Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  To use it to something productive, right?

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And so that's been kind of the key thing. But I would say we over index slightly on productivity.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:40Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And now we are indexing more on growth.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:43Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And unfortunately for human labor, which I find unfortunate is like, we don't feel we need more people.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:48Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Like, we are already gone from seven thousand four hundred to three thousand.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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 O P E C is just coming down. It's like the opposite of what you're supposed to be talking about. Uh, but in our case, we haven't laid off people. We have just relied on attrition. So twenty percent of the workforce leaves every year naturally because they go on for other adventures.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:11Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Uh, and we just rely on that. And then, uh, we become fewer and fewer and we get more and more done, which is amazing.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So the only thing we could ever consider where I would say it would make sense potentially to spend more money is marketing. But right now, we're very happy to do within the budgets we have.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked to Alex.

• 31:25Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, you were saying the exact same thing.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Very similar thing.

• 31:28Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Um, what about, uh, um, I, I, I'm interested to hear. So I, I understand the, the over indexing on productivity and maybe pulling back. But it feels like two years ago, every company was kind of seeing AI as a hammer. And now 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. Uh, I feel like we are now in the scalpel era.

• 31:56Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Hmm.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  And there are incredible use cases for L L Ms, maybe within software that you're already paying for, and you're not even implementing it, maybe to, you know, glue two systems together. Are there any standout examples of like AI as a scalpel that you're seeing these days? That you, that you think like, yeah, it's a little bit narrower than just like do everything. Um, but it's something that you're, that, that, that you're excited about the early glimpse of what's possible there.

• 32:25Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I think more recently, I've gotten all the senior managers at Klarna to start using Cursor.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:30Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Regularly. And I still think that there's like. There I 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 cursor 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.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:55Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  You don't need to be as nervous about the same aspects that you do when you think put things in production. So I am as hyped as ever on AI from that perspective.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, and and your position of of getting all the benefits of AI but not having uh not being threatened in the same way that other, you know, you guys make software, but you're a payments company, right?

• 33:13Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  Financial services and so. Somebody can't go in a cursor and be like, build me uh Klarna, don't make mistakes, right? Like.

• 33:20Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It's yeah, I I yeah, that's probably true.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  A bunch of data on whether or not we should underwrite this person's risk profile.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  How 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 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 ChatGPT. That ends up being good for simple financial products like Klarna, where people can easily understand, I'm 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 as everyday consumers? Get start to get access to, again, ChatGPT is not advertising itself as a legal tool, but you can get a lot of insight from from from loan documents.

• 34:09Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It comes back to what I said about, you know, that vision we had ten years ago about which we're still on. Exactly, which we're still on, which is just like digital financial system. So what what I believe is that if you look at a lot of industries, they are making excess profits because of the switching costs.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So we customers are just not that keen of switching, especially when it comes to banking, but also electricity, carriers, all these things. They're not like, it's not like I really love my carrier phone carrier that much.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 34:38Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It's just that I don't bother to switch, right?

• 34:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:41Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And that allows them to charge more, allows them. To pay, you know, to have lower quality services at higher cost.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So when you imagine a world where you have a digital financial system is 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.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  That thing for you, that it must lead to a better functioning economy with less excess profits, especially in this. It doesn't matter for Prada, or sorry, I shouldn't say this is Prada.

• 35:13Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  For whatever it might be.

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  A man of taste.

• 35:14Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, thank you. For, for, for Prada, LVMH, doesn't matter, right?

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  Irrelevant.

• 35:20Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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, so we, 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 Klarna, you're investing in the fact that we will be one of the forces that drive that change. And hopefully as a consequence of that, get a bigger piece of what will be a smaller pot. Yeah.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  What's next for you? Are you going to stay running the company?

• 35:54Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I mean, I, I've.

• 35:59Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I've only been doing this for two decades. Come on, guys. It's like.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  Just getting started. Just getting started.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  At this point, yeah.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  You seem, you seem incredibly calm and.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  It does feel like this is just another day for you.

• 36:08Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It is partially another day for me, but I, I think that's like.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  It's a special day. Congratulations. But also it's good, yeah, it's good to be in that mode.

• 36:15Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Look, as I said, like, I, I, I tell you, emotionally, going to Bentonville, Arkansas.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Standing at the grave of Sam Walton.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  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.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  Greatest retailers of all time.

• 36:33Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It is fantastic. That to me was, I, I, I'm sorry, like, I love this, but emotionally.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  That was bringing tears.

• 36:39Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  That was very special. Just breathing that air.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  You know, it's, it's also very like Scandinavian type of culture in the Midwest. There's a lot of similarities, you know, so. So I think this is cool, but that was special.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Was there anyone 20 years ago that believed that you'd take it all the way here? Vekid?

• 36:55Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Apart from myself.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:57Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  In my words. Exactly. Apart from myself. Look, I get that question.

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  Because by the time Sequoia is investing, then everyone's like, okay, they'll be at the they'll be at Nicsey soon enough, right? It's gonna, it's, it seems inevitable.

• 37:09Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It's funny, I, I found this old email I wrote like five, six months into it, where I wrote to my co-founders 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 after the bank.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  Global.

• 37:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Become global, you know, and it's like, wouldn't that be awesome? Like, it's kind of funny, 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 today. Yeah, exactly, that like, you know, I actually predicted, but, 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.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  In the league.

• 37:53Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, 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 gonna do everything that I could and, you know, all the energy and all the hours spent and all the sacrifices, right? So.

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  Feels like the biggest misunderstanding of, of, of, of this company broadly is, is just like your intentionality around building this, right? Of, of, of like actually trying to build fair, transparent products that, that, uh, that, that are going after those excess profits, like you described.

• 38:25Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Thank you. I'm happy to hear that.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But I think, I think, actually, we had one slide on the roadshow that shows a study from 2015 by McKinsey, actually. I love McKinsey, sometimes I hate McKinsey, but.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for McKinsey.

• 38:37Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yay!

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  They don't get enough love.

• 38:41Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And they did a study here in 15 where they, 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, oh seven. They tried to 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, percent interest on it or whatever, and they're like, what is this? This is the product of the devil. Like, get me rid of this. Like, and they pay down the debt and they're like, I don't want to use that. And that group, they don't want the airport launches. They don't want the loyalty points or the cash back. That's not them.

• 39:23Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Those are the prosperous and content, the Amex users, the chest high 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. That it. And then occasionally when I need it, 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 it's not everyone wants that, right?

• 40:07Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Like, and 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 do.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Okay, last question. You're wearing the last blockbuster hat. What's your favorite movie?

• 40:18Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  That's a good movie. Like, I have to tell you, recently, uh, my son, who loves Star Wars. So you gotta watch Mandalorian. And I was like, okay, but how good can it be? It was awesome.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 40:30Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It was awesome. So, um, so that is probably.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  But this, I actually. Did you bring the family today?

• 40:35Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  No, I did not. I have to tell you.

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  This is just another business trip.

• 40:39Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  This was, I did a road trip.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna go to Wall Street, I'll be back in a few days.

• 40:43Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  We did a road trip with the kids from Boise, Idaho. To San Francisco. We stopped in Bend, Oregon to go and visit the last blockbuster. I really recommend for everyone going.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  So this is from the store, not from the movie about the store?

• 40:57Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  This is from the store. You should go there. 50% of the revenue is still DVD rentals.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 41:03Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So, and it's fantastic experience.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  Oh, here, we have a new hat for you.

