Well, I always assume people know Clara, but for those in the audience who might not, give us some background. Sure. I mean, when we started the company, it was basically just a payments company, but today what we're really passionate about is, um, is the whole banking and retail

banking and, um, and how we can really like save humanity from all those boring things that banking means, like all those mundane tasks of managing your bills and managing your shopping and all that stuff. How we can just make it go away. It's a great mission to have. Yeah, um, so

just to go back because I think our the person who introduced you was, uh, saying that you were founded over a decade ago, but it's it's actually it's almost 15 years now, right? So, uh, getting there, um, so you're more of a scale-up, mature

company, um, can you give us some basic facts like how many people you employ, revenue, etc.? Sure, um, so we are kind of in a fun phase right now. We're about 2,000 people, but we just announced that we're hiring about a thousand, so we're going to

grow up to 3,000, uh, and that's really crazy. It's not like a purpose in itself really to be a lot of people obviously, but the the thing is right now there's just so many amazing opportunities in how we can change the whole banking industry that

we felt that this is the time to just go aggressive and like get a lot of things out there and make a lot of things happen. So, it's really exciting. We have about 60 million users worldwide, um, and, uh, you know, we're about revenue-wise

we're close to half a billion dollars right so the the title of this session is from a local Underdog and I was doing some preparation uh for this interview and I I read that when when you were in the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship you actually entered sort of an awards

thing uh with the concept that eventually became Clara and you didn't even make the cut like it was one of the last to get uh ranked right yes yeah it's it's a fun story because we were like I mean we started this thing at the

Stockholm School of Economics and it's partly funded by um by companies so when we just started they had this Dragon's Den setup and they brought in like the most prominent Swedish business figures which was like the founder of H&M and you know the local CEO of McKinsey and the

Wallenberg family who kind of own like half of Sweden they own all the banks and everything and they were supposed to like judge a couple of uh business pitches and we went on stage and made a pitch and uh they basically told us like this is never going to work forget about

it uh the banks are going to do this so you know I can laugh about it today obviously but being 23 years old back then as a student it's not one of those things that makes you super excited but what was really cool that when I came

down from the stage uh there was an older gentleman who approached me and he said like like screw those old guys don't care about what they say the banks are never going to realize what happened to them um so I think that was pretty cool but um and then obviously you

didn't. So you started a company with uh two friends of yours who were also attending the school. Um, how do you remember the early days? I mean the early days was obviously a lot of fun. I remember when they were like as warm as this today, we didn't have any air

conditioning, so there's kind of a funny photo where we sit in our underwear working because it was so hot. And um, we always like prided ourselves about having great customer service, so we obviously didn't want to close customer service during lunch hours, so we would

use go out in the park, bring some pizzas and and um, and eat. And remember this was like before Wi-Fi and phones almost, so whenever the phone called and we knew it was customer service, we had to run all the way back to the office to kind of uh

to answer the question of the customer. Um, and uh, and many times it's like, oh sorry you uh you got connected. Can you please redial because it took us about 10 minutes to run back. But um uh, so no, I think it was amazing. Um, but also just in

general, I mean it was we didn't. I think also things have changed a little bit right? I mean back in those days in Europe there really weren't any like startups or success stories, and the really only one that we could look to was Niklas Zennstrom and Skype. That was

like the only European thing that had actually become like a global phenomena, and uh, and that was a massive inspiration to us. But there was no support, we couldn't talk to any other entrepreneurs that were successful, had did something similar. And I I do

actually think we got a lot of poor advice in the first couple of years as well as a consequence of that I think it's really cool now as you look to Berlin and Stockholm and these places that like there's so many now successful companies that there's more like know-how

available and people can talk to each other and share ideas and thoughts much more I think one of the biggest uh things entrepreneurs need to learn is how to sell your company to everyone not just to partners and customers but also to people that you want to recruit right

so how do you remember those early conversations uh I still feel that you know the best people you always find are always busy doing something else so I think outward reaching recruitment is always there but um it it is it was hard and I think I think the one of the hardest things as

an entrepreneur is really to recognize what does good look like when you don't have a point of reference right so I think engineering was a good example because we were not engineers ourselves if somebody told me this is how long it takes to code this or this is what the

architecture should look like or this is the latest technology or whatever like I had zero ability to make an assessment of whether that was true or not was this right wrong like when you're and I think the same goes for a c for a engineer founder right and he was going to have

some commercial guy coming in and saying yes this is how you're supposed to do sales or this this is how you're supposed to do marketing and so forth I think that's really and and the only way I learned over time was that um I start

for example on the engineering side I decided to like reach out to six or seven CTOs of successful Swedish companies and I met with them and I started discussing with them like tell me like how do I recognize what does good look like and so forth and like being out there

talking to people and trying to learn was what eventually made me at least create an idea of like yes this is how I think it should look like and and then trying to recruit and find people and match those criteria and then eventually when you create an internal success

