Klarna Founder: From $0 to $46 Billion: Sebastian Siemiatkowski

He'd had a discussion with me. We're sleeping in the street dead scared. Like, be careful with who you're listening to. Have they really contributed to success? Have they really built success? Or have they simply been in a company that was successful? Afterwards, I've heard from journalists that like a ton of emails were coming from banks as they simply, you know, they're threatened by our existence. And so, the kind of articles and the writing about us shifted from they're here to screw customers over to do bad things. And that was tough. I went home. I had dinner with my wife and we talked about it and I was like, "No, this time around I should probably help him." I decided and I tried to call him and he didn't answer and I emailed it didn't answer and morning my mother called and said he was dead.

Right. It's kind of funny you ask that because like I don't necessarily feel that I was remarkably unique in my early days. A friend of mine, their son turned out to be blind but he has perfect pitch and he's now eight years old and he's sitting and playing the piano and singing and that is to me remarkable. And I was thinking about that, I was like that was me when I was a kid. Look, I mean my parents were from Poland, they moved to Sweden about a year before I was born. I was born in the northern part of Sweden. They were, you know, basically immigrants because they didn't see a future in the communist Poland, which was the case at that one time. And so, you know, they came to Sweden but obviously as it was back then it was very hard to integrate into Swedish society, you know, English wasn't as profound as it is today and there was, you know, a lot of language barriers at that point of time. There was also like a lot of, I would say, skepticism about people with Polish names and Polish backgrounds. It was hard to get a job if you had a foreign sounding name, there was a lot of these biases. So, my parents struggled quite a lot to integrate. My mother was an early retiree. And my father kind of jumped from job to job, was unemployed for quite a long period of time, drove a cab for all your years, did a lot of different things, right? And so I think that like I do think that there's something to the fact that as an immigrant kid with parents that still like intellectually had academic backgrounds and, you know, had studied at universities and stuff like that and never basically were able to live up fully to their potential. I do think that that kind of creates some kind of like you feel like that's unfair and you're going to like try to fix that somehow. And I was growing up among Swedish friends who just had better economical standards than we had and I was obviously longing for what they had. Um, you know, I remember that with my mom like there were weeks when, you know, we were eating pancakes every day and I thought that was great, but now I realize it was because there was nothing left. That was the only thing we had, like flour and milk and so forth. So I think that like I do think that that kind of setting and there's obviously some research that suggests that in Silicon Valley more than 50% of the companies are, you know, started by immigrant backgrounds. I do think that that kind of setting of, you know, having a lot of the intellectual capacity and all these things and then the kind of prerequisites potentially to do something different and at the same point of time this kind of drive of like you kind of almost feel like it's unfair. You know, life isn't necessarily fair, but like you feel like this is not fair. We should have like been able to have something different than this. And maybe also to some degree, I don't know to what degree that's on an emotional level, I don't think on a rational level, but an emotional level also like your parents really sacrificed their lives. Like I think it's hard for people that are not immigrants to understand the consequences of not having the friends from school, not having the, you know, the understanding of how society works, which school is better, which is worse, how do you interact with government, you know, how does the system work, all these things like that total lack of understanding of a specific society that it means to shift like my parents did in their, you know, late 20s, early 30s. And how difficult that means for your own ability to kind of, you know, do something with your life. I think that's something that's underestimated. So you have a kind of emotional thing that you want to, you know, you feel that they did a massive sacrifice in some regards for your behalf, right. Yeah. And that feels like a tremendous privilege.

Fantastic country.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Very much so. I mean, um, even the fact that we were Catholics. Now, I'm not a very religious person today necessarily, but we were Catholics and my, you know, my parents, we went to church every Sunday and stuff like that. In a very non-religious society like Sweden, that was in itself very odd. And I remember people like saying, you know, Jesus wasn't, you know, the son of God and stuff like that, which at that point of time, like today, I wouldn't necessarily put, but coming to that, but at that point of time, it was like, you know, somebody was like, you know, saying things like that. And then also the view of Poland at that time was that there was this country behind the iron curtain that was spewing out, you know, toxic waste into the Baltic. And so there was a lot of like, you know, Polish jokes and jokes about Polish people and stuff like that. So I think all of this like I took to heart. I wouldn't say I was bullied. That would be in my opinion taken too far because I know people have been bullied for real and I don't think I was. But there was like that, you know, the sense of being different of not necessarily, you know, both not having the same prerequisites but also getting quite a lot like sometimes getting quite a hard time over these things. Right.