• 41:05Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Oh, I'm not gonna have that this one now, so that's good.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't have to put it on, but, yeah. Thank you so much.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question, last question. Last, last, final, final question. Uh, is your profile picture AI or is it real?

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Are you that flexible? It's Photoshop. It's Photoshop.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, handmade, handmade.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, your stock chart looks like that.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, your stock chart today looks like a lot of it. Anyway, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  Happy mental day. Congrats to the whole team. See you tomorrow. You're the man.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  We'll see you later. Have a good one.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  What a legend. Just another, another day, just another day.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just gotta go take my company public.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  It's a business trip. I'll be right back.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Just raising, I'm not even selling shares.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm not selling shares.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, I, I, I do think people have this massive miss. Come on the show.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Welcome. How are you doing?

• 41:54Speaker 04

  I'm pretty good. Hi, I'm David.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Just, just pretty good.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Just pretty good.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  I'm good, I'm good.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  She'll be fantastic.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  I am absolutely fantastic.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  Let's get you fired up. How you doing?

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  We got lots of, lots of sound effects here.

• 42:06John Coogan?

  Uh, announce yourself for the stream.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  I am David Tannstrom. I'm the CMO at Klarna.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  How did you get introduced to Klarna? How did you meet Sebastian?

• 42:13Speaker 04

  I used to run one of the biggest ad agencies in the Nordics in Europe. And, and we actually started to do the Klarna transformation from this blue, boring B2B company into this consumer franchise.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  I started out agency side and after a couple of months Sebastian was like, why don't you do that here?

• 42:31John Coogan?

  What were you, uh, what, what was your bread and butter when you were in the ad world prior to Klarna? Were you doing big brand marketing projects or were you doing? Cause there's so many different niches. It could be video, you could be billboards, you could be, you know, there's a whole bunch of different things you could do.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Now, we, I did all of the above.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  You did everything, okay.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  No, but I'm, I'm, the strategy is probably my thing.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Strategy, okay.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  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 Burger King? Like?

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  The science.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  The science behind something that cannot be science, right? The, the thing that, that really intrigues me, like the psychology part of like the La Boo Boo thing now, right?

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  How does that, how does that happen?

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  How do people fall in love with ugly plastic dolls and like?

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  We've been asking, uh...

• 43:18John Coogan?

  We were asking the same question on the show two weeks ago. We tried to dig into it.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  And that's the thing, right? And, and those things intrigue me. And I do think marketing done well and done correctly isn't that, you know?

• 43:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Isn't, isn't that vicinity of being, you know?

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Whose idea was?

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Psychology you make money from.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Whose idea was pink?

• 43:34Speaker 04

  That was actually my idea.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. Well, the thing, so the thing about, the thing about ideas, guys, 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.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Very blue.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  Everyone is blue. Like, everyone is blue. Just put the logos up, everyone is blue, someone sprinkles 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?

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  Very inverted.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  And here we have it.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, where was the Klarna brand before you came in? Who was it catering to? Was the key oversight that it was more...

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  It was just fully B2B?

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Fully B2B, is that the narrative?

• 44:53Speaker 04

  No, it wasn't, but it wasn't a brand. It was a fantastic product.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Guess the color?

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Blue.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Blue, of course. Blue logo.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Very, you know, as a lot of tech companies start out, very like, square, very bro-ish, 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 ASAP Rocky, and Pink, and how we show up, and, you know, partnerships.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the, talk about the cultural differences between the European market and then coming to America, because I feel like they...

• 45:35Speaker 04

  I mean, from my perspective and from the financial perspective, the big, big difference is that US is a credit-heavy market. Everyone understands...

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  We love to spend money.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Love credit cards.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  Love credit cards, but also understand credit.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Like, if you ask a random European, like, what is APR?

• 45:56John Coogan?

  No idea.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  Nothing. And, and, and Europe is a debit market, right? And understanding those dynamics, how that works, the power of credit cards in the US and, and the, 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 card, like a physical card in, I don't know, five, 10 years. I just haven't seen it.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  That's the only thing I only always forget when coming to the US, my physical card. So I show up at the hotel and they're like, you need a card.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  To put on file, yeah, you're like, what's going on here?

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that, that's the biggest difference. But then, I mean, I love the US, I love the spirit in the US, I like, they, they.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  American consumer is undefeated.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Everything is bigger, nothing is impossible. Like, there's just this, um, I, I think greatness to think, that, that, that is the, that's 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, right? So in, in Europe, when we do a partnership with a celebrity, they're like, you're a sellout.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Really? I was about to ask.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  Celebrity.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  Exactly. You're a celebrity, like, you're a sellout, why do you do this? You only want to make money.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  In the US, when someone does something where they're like, you're the best, make as much money as you can, this is awesome. So there's a huge difference in that as well.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I feel like, um, Shaquille O'Neal in particular has built a whole brand around like being just everywhere and 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.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  I love it. It's like, if you pay me, I'm down.

• 47:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, and 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? Because it's like part of her brand work.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you can't even guess the next partnership.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  What about in terms of, uh, actual, like, the distribution of marketing materials? Is there any difference in America? There's this power law in TV advertising around the Super Bowl. There's obviously a ton of stuff going on in social media, podcasts, live streams. We have a bunch of advertisers. Where, where, where does, where's there a difference between where the actual ad impressions are coming from? Is there any difference or is it pretty much the same?

• 48:14Speaker 04

  I think the interesting thing with the US is that you still have these tent pole moments.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  Like the Super Bowl, you have that thing, everyone gathers and you have these like not millions of viewers, but tens and hundreds of millions of viewers. In Europe, everything is so distributed, digital is very strong. So there, there is hard to build a brand.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  When you don't have these tent pole moments because a brand is very much about like you and I have seen the same thing.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  And we think it's cool. When every ad is personalized, I don't know, like, have you seen the Klarna ad? I saw it, but that was, that was only on my TikTok algorithm.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  It can always be a bad signal if everyone saw the same ad because you know why it's going viral.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  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, I saw the last episode, like I'm in, you know, I'm.

• 49:00Jordi Hays?

  Part of the culture.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  Exactly, part of the culture and you don't have that in Europe.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:04Jordi Hays?

  How involved did you get on the roadshow side? Klarna is this interesting, um, in an interesting place where the, the consumer brand, I feel like is almost different than the, the brand within tech, for example, right? Because like in our world, a lot of our audiences are high, 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, what's the, what's kind of like the disconnect between those, those kind of the two brands?

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Sometimes that's, that's a difficult bridge to gap, right? 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 daily basis.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  Exactly, totally, totally.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  I think that was a thing with Figma, right? Figma, fantastic company.

• 49:49John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Investors don't know how to design, right? They haven't used that.

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but even different, the only thing different there is an investor knows that every one of their portfolio companies uses Figma every day, right?

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Exactly. But, 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.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  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.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  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 waitlist. But how are you thinking about going multi-product in the US market specifically?

• 51:07Speaker 04

  I mean, the strategy is basically growing with our consumer engagement, right? So we have 111 million consumers. I think we have north of 30 million consumer boom, north of 30.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  North of 30 million consumers in the US. They love Klarna. So they keep telling us, hey, I use Klarna online all the time. Why can't I use Klarna in store? Okay, that's the idea of the credit card. Hey, I love Klarna, but I want to pay, you know, with debit from time to time. Well, okay, that's the start of the balance and that is how we grow, right? I presume.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  I want to buy a house, but I want to make 30 years of monthly payments. I mean.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  We're excited to keep following the journey. Thank you so much for coming on the stream.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  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 Jordi 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 them.