story and say look this team is really moving at the right pace and they understand it and they find the right balance between you know hacking things together while at the same time not creating you a massive legacy um then you kind of learn that and you try to

iterate and copy that so and how do you structure recruitment today because obviously when you're a 2,000 person company you can't do it all yourself um and there's a war on talent I mean there is uh not just in Berlin but also

in Stockholm and Beyond um so how do you approach this now it's funny to say that cuz actually in the last I mean when when we we we last year we started realizing that we really wanted to scale up because we see these amazing

opportunities in in retail Banking and how we can change that industry and that's when we started looking into like okay we need to grow and we need to grow fast um and then kind of recruitment actually became my top priority because I started thinking like how do we actually

how do you recruit a thousand people and because I've been in this growth phase before you also obviously want to do it like you want to attract the right people that match your culture and that have a perfect fit and so forth I kind of copied what everyone else was doing

so you know Google was having these colorful bikes and rooms with Lego in and people were telling me like yeah you should have 20% of creative time because that gets everyone super excited and we tested that and like even though we had 20% to creative time it wasn't really like

our throughput increased or people were much happier um so I think it like what I feel much more certain about now is that like today we think about this very differently so like our promise to people is like we're going to challenge you like we're going to challenge you

really hard you're going to get into really tough tough situations you're going to be challenged but we're also going to give you a lot of trust uh we're going to give you the opportunity to own a problem end to end and deliver at it uh we're going to treat you at

adults tell you the truth of how we think about things not try to skim things over we be honest and transparent so like I think that like but doing this recruitment thing also like reminded me again of just how important it is like what is our culture about and how can we

attract people and what and and and how can we send that message to people that want to join us and speaking of culture how difficult is it to maintain like this startup driven uh culture that you had in the beginning you know 13 years later how do you communicate this to

2,000, you know, in the future, 3,000 people, yeah, I think, look, I've struggled with that for many, many years. I think it's so, so hard. Um, but I feel in the last one or two years that we have figured it out, or at least improved

massively on it, but I think again, it's one of the things that at least we did wrong, and I, I see some companies like Amazon and Google also doing the same now, but like we ended up in fairly classical structures where like there was a marketing department and a finance

department and so forth, and it wasn't until we like rethought this whole thing and said, look, in the end, we want to be small, small units, like Amazon talks about the two-pizza team rule, eight people at max, they should own a problem and they should own it end-to-end, and if

they need a marketer to solve the problem, if they need an engineer, if they know, you know, a product person, or whatever they need, they should have that, and we could obviously coach them and challenge them and act as investors and challenge them on what they're doing.

But in the end, they need to own their destiny and own their problem space and and set the path, and then you actually can transform a 2,000 people company into 250 startups. It's doable, but I think the other thing that most people

missed, actually, and that I haven't heard any other people talk about, is when we kind of promote or give people like responsibilities, we think about experience, we think about background, and I feel like the only thing that matters is passion, like the only thing that

matter is passion so whoever is leading that startup we call it the accountable lead it's like the small CEO of that startup the only thing I care about is does that person have passion for the problem space and so what's really like tough for me as a CEO is that like

I might have all these ideas of things that I would like to do but if if if I force somebody to do it that doesn't have the passion for it like that's just going to be a massive failure so the only way in which I can actually

you know find somebody to invest in and go after this problem space is by finding somebody who's as passionate about it as I might be or somebody else might be that's the only thing so and that hard thing obviously in a in the bank is that

there's some things like compliance that there isn't a massive amount of people that are very passionate about so that makes it even harder to find them right I think that's like an easier thing if you're a I don't know like a Bitcoin company you're going to find a lot of

people you know passionate about Bitcoin but passionate about compliance that's harder so that puts even more pressure on your recruitment right uh so let's go back to the history a little bit I think uh 2010 was a particularly crucial year for for uh Clara because you then you

were still in Nordics first expansion to Germany an acquisition you took investment from Sakoa Capital um and I think once you raise investment from a VC firm like that sort of the clock starts ticking like at some point you have to provide a return um you've

raised a lot more funding since strategic investments from Visa, but also from some of the biggest names in the VC world. So, um, like, what, we're eight years later from that first investment. Like, at what point do you think there's going to be some type of an exit? Well, if I

really hope maybe when I'm dead, um, because like I really love what we're doing and I don't right now, like, I I'm I'm also a pragmatic person and I do feel I have a responsibility to my shareholder base. So, if somebody comes

and does something crazy, I might have to say yes, but that's more of a fiduciary responsibility type of thing. But if you ask me personally, like I love what we're doing. I can continue doing it forever, like there is just so much to do, and

I think, think actually it's funny you mentioned that about, we did an acquisition in Germany. I think that's one of the coolest things that CL did because we bought a company called Support that's based around the Munich area, and actually Support, a German company, and the founders behind it

they're the reason we have PSD2, they're the reason we have open banking and this massive change. And when we bought that company and merged with them, PSD2 wasn't yet decided on, so it was a massive risk to us. It's probably the scariest decision