• 52:16Jordi Hays?

  If you're just tuning in for the first time, I just wanted to share, we have a game sign burrito by Sebastian.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  It's actually, it's not just any burrito.

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  It's a Chipotle burrito.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  And Klarna does have a partnership.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  And this will be going in the Business Hall of Fame that we're putting together.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  Bring in our next, let's bring in our next guest. Oh, I it has been, it has been too Too long, too long. Great to see you.

• 52:41Mati Staniszewski?

  I'm bringing you some sweets.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  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 a day. Klarna owns pink. And here you are. Klarna owns pink. No one, no other brand.

• 52:53Mati Staniszewski?

  Excited to be here and see you guys again.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  This is nice, too.

• 52:56Mati Staniszewski?

  Thank you.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, pink, pink.

• 52:57Mati Staniszewski?

  We're overtaking the whole, the trading floor.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you, how, uh, how did you become a board member? How did you meet Sebastian?

• 53:04Mati Staniszewski?

  So I joined the board recently. I joined earlier, earlier this year. Uh, 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, uh, and that's how Sebastian and I met. Uh, and now over, over a year back, started speaking about AI, how we can innovate to build the financial assistant of the future.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Was the actual intro through like Sequoia folks or something?

• 53:26Mati Staniszewski?

  It was initially, we met on the event of Sequoia's event.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:30Mati Staniszewski?

  Uh, uh, I was on one of the panels. Sebastian asked the question.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  Is this AI Ascend?

• 53:34Mati Staniszewski?

  It was the Europe Hundred.

• 53:36John Coogan?

  Okay, previous.

• 53:37Mati Staniszewski?

  Which is another, of course, amazing thing about, about kind of the connection where Klarna is one of the, the few European companies that started in Europe and build a global brand that everybody recognizes. Uh, even today, earlier, working for the trading floor, the ma, the best feeling was a lot of the people coming by, it's like, I'm a Klarna user. It's like 110 million active, active customers, which is of course, as, as, as another founder that started a company in Europe and is trying to build global business, uh, Sebastian and I got along well and started speaking about this.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how did you explain your business to him at the time? Was there, was it in the context of a partnership or just kind of life lessons learned and, and understanding of your understanding of AI could potentially get him up to speed on what was coming?

• 54:19Mati Staniszewski?

  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.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Mati Staniszewski?

  Few hundred people, uh, uh, work could be elevated through the AI work, um, and eventually, uh, optimized on the, on the, on the bottom line as well. Uh, and, uh, and we started speaking about a lot of other ideas of what could, 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.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:52Mati Staniszewski?

  Where people can call in, whether it's a claim, whether it's to understand a little bit more.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:57Mati Staniszewski?

  And that's where we.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  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 and 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 steak 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?

• 55:37Mati Staniszewski?

  I'm optimistic for like a scenario where you, you have, like Klarna, a lot of inbound, a lot of partners that want to work with you.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:43Mati Staniszewski?

  Now, a lot of the, the requests, you need to figure out a smarter way to handle those requests.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:48Mati Staniszewski?

  So instead of waiting for a longer time to, to speak with a human, could you validate the workflow with an voice agent and go through that quicker?

• 55:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Mati Staniszewski?

  We've actually seen and deployed that for, for ourselves where

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 55:59Mati Staniszewski?

  if you, if you want to accelerate the pipeline, you can speak with the voice agent and tell a little bit more about the use case.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:03Mati Staniszewski?

  And actually what happened is that a lot of people are more keen to tell you a lot more

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Mati Staniszewski?

  than they would otherwise. But then there's, you know, so many other areas where that's relevant. A good example is training people internally.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:14Mati Staniszewski?

  So whether you are on the, on the talent team, and I think that's how a, a lot of people in Klarna are thinking about on the talent team, whether it's, you're actually on the sales team, how can I get better? And then whether it's the, the agent on the tech side, whether it's voice agent, you can actually learn and do that better.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:30Mati Staniszewski?

  And then there's of course the last angle, which, which is the, the easiest one, but only easy if everybody adopts it, is how you can use AI in the internal process, in internal tooling. We actually just spoke with one of the execs at the, at the, 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 project management flow.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:53Mati Staniszewski?

  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.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Mati Staniszewski?

  So that's a 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.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like it's part of this 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 of, you know, 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.

• 57:42Mati Staniszewski?

  It was like a stitch up of effectively phonemes to make your voice work.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:47Mati Staniszewski?

  But I think is the other thing that is clearly seen across the companies is that the best mixes, you 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 voices. You think about text, just people that can handle the really tricky cases. Specialists are there. Klarna is actively hiring on that side. But then the easy 80% of the task, whether it's just getting information, getting more

• 58:17Mati Staniszewski?

  product delivery through that first steps in the flow are happening all over AI.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Is there some sort of parallel to draw between the fact that I feel like both Klarna and Eleven 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 like kind of bond over?

• 58:48Mati Staniszewski?

  And we spoke of course briefly about 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 Klarna did it incredibly well, being so early in the e-commerce, then digital payments, now with so many of the AI innovations.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Mati Staniszewski?

  And I think understanding the customer, working backwards and then expanding is the right move. At Eleven Labs, we are 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 the common theme, like you need to really deliver the best experience for a specific, specific segment.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  You're checking with the mafia.

• 59:38Jordi Hays?

  What should we expect?

• 59:39Mati Staniszewski?

  Yeah, yeah, the godfathers. You've probably seen, Sweden is booming, of course Klarna now, Spotify in the past, so many other amazing companies with Lovable, Legora 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 and for Klarna. 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, 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. Like, that's very clear. The founders are realizing that.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  That's a real path.

• 1:00:26Mati Staniszewski?

  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. And now it's like, you should start thinking about a global space from the start and it's possible. Examples like Sebastian are a great examples, been at it for 20 years and is just now kind of going once again as we think about reinventing Klarna for the next 20 years and expanding of the work. So I think that's a good inspiration for all the founders there too.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is a different story. I mean, I feel like New Bank has not expanded into the US in any meaningful way and they built a fantastic business, a co-founder company, obviously.

• 1:01:04Mati Staniszewski?

  FinTechs are amazing in Europe. In Poland, it's.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  But there's something special about 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 business, but not coming to the United States in a meaningful way.

• 1:01:19Mati Staniszewski?

  Hundred percent. I think you need to, from the start, think globally and especially now, like if you are starting a company.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  I mean, practically, 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

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Or five.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Or quarterly trips or make sure you have someone on your cap table in San Hill. Like, how can you concretize, I mean, without making too many generalizations?

• 1:01:49Mati Staniszewski?

  I think the first piece would be you, even without the physical presence, you should be reaching out to people writing the newsletters.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:56Mati Staniszewski?

  A lot of the AI people that are are are active on social media. And you don't try to push them on the work. Show them the samples, show them the product, let them test it. If they like it.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Mati Staniszewski?

  You that's your crack.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  Just be a live player in the community.

• 1:02:07Mati Staniszewski?

  Exactly. And you need to, you need to be, you need to go direct, you need to show them the work.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:12Mati Staniszewski?

  You don't want to, you don't want to go the fluff way of of of of the promise of the future.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:17Mati Staniszewski?

  Uh, so I think this is like the very concrete thing that's that's worked really well for us. And I think for a lot of other companies we see, we see currently.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Mati Staniszewski?

  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 that can be in Silicon Valley or they can be in New York. And and spend time with other with other companies and make sure that that they are building with that technology or you understand their needs before.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't, you don't want your competitor, competitor going through Y C demo day and signing up, you know, half the batch before.

• 1:02:49Mati Staniszewski?

  Exactly. You need to be with the Y C companies before before any other player.

• 1:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Mati Staniszewski?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  What's the fundraising environment out like, uh, in Europe like?

• 1:02:58Mati Staniszewski?

  I think the, you know, you can get capital now. I think in Europe and US, if you are building for that scale. You can, you can, you can really do it. Their capital is is plenty. It's more about the the usual, get the smart capital, get a smart investors.

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Mati Staniszewski?

  That will help you scale to US, that will help you get the talent.

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Mati Staniszewski?

  Um, that, uh, that are in there for with you for the highs, but are also there when you are, 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 hundred percent, um. There is a lot of, a lot of capital, a lot of money that that everybody can can get. And I think surely you're seeing a lot of European companies are going with. With pretty, pretty great funding rounds as well, especially in the recent, in the recent.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we, we, Deli and Asprey were for Founders Fund on the show and he and he invested in, was it Enduro Sat, the satellite?

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Satellite.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Company and it's just like a crazy, crazy company out in, in Eastern Europe that's just built like a phenomenal business in hard tech, which like total narrative violation. And yeah, there's definitely stuff all over the place.

• 1:04:02Mati Staniszewski?

  Exactly. And then you might've seen N8N, which is, which is another of the agenda workflow builders, which everybody uses across the engineers to go to market teams. Which, which is another great example, and of course, love always talk about.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  So we, 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. We're gonna see you out here soon.

• 1:04:26Mati Staniszewski?

  That's the hope. We are, we are building too, you know, to create a generational company. That, that, that tender offer is exactly for that to get the people liquidity so they can focus on that long-term. So, so that's the hope. Would love to, of course, be, be here and follow Clarence Path one day.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully we'll be there.

• 1:04:42Mati Staniszewski?

  And thank you.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Uh, we, we, 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.

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, year, two, year or two from now.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming.

• 1:04:53Mati Staniszewski?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Great to see you guys again.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Coming in the studio. Let me tell you about some more advertisements.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Careful with that burrito. That is a piece of business history.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  TBPN is made possible by Wander. Find your happy place. Also AdQuick. We mentioned billboards earlier. I didn't get an AdQuick ad read in, but there's a lot of billboards over here. Billboards all over New York City. Go to AdQuick.com. Also Bezel. 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 GetBezel.com. Also NumeralHQ.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Polymarket.com. If you want to track what's happening in tech, you can see it at the bottom of our ticker. You need to go to Polymarket.com. Uh, also Adio.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Uh, attio.com. You can go to attio.com slash TBPN. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And lastly, before we bring in our next guest. We have Finn.ai. The number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. We heard, uh, Matty 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 fin.ai. And we will bring in our next guest.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Who we got?

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  We have the next person. We have two minutes. Fantastic.

• 1:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Two minutes. We get to hang out.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  We get to hang out. Let's play some soundboard.

• 1:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's amp it up. Easy, easy, Josh. First time on the soundboard ever.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you put this thing within, uh, within striking distance of me, I'm gonna have some fun. Oh, anyway.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  It is, uh, one of the most beautiful views in the world.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  It really is the fortress of finance, the east coast edition. Um, also.

• 1:06:51Jordi Hays?

  They out-trust us, too. We got a big trust.

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the trust is really, really good.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  This thing is just a real monument.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Uh, and, uh.

• 1:06:59Jordi Hays?

  I see Andrew Reed down there.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  Incredibly active.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Look, look, there he is. There he is.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Hey, there he is. Come on up. Come on up.

• 1:07:06Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's working on it. He's working on it. He's on the schedule. Andrew Reed will be joining us.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  I think we have him on at three.

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great. Uh, can we see Kramer? Is Kramer around?

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  I don't know. I do believe we're gonna be able to take some photos.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  I do see CNBC.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Over there.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, what, what, what I was, uh, I mean, the, the whole floor is buzzing and, uh, it's, it, obviously Klarna IPO is a big deal. Um, but just seeing all the different pods, uh, everything is really cooking today. Uh, the IPO market's fully back in swings.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  Something like seven IPOs this week?

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we were, we were talking about like, there were other companies that were like, is that gonna go out the same day? And like, should we try and have that CEO on? Uh, there is a lot going on.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's Figure in the works, StubHub is in the works.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  It's not Figure, the robotics company. It's Figure, the blockchain company. Is that correct?

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  Blockchain lending.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Yes, blockchain lending. Okay. Uh, we will have to get sharp on, on Figure at some point.

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep, we're working on getting the founder on.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  In the timeline?

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't have Wi-Fi, so, uh, I am guessing, but you can pull up the timeline. Uh, Daniel, uh, Daniel Prunk 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, uh, of Larry.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a big, it's a big backlog. It's a big backlog. It better be heavy OpenAI. If it's uh

• 1:08:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, this question is just asking what like, how do you plan to physically build like, assume the demand is there?

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how are you physically gonna build it?

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  You're gonna need a bigger tent. It's gonna be a lot of tents. It's gonna be a lot of tents. I mean, how much is, how much are they spending on, um, I mean, Stargate 500 billion supposedly and like, Zuck is penciling out 10 billion dollar 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.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  So that, you know, um, it is, it is sort of like somewhat unexpected from, uh, from Oracle specifically.

• 1:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Here he is. Here he is.

• 1:09:25John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:09:25Jordi Hays?

  The man of the hour. Boom, throwing on the hat. Here we go.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Fourth or fifth time, second IPO. Great to see you. How you doing? How you feeling?

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. They really treat you like the mayor around here.

• 1:09:35Andrew Reed?

  Sorry for being late. I was picking up some market color.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Okay, what's that?

• 1:09:39Andrew Reed?

  The, the, the floor traders, you know, I feel like I needed to accumulate a little bit more.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:44Andrew Reed?

  I need to know where rates are headed.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:45Andrew Reed?

  I need to know where interest rates are going.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  What'd you get for us? What's the, what's the market color? What are people saying?

• 1:09:50Andrew Reed?

  Everyone's talking about Klarna.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:52Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, yeah, I was very excited.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  What about interest rates? Anyone?

• 1:09:55Andrew Reed?

  That's proprietary.

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  Proprietary, okay.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  proprietary alpha.

• 1:09:58Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really is. It's great seeing you back here. We, uh, I love hanging out in the stock exchange.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:10:05Andrew Reed?

  I also love hanging out in the stock exchange.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Tell us the initial story. Uh, how did you initially, uh, wind up investing in Klarna?

• 1:10:11Andrew Reed?

  Well, uh, 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, uh, who had, you know, famously invested in PayPal and Google and a bunch of other great companies. And I 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

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:10:39Andrew Reed?

  Uh, a great associate, yeah. And, you know, we invested, um, in

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  2010, right?

• 1:10:49Andrew Reed?

  2010, in a company that was a Swedish alternative.

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Jump scare.

• 1:10:56Andrew Reed?

  Whoa. It was Swedish slash maybe pan Nordic.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Andrew Reed?

  Alternative payment company for e-commerce where you wouldn't pay until the thing arrived. So you knew you were going to get what you were getting.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of Europe at that point was e-commerce, but and the internet was there, but they didn't have the payment rails. So it was like you pay cash to the delivery driver.