I ever had to take because I was signing a check for 140 million euros, and if PSD2 would have gone the wrong way, it would have been all gone. So, that was really scary, scary, like to be honest. But, but I think what's really

Cool is that we supported that company and they've been driving the legislation change that's now opening up the whole European banking industry. And what I feel so cool in this is that like banks are making so massive profits, like if you take Sweden as an example, the

Swedish banks are making on average a 1,000 EUR in profit per citizen in Sweden, like that's an extra tax. And like if we can just make that half, uh, and give that money back to the people and let them do something meaningful for it instead, whether they want to go travel

or, you know, hang out with their friends or whatever their interest is, like that's a really exciting thing to do. So, but and that's a big mission and I think that what's been cool with the company, like Seoa, is that they really buy into those big visions, I think.

Seoa is one of few VCs that really don't, they don't really care like they want it to be, you know, somebody that's trying to be the next Google, next Amazon, or be something really big in their sector, and they're they have a luxury because of their

success to actually say, look, go on for another 5 years if you have the opportunity to do something like that. And I've been trying now to get investors on board that have a similar mindset and can really look long term. Um, so products and services wise, when

we sat down, I think it was 4 years ago, uh, in I think it was your previous HQ, um, you were still very much a B2B company focused on the merchant side. Since then, you've kind of shifted to a BTC model, which is a lot more difficult. It's a lot

more people you have to build trust, um, there's there's a lot more involved than just selling to merchants, right? So how did that change sort of uh the internal processes within Klarna? Now how did it change the company? I think it has changed, but I

think we're still in that process to some degree, uh, but it it's kind of funny, you know, it's like four years ago, um, we didn't even have like a consumer portal online, so if customers had questions, they had to call us, and uh, and

today we have, you know, H, actually our German app is bigger than our Swedish, like in number, there's a couple of million users of the German app if I remember correctly, so it's like it's really transformed a lot in that sense, but um, but also to your point, obviously

it's it transforms the whole company. So one thing that we had to do is we had to reimagine our brand because uh we felt also that like most of the companies in banking or payments or whatever, they all look the same, it's all very boring and

not exciting, and we wanted to create a different flavor, um, and that was when you kind of end up, and suddenly we came out with Smooth, and we created this TV advertising that I recommend for people to see, uh, there're like fish going down the slider and really crazy stuff, and

when we did that, obviously our merchants reacted a little bit like, "What the hell are you doing?" Um, but I think by now we've proven that like um the consumers really think about these things differently, and you can create trust by having people in suits, or you can create trust by

building great products that people like and want to use and create value for them. Um, so there is really an opportunity to change that, but obviously that creates somewhat of a conflict with your merchants. And I think trying to balance that is what is actually really exciting. I think I mean creativity to me

is about solving a problem with many constraints in a way that nobody else has solved before. So you satisfy the constraints at a better, in a better way than anyone else before, uh, or in a new way that nobody thought of. And this is exactly the same I think if you look at

payments today, it's either you have like the wallets from the US that most people in the industry don't call payment schemes, they call them extortion schemes because basically they charge merchants massive amounts and then they incentivize the consumers. Or you have

the other way around, we're just on the merchant side. And I think that like again this creates an amazing, nice, interesting intellectual challenge. How can you build a payment system that actually is great for the consumer and for the merchant where both benefit um and and but that's

also much harder to do obviously. So I think that's exactly the kind of interesting challenges you want to face. Nice. We only have a little bit of time left. Quickly do the last question. How do you spot the opportunity in retail banking since you weren't part of the

industry? Yeah, I, I is it really that hard? I mean I'm not part of the industry, but I'm a customer and I get super frustrated whenever I try to do anything that has anything to do with banks. And every time I'm sitting in the evening and I'm doing

My bills at home, I just feel like, oh my god, there must be something more meaningful I could do with my life than sitting here and doing this. And you know what used to be self-service, it's not self-service, it's self-work. Like the bank basically

outsourced all the work to us and improved their margins. So like I don't think it's hard to spot the opportunity because the banks have been obsessing about themselves, not the customers. And so the only thing you really need to do is obsess about your customers and what

you can do for them. And that's, that's the differentiation that you can create. If anything, I would argue it's easier to spot the opportunities if you're not part of the industry and just a customer because you see, ex. And I also think to some degree it's like people always ask

for like, what's the silver bullet? How are people going to look to me? It's like when the iPhone came around, right? Why did we go for the iPhone? Nobody can explain to me still what was it with the iPhone that made everyone choose it? Like it wasn't the camera, it was for sure not

battery life, so it was just the love and passion for every freaking detail of how that phone worked and the improved customer experience. And I think the same iPhone moment can happen to retail banking where we can provide a service that is just in every detail better than

anything that's there today. Great. Well, I wish you all the best through all the time. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. This

클라나 대표 인터뷰 (소프트뱅크, 세콰이어 투자)

클라나 대표 인터뷰 (소프트뱅크, 세콰이어 투자)