• 1:11:16Andrew Reed?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  And Klarna was like some, it was like part powering that and building on top of that, those rails.

• 1:11:20Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  Like not even, I don't even know if you can call them rails, hands.

• 1:11:23Andrew Reed?

  And you go into the, you know, you go into the memos from back in the day. It was, um, you know, how might Klarna find success in making its next hop?

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Andrew Reed?

  So it was Germany and the Netherlands. And we had this incredible detail on like, might they succeed in Germany and demographics in Germany and competitive landscape? And then Netherlands seemed like, oh, you know, if they do that, we're, you know, we're money good.

• 1:11:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Andrew Reed?

  And, um, 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 has.

• 1:12:04Andrew Reed?

  Yeah. Sebastian, Sebastian, he has that dog in him.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  He does.

• 1:12:09Andrew Reed?

  Truly.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:12:10Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Jordi Hays?

  I could 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, he said today, he didn't sell a single share.

• 1:12:20Andrew Reed?

  No.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Like he's all in.

• 1:12:22Andrew Reed?

  He is all in. No, he's in and he.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  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 and just another, another week.

• 1:12:34Andrew Reed?

  Yeah. He is very eager. He's, he's very eager to get back, back to, to work. Yeah. He's, um, but Nicholas, the CFO, I don't know, have, has anyone shout out Nicholas?

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:12:44Andrew Reed?

  Legend, Nicholas Nagle, Klarna CFO.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  Probably incredibly important for this business.

• 1:12:49Andrew Reed?

  He has been, yeah, for, for all the reasons you might imagine.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Fundraise and pay some salaries.

• 1:12:52Andrew Reed?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:53John Coogan?

  You can get into cash crunch.

• 1:12:55Andrew Reed?

  And.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  He was describing that in the early days, Christmas came and they had a ton of cash that needed to go out the door.

• 1:13:00Andrew Reed?

  Yeah. Nicholas is, I'm pretty sure taking a nap right now. I think he is, in fact, I can guarantee that he's taking a nap right now before dinner.

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  Power nap on the trading floor.

• 1:13:09Andrew Reed?

  I'm gonna take this hat off. It's a little tight. Okay.

• 1:13:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Andrew Reed?

  I'll put it back on a little bit when I leave. Yeah.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Where I guess like walk through by the time they were going to enter the US market, you were you were on Team Sequoia, right?

• 1:13:23Andrew Reed?

  Yes.

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  You were able to witness that.

• 1:13:24Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  I guess like give us give us a backstory there because I think that the level of traction they have in the US market was I don't I don't even know if you could have underwrote that as they were starting.

• 1:13:37Andrew Reed?

  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 Affirm or David Morton 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 to the US. And it was around this time that the term BNPL, you know, BNPL wasn't a term until probably 2017.

• 1:14:22Andrew Reed?

  You know, Sebastian had been doing this since 2005, right? So it became a big thing and Afterpay started taking a lot of share and Affirm obviously was doing tremendously well. And the thing with like Klarna'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 for those customers, you know, Klarna has seen them a zillion times by now, right? Like when they're underwriting a transaction, it's the, you know, zillionth transaction for that customer. Going into 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.

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  And just culture, yeah, cultural differences between the US consumer.

• 1:15:02Andrew Reed?

  And merchants and exactly, frequency.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, American consumers don't have the same like loyalty to Klarna, right? It's not like a national champion.

• 1:15:09Andrew Reed?

  Not even heard of us. Yeah, exactly. But then Klarna got into the US in the end of 20... Think probably since 2017, 2018, and then really during COVID, when e-commerce obviously was booming, that's when they really got their foot in the door with the big US merchants. But amazingly, if you look at the momentum now, in the F1, I probably get these numbers right. You know, Q1 year-over-year growth in the US was 33%, Q2 was 38%, right? So like the actual like forward-looking momentum, or not forward-looking statements, the real-time momentum for Q2 is very, very impressive.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  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, Deca corns are 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 like Goldman and JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, we've always lived in this world of oligopolies. Should we be thinking about long-term fintech? Like it's like hyperscaler clouds, like it'll be competitive, but everyone will still make money? Or is there a winner-take-all world in point solutions? Like, how do you think about the market in the long term?

• 1:16:31Andrew Reed?

  The thing I find most interesting about fintech, especially for a company like Klarna, you know, which has its, which has footprint across Europe and the US, like fintech penetration in Europe is actually quite high. You know, if you think about Revolut's market share in some of these European countries, or Trader Public for trading, or Klarna for payments. And, you know, they've really started to make a dent on the legacy retail banks. And the US fintech market share is still tiny, right?

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's where they're eating from.

• 1:17:03Andrew Reed?

  And I think the US market, which obviously is the biggest profit pool in the world,

• 1:17:10Andrew Reed?

  that's right. It's still pretty much, it's JP Morgan, it's Wells Fargo, it's Citigroup. It's, and then that huge, long tail of, you know, from the next tier down to the credit unions. And

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  Also, I mean with ACH, like Visa and Mastercard, there's also market share to take from that.

• 1:17:27Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, and, you know, not to mention stablecoins, there's so much interesting stuff happening in US fintech. And somehow, US fintech is like

• 1:17:36Andrew Reed?

  Lower penetration than Europe fintech?

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:38Andrew Reed?

  And I think for a company like Klarna, which is obviously going to be growing here.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  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 Klarna. You know, Max Levchin's an active founder. You got Brian at Coinbase, Vlad at Robinhood.

• 1:17:57Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I've seen that YouTube video.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  You got Eric, you got Eric and Ray. Like, 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, you know, 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?

• 1:18:26Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, the last, you know, like I dabble in fintech. I wouldn't say I'm, you know, compared to someone like Ruloff, who knows everything about everything. I'm certainly not a specialist.

• 1:18:37Andrew Reed?

  The last fintech investment that I led was in a company called Phantom Wallet, which is, you know, it's sort of the, you need a discontinuous shift in the market. You need something meaningful to be, to differentiate yourself along. So Phantom, it was, you know, centralized to decentralized wallets.

• 1:18:54Jordi Hays?

  And then benefiting from Solana, like timing, picking the right chain to originally partner with.

• 1:19:00Andrew Reed?

  To get out of the gate, now it's multi-chain and it's all non-custodial and it's a different business model, different footprint.

• 1:19:07Andrew Reed?

  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, these like the, the advantages you just mentioned, the advantages you just mentioned are incredible.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  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, counter positioned like that. You carve out and then you can weave and build and eat off of someone else's plate of fire. It makes a ton of sense.

• 1:19:34Jordi Hays?

  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 seven, it's, I think it's like 65, 70% of their current market cap they paid. Or their current market cap, market cap. What?

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Why do you think, yeah, was that just like fintech overheated broadly also?

• 1:20:00Andrew Reed?

  I think there are a few of these stock for stock deals during that era. I think Okta Auth0 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.

• 1:20:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Andrew Reed?

  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.

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Andrew Reed?

  I think a lot of the e-commerce things in 21 remind me something of that where we were on a straight shot.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  There's so much demand. It was also the, you know, the COVID boom, e-commerce.

• 1:20:31Andrew Reed?

  And it was a, you know.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  And I think we just actually got back to the same level of e-comm penetration that we had in like 2020, 2021.

• 1:20:38Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  We're back to the same original growth trajectory.

• 1:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Not growth trajectory, but I think overall penetration.

• 1:20:44Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, but the way I think about that trend is, you know, in 2021, it was obvious that we were headed towards 50% plus e-commerce penetration across categories. And, and it's happening so quickly. And then 2022, 2023, the narrative was like, e-commerce is dead. It was all pull forward, you know?

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:01Andrew Reed?

  And then sure enough, like, no, we are in fact headed towards e-commerce penetration.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  People were correct in those ways.

• 1:21:06Andrew Reed?

  Yeah. And now you look at the, you know, the Shopify numbers that came out.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:10Andrew Reed?

  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.

• 1:21:16Jordi Hays?

  And that's even during this rocky year with, with tariffs and uncertainty on the vendor side or on the merchant side.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anything else, Drew? I hear we have some people waiting, so.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, okay. I have a bunch more questions, but come on the show again.

• 1:21:29Andrew Reed?

  I'll be, I'll, thank you for being here.

• 1:21:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure we'll be back here.

• 1:21:33Andrew Reed?

  Love running into you guys at the Stock Exchange.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  It's the best place to hang out.

• 1:21:36Andrew Reed?

  Thank you.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:21:38Andrew Reed?

  Thank you.

• 1:21:39Jordi Hays?

  The mayor of Nicie.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Marcus.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  There what? Okay.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  That's not really... Some breaking news, one second. Yeah, we're okay. Let's bring in Marcus. Yeah. And...

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  Hey, Marcus, good to meet you in person.

• 1:22:00Speaker 07

  Absolutely, likewise.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  Great to hear you. Please, take a seat. Would you mind introducing yourself for the stream and then we can talk about everything?

• 1:22:07Speaker 07

  Sure. Hey, I'm Marcus Vilek, founder and CEO of Bolt.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  And do you remember the first time we interacted online?

• 1:22:14Speaker 07

  I do.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  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 roughly correctly?" I should have just asked you, because I was doing video essays, like blog posts, instead of like actual interviews. But here we are, interviewing. Anyway, tell us your story of how you got involved in Klarna.

• 1:22:38Speaker 07

  Sure. So I started Bolt as an entrepreneur when I was 19 years old, back in 2013. And back then, I was looking at their neighboring country, Sweden, where Klarna already back then was one of the biggest tech companies. So I was always following it when we were building Bolt from Estonia.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  Just as like a role model.

• 1:22:54Speaker 07

  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. So that was a big role model for us. So that's how I sort of started following the company.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And walk me through a little bit of your journey. How long did it take you to expand? Like, take me through the first couple eras and the acts.

• 1:23:17Speaker 07

  Sure, sure. So, I mean, 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. 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.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:34Speaker 07

  And then we just first saturated the home markets and then started expanding. And I think Klarna has done the same strategy really well.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Is this your first IPO, first public company board?

• 1:23:46Speaker 07

  It is, actually. So for the 12 years, I've only been focused on Bolt. I haven't wanted to take on any distractions. But we've run 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. It only took a couple of hours.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  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 that?

• 1:24:20Speaker 07

  Absolutely. So actually, 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 gonna have a blockbuster IPO. So you wanna join and see how that's done. And I think all of those three things have proven to be true over the last year.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  What is Klarna getting right about running a company that's, it's sort of a two-sided marketplace? They have, you know, customers that need to implement Klarna and then customers that use it to checkout. 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?

• 1:25:12Speaker 07

  I'd actually say that building a payments network and building a ride-sharing network actually have a lot of similarities in terms of how we build a two-sided marketplace. And what we found is that this always starts off on the supply side. Because unless you have the right supply available, like there's 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.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  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 Robo-Taxi rolling out. What do things look like in your business and where do you see things going?

• 1:26:02Speaker 07

  So, first of all, I think it's great. Self-driving cars are completely gonna revolutionize cities. I think for Bolt specifically, we're really well positioned so this can 100x the size of the business. And we're really looking forward to the next decade. On the other hand, though, we gotta be a bit more realistic. And I'm always the pragmatic guy in the room. So when I look at the numbers, we gotta admit, like, these things are still a number of years before the commercial unit economics make sense.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:26Speaker 07

  I think it's one thing to put a couple of thousand cars on the road. And I think what Waymo has done is absolutely unique and impressive. But they are operating only in the wealthiest cities in the world.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Speaker 07

  It's still gonna 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.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:43Speaker 07

  So in that sense, I think Bolt's business is quite well insulated. Like, we have five to 10 years before it is gonna have a major impact in terms of any downside or risk to our business.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the bull case for at least Uber in the era of self-driving is that Dara Khosrowshahi ran, was it TripAdvisor before?

• 1:27:01Speaker 07

  Expedia.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  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 wanna bring their CapEx or their asset to the Bolt network, you act as an aggregator for customer demand for them?

• 1:27:27Speaker 07

  So...

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  Is that the correct partnership?

• 1:27:29Speaker 07

  I think the industry is for sure gonna evolve over time. And it's still not clear how it's gonna end up 10 years from now. But I think in the short term, we're absolutely ready to own the Cars and Ourselves balance sheet as well.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. So do you own anything right now, scooters or anything?

• 1:27:43Speaker 07

  We do, actually. So I think that's a core distinction Bolt has versus any other ridesharing company in the world.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  This is the craziest thing. You went into scooters and you didn't get destroyed.

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  But to me, that feels like, again, something we've been asking some of the other guests, 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 Lime scooter era, and people used to destroy scooters for sport. It was like, it was a pastime.

• 1:28:14Speaker 07

  Wait till you see what happened in Paris. So, I mean, we were at some point losing 2% of the fleet each week.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  What are they doing, throwing it in a pond or something?

• 1:28:21Speaker 07

  Literally into the river.

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Into the river.

• 1:28:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Into the Champs-Elysees.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  But there are markets that it work where people respect the the robots and they they take care of it.

• 1:28:28Speaker 07

  Absolutely. And I think overall, though, like when we just like compare the journeys of 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.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to lose 2% of the fleet weekly for that long.

• 1:28:45Speaker 07

  No, no, exactly. We didn't raise hundreds of millions for the scooter business. Like, we had we had to be very clever in how we operated. And so I think overall, I mean, what we've done is that we've operated some of these hardware CapEx heavy businesses as well, whether it's quarters or we have a car sharing business with thousands of cars. We operate in in more than dozen cities around Europe.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:29:02Speaker 07

  Um, so in that sense, like, we're not really afraid to to similarly operate self-driving cars, uh, if need be, in the early stages of the market.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Speaker 07

  Long term, once this gets into hundreds of thousands of cars, obviously, the industry is going to pay out differently.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  How did the initial Sequoia deal come together for you? Because I don't think they have an office in Estonia, but is it through the Stripe mafia or the the Skype mafia?

• 1:29:20Speaker 07

  Uh, so so actually, I mean, uh, 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 and I think that was a successful one, so they started looking around more in Europe.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:33Speaker 07

  Um, and actually, funny enough, I I met with um, with the two of the Stripe founders.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:29:38Speaker 07

  They actually, so they they came to Estonia. Uh, it was it was a great fun time catching up with them years ago.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Speaker 07

  Uh, and then actually, uh, 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 Bolt came up, and that's where their original interest came from.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  What's the state of the Estonian early-stage startup scene?

• 1:29:57Speaker 07

  It's fantastic. Honestly, I think the Estonian startup scene per capita is the best in the world.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01Speaker 07

  Um, Tallinn is half a million people. We got 11 unicorn companies. Uh, 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.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Speaker 07

  Um, and when we look at just the number of entrepreneurs coming out of these companies, whether it's Bolt or Klarna as well, it's absolutely fascinating. Like, I mean, this is booming now the second and third generation of companies.

• 1:30:22John Coogan?

  A couple of the narratives that I've heard thrown around about why Estonia punches way above its weight relative to uh... 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, hey, we gotta take this stuff seriously, guys. Do those two narratives sit well with you? Does that sound about right?

• 1:30:50Speaker 07

  Those are absolutely true. I mean, again, when we look at 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 and they couldn't. 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 I had 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 P R rankings, etc., 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.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about artificial intelligence, just AI generally, either applying it to your business? Or this idea of building a data center?

• 1:31:36Jordi Hays?

  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 Karp over Palantir and then obviously Sebastian here at Klarna. Is that a similar approach that you're taking in terms of, you know, finding what that balance is?

• 1:31:56Speaker 07

  Absolutely. So actually, it's very similar, I think, with us and with Klarna over the last couple of years. So Klarna has done it, 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. Like, 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 tech. And in every other department, we're just finding more efficiencies.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:32:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  And we get another wave of that story of the, of the, of the fast internet?

• 1:32:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  And there's a 13-year-old kid who's like, "Yeah, I'm gonna fine tune a Lava 4 or something." And you get the next generation of entrepreneurs. Do you think that's possible?

• 1:32:50Speaker 07

  Um, 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.

• 1:33:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nebeas is, I guess, main data centers in Finland, right?

• 1:33:09Speaker 07

  Exactly, which is literally between Sweden and Estonia. So, 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.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the, the geo, the geographic footprint of both now? I know there were experiments or business expansion into Africa. Like, how are you thinking about conquering the globe, playing the game of risk internationally?

• 1:33:35Speaker 07

  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 flow so we could offset the costs and actually generate some actual capital we could use for expansion.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:46Speaker 07

  So we did that first in Central Eastern Europe, which we're now by far the number one player in.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:34:00Speaker 07

  Um, 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.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:07Speaker 07

  And funny enough, actually, that was a very easy expansion then for us, because we started off in these low-cost markets that were hard to compete in.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Same, same, same with, with Klarna, right?

• 1:34:16Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that you'll expand in the U.S. or has the capital fight already played out? Is there any opportunity left?

• 1:34:38Speaker 07

  Uh, not something I can disclose today, but uh, keep, keep watching us and there's probably gonna be some news in the future.

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  We will definitely be following. Very excited. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for joining. This was a pleasure. Thank you. Great to meet you.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:34:51Jordi Hays?

  Come back on the show anytime.

• 1:34:53Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  We'll zoom you in. Um, some crazy news hitting the timeline. I don't know if you saw.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  I did not.

• 1:34:59Jordi Hays?

  Charlie Kirk was shot at an event. It's unclear yet if he is alive or dead, but absolutely tragic. Uh, otherwise, Sam Altman was on Tucker.

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  You were on Tucker Carlson.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman was confronted by Tucker about the death of the OpenAI whistleblower, Sutcher. Sam Altman says, I haven't done too many interviews where I've been accused of murder.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  I mean, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 1:35:27Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  It's not. That is a crazy, crazy story.

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh,

• 1:35:34Jordi Hays?

  three, uh, I guess Oracle and, uh, OpenAI have signed a $300 billion computing deal. So you basically called this.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  Earlier in the show.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Where's that? Uh, where's that revenue ramp?

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  Has to be with OpenAI and it has to be, it has to be underwritten on the growth of, of, uh, OpenAI's cloud business.

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI's losses, OpenAI's losses are, are Larry's.

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, yeah. His, his revenue and then, but OpenAI, yeah, I mean, they should be losing, burning as they grow. Um, 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. Uh, in the, uh, in the, uh, in the, the provision of tokens, they're starting to take coding more seriously. This has been kind of the narrative around GPT-5 was that, uh, GPT-5 was, uh, them, you know, kind of redoubling their efforts in just selling, being token sales for B2B.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  And so, uh, my, our, you know, the thesis that, that everyone's been kicking around is basically, uh, we could see an oligopoly in frontier model inference sort of play out. You have GCP with Gemini, uh, 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 these massive tens of H100 equivalents, they're good to

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  go. And OpenAI has been code developing chips with Nvidia, put those, you know, but you need a, you need someone that's like a hyperscaler, like Oracle, to actually go and implement that.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Anyway, our next guest will be here in a few minutes. Do you have any other?

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  Prayers.

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is some shocking news.

• 1:37:42Jordi Hays?

  For Charlie Kirk, regardless of your political beliefs.

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  And

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  See what the chat has to say. We miss you guys.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Yes, we've been on the road for two days. We will be back in the TVP in Altria Dome 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.

• 1:38:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everyone's saying, don't open X. So if you're watching this on X, I guess stay.

• 1:38:54John Coogan?

  Go over to YouTube, I guess.

• 1:38:55Jordi Hays?

  Over to YouTube or log off.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Rough. 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, maybe you're listening to the audio, you know?

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  And we are at the Klarna IPO. We've interviewed the CEO and other folks, board members today, Marcus Villig. Marcus Villig 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. Absolute ripper.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Seems like a Chad.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  And he's just like, "I'm going to work on myself. I'm going to be over in Europe building." Anyway, anything else you want to talk about?

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Really, nothing like a shooting to kill the vibe.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Incredibly vibe-killing. I agree. I agree.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Still unclear what is happening.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  I'm sure the story will develop over the next 24 hours. Hopefully, there will be some good reporting from the folks who

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  Cover this sort of thing.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  Handle this type of stuff. It is a thankless job.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Not our wheelhouse.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  Not our wheelhouse at all.

• 1:40:43Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  We're hanging out.

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's tough. We like to have fun on this show, but it doesn't feel right when a tragedy like this strikes.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  It is rough.

• 1:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel bad for people that, um, people are sharing around a close-up video of the shooting, which is like,

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  Rough.

• 1:41:07Jordi Hays?

  Seems like, I'm sure Nikita can figure out a solution so that...

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  X does have the ability to add a sensitive content warning.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but who's...

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  Before an image, but I don't know.

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  Who's adding that?

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Also, I'm not exact... I've seen people use it as like-

• 1:41:23Jordi Hays?

  A meme?

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  As a meme, so it must be a button that you can click, but I have yet to actually see that used. And if it kills your reach in the algorithm, people won't do it because they, they, they want to grow their accounts no matter what. Um, very, very rough. Huh, tough day in the news business. Um, well, on some other good news, in 10 days, Jason Carmen will premiere his first sci-fi film, Planet. Come see it, he's, he's playing it 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 Carmen's latest work-

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  This morning, Bucho Capital bloke said, "My timeline is literally just Oracle earnings and a woman being murdered." Obviously, the, uh-

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, the, the, the staff-

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Other, uh, the other murder. Um, really, really tragic.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  We condemn all violence of all forms, of course.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's just, you, violence generates more violence, unfortunately.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  Very rough. Um, well, we will be closing out in just a minute. Um, in the meantime, let me, here is a lot of news- We've been, we've, we've unfortunately been missing a few big fundraising announcements, uh, but we will be catching up with tons of founders tomorrow. Be sure to tune in, uh, and we'll also be taking you through, hopefully, a bigger deep dive. I, I would love to go deeper on the iPhone. Uh, 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-

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  Coming over.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  Though, though, oh, she has her hat on!

• 1:43:09Jordi Hays?

  She's got her hat on.

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  She has her hat on already.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream!

• 1:43:17Lynn Martin?

  I gotta put it on quickly.

• 1:43:19Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Good to see you again.

• 1:43:21Lynn Martin?

  Hey, good to see you guys.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hosting us once again.

• 1:43:26Lynn Martin?

  You got the hat.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  You got the hat. Thank you for wearing it.

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through the day.

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, how did today go?

• 1:43:33Lynn Martin?

  Great. Today went great.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  I mean, just since we saw you, how busy have you been? I feel like we, 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?

• 1:43:45Lynn Martin?

  Yeah, there's been a number.

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  Walk us through the last couple of weeks.

• 1:43:47Lynn Martin?

  Yeah, there's been a bunch. There's been bullish.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was big.

• 1:43:52Lynn Martin?

  There's, 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.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  Yep, it's fantastic.

• 1:44:01Lynn Martin?

  We have Klarna today. We got VIA on Friday.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  On Friday.

• 1:44:05Lynn Martin?

  We're excited about that one.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:44:07Lynn Martin?

  Next week, it's gonna be busy too. So we got, the market is open. And 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.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:44:20Lynn Martin?

  It is, it is.

• 1:44:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it certainly felt like that. The, 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 for you guys.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  It went very smoothly.

• 1:44:39Lynn Martin?

  It went very smoothly and this IPO had a different pop, but it's, it's, it stayed there, which is good.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46Lynn Martin?

  It's still healthy. It was like a textbook IPO. Traditionally, you wanna see like that 20% pop and that's kind of where they are. I think they're about 25%, maybe 30%. That was, it was great. It was great.

• 1:45:02Lynn Martin?

  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. Been working with them for a couple of years on IPO readiness, so.

• 1:45:15Jordi Hays?

  Everybody had to be patient.

• 1:45:16Lynn Martin?

  Everyone had to be patient, but now that this one went well, I think the next few are gonna go, touch wood, okay as well.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  Give us your thoughts on the market overall right now. Obviously, yesterday was crazy. Oracle earnings.

• 1:45:35Lynn Martin?

  I was gonna 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 listed companies. Last I checked, it was up 35%.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Which is more than that now.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Normal for a company that size.

• 1:45:49Lynn Martin?

  It is because they just announced the partnership with OpenAI. It's like good news, plus good news, plus good news for the company.

• 1:45:58Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot of RPO.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, massive backlog.

• 1:46:00Lynn Martin?

  Yeah, I mean thrilled for them. And I'm thrilled to see the market rewarding them too, because that's been a deliberate strategy that they've employed. They've kept, they've stayed focused on rolling out that strategy. And now they're seeing success from it, which is great.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Decades in the making.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  Grinding away for decades.

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Give us, give us the update on Texas.

• 1:46:28Lynn Martin?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Yes, please.

• 1:46:29Lynn Martin?

  Yeah, so we announced NYSE 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.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  What goes into the decision to go to Texas instead of New York for a company?

• 1:47:07Lynn Martin?

  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.

• 1:47:23Lynn Martin?

  Company, um, company governance and a variety of other measures.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Lynn Martin?

  It's been met with tremendous positive reception. You see companies moving their headquarters, changing where they're incorporated from state that y'all are based in, in California in particular, to Texas, but also some of the New York companies have built huge presences.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Joe Lonsdale at ABC has talked about it a lot. Elon Musk's talked about it a lot.

• 1:47:50Lynn Martin?

  Absolutely.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  Starbase is a company town now. It's becoming a whole

• 1:47:53Lynn Martin?

  I know.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  economy unto its own.

• 1:47:55Lynn Martin?

  I know.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  We had a friend who went and toured it and they have their own shops and their own housing.

• 1:47:59Lynn Martin?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59John Coogan?

  Everything, it's become this massive movement over there.

• 1:48:01Lynn Martin?

  Yeah, and Illinois as well. A lot of companies have moved out of Illinois to, to, and to Texas.

• 1:48:08John Coogan?

  To Texas.

• 1:48:08Lynn Martin?

  So we were just being responsive to our customers.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  So does listing in Texas, uh, does that just align you with being registered as a business in Texas?

• 1:48:17Lynn Martin?

  Mm-hmm. It allows you to benefit from some of the pro-business legislation.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  And is it, but is it a prerequisite to be headquartered in Texas?

• 1:48:26Lynn Martin?

  You don't have to be headquartered. It's an or.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Okay, it's an or.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  And cool.

• 1:48:29Lynn Martin?

  Yeah, but actually, our first

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  Align the whole stack.

• 1:48:31Lynn Martin?

  Our first company

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Lynn Martin?

  to do a list on us was Trump Media and Technology.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:37Lynn Martin?

  Which is based in Florida.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:48:39Lynn Martin?

  So they're not even based in, in Texas, but they were

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  They wanted to be there.

• 1:48:43Lynn Martin?

  such proponents of the pro-business mentality, the pro-business legislation that was going through.

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:49Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, taking a step back, what, what is the, what is the right profile of a business uh, for, uh, in the current IPO market? I think that there's so much capital available in the private markets. We haven't seen as many, uh, you know, I would have thought we'd maybe see some AI companies getting out with like, you know, fifty, you know, sub nine figures of revenue. We, we haven't seen that, uh, at least from our view, a ton so far. So what is the right, what, what is the investment banking community see as like the right profile for a company today?

• 1:49:23Lynn Martin?

  I mean, there's always the question around the rule of 40.

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Lynn Martin?

  I think The companies that 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 on to 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 profitability that you can articulate to an investor, but

• 1:50:07Lynn Martin?

  you don't have to be 30% EBITDA margins, things of that nature to go public.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you think it's helpful? I mean, how helpful is it that a firm reported earnings like a couple of 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 BNPL as a category. Does that help at all with Klarna's roadshow and give people more confidence in the category?

• 1:50:38Lynn Martin?

  I think the, probably one of the success points for Klarna's roadshow was the expansion that they've been able to do, not just in Europe, but also outside of Europe into the US market. I'm sure that was something that resonated with investors. Macroeconomic environments also tend to factor into a lot of these roadshows as well.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  What do you think changed that sentiment about profitability to go public? Was that, 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, do you think the story that people should be telling? Are there other companies that have done it really well?

• 1:51:26Lynn Martin?

  Yeah. I think the, 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? 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.

• 1:51:47Lynn Martin?

  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's, 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.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the stream.

• 1:52:20Lynn Martin?

  Thanks for having me. I'll put my hat back on.

• 1:52:23Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Thank you for representing.

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, and thanks for having us.

• 1:52:26Jordi Hays?

  Always great to be here.

• 1:52:27Lynn Martin?

  Great to be here with you, Sessos.

• 1:52:28Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, hopefully we'll be back soon.

• 1:52:29Lynn Martin?

  Hope to have you back soon.

• 1:52:31John Coogan?

  Can't wait.

• 1:52:32Lynn Martin?

  Absolutely. Means the market's opening up.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  It's open. It's open. We'll come find you after.

• 1:52:37Lynn Martin?

  All right, cool.

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:52:41Jordi Hays?

  And on that note, I think we can, yeah, we can wrap it up.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in to our live stream from the New York Stock Exchange. We will be live from the TVP and Altra Dome in Hollywood, California tomorrow. So tune in and we will bring you a lot of news and interviews.

• 1:52:56Jordi Hays?

  Thoughts and prayers to Charlie Kirk and his family and loved ones. Absolutely tragic.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  Thank you for watching.

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.