And what was that?

No, I think yes. Very similar to yours, right? Because also what happened in my life was that my parents divorced when I was about 8 years old, right? And so and they had a lot of conflicts, right, on different topics and I think to your point like as a child and interpretation of the reason for that conflicts was the lack of money like because that was what they were talking about all the time. You were hearing that. Now I do today probably have a slightly different view of whether that was the only explanation for their inability to, you know, to be a couple and be together but at that point of time I agree with you that was like one of my interpretations was like yes it would be nice to have, you know, monetary success in life and that would solve some of these problems for sure. For sure I do agree with that. But I also in at least in my life there was in addition to that something else which I cannot really explain which was that I was always intrigued and like thought it was interesting to kind of do business. Like it's very nerdy and I can't explain it like I remember reading like Richard Branson's book when I was like 13 years old and I think it was like super interesting or the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, who was a big thing in Sweden obviously because it's a Swedish guy. So like I remember reading up on these stories and I also remember like trying to start businesses very early. So I had like I did a lot of different things in like trying to start it was everything from like gathering some of my friends and we would go to the apartments where we were living the kind of the story buildings. There was this bus stop where all the people were coming and we would go there and like offer us to carry, you know, groceries and stuff like that for return for like all that kind of stuff like just finding different ways of like, you know, trying to do things.

No, but I think you're right in the sense that like I think definitely in that environment growing up in that setting, you know that like there's nobody who's going to help you. Like there's nothing you're not going to get anything from anyone, right? It's just going to be either you do it or it doesn't happen. Those are the two options. Like it doesn't happen or you do it yourself. Like those are the options. I think if I look at my own kids, there's a lot of things that happens in their lives that fit into a third category. It happens because dad and mom helped out and you know whatever. There's a lot of other things that happens. But here it was like, you know, if I want to have an adventure, if I want to go and see the other part of the city, I bike there. I have to go there myself. Nobody's going to drive me. Like, you know, this like and I do think that there's some lack of like healthiness to that as well, right? Whereas like it kind of educates you and I haven't thought about it but now as you're saying it actually kind of thought about it that it does help you. But I would also say on the immigrants side what you said like they are more commonly among entrepreneurs. But I also think that like when I look at like, you know, when we have problems in neighborhoods with a lot of immigrants and so forth I think that to me it's almost like I wish that society would realize that like there's going to be a lot of frustration a lot of people with, you know, energy. They want something different. They want something a change. They don't want things to be the way they are. That's kind of where you're coming from. And then it's just society's ability to try to showcase that that energy can be used to become Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It can be used to become, you know, a music artist. It can be used to become an entrepreneur. That energy or if we fail to offer those opportunities or showcase that those alternatives they may come out as burning cars and doing other things that are less productive, right? So I think it's really that, you know, to me today I was just like wish that society would really see it as like how do we help showcase and show that there are these great options for that like buildup energy of wanting something to be different, right.

Well, I think it did. One thing that to your point which you were describing as well in your own history is that I one thing that I do worry for today compared to me was that I was in a school with mixed I would still say 70-80% were Swedish 20% at that point of time had different immigrant backgrounds. If they would have been only immigrants in that I would not have anything to compare to. Right? So I do think that the school system at that point of time was less segregated than it is currently at least in Sweden. I'm not that familiar with the UK current situation but I think that was the case. So in that case now were the teachers that amazing and like, you know, there was a mix like some were good some were bad, right? So and I remember like, you know, I was one of the kids who had very easy at school. I learned to read quickly and so forth, right? And I believe to some degree then I became slightly bored because at the Swedish school system at that point of time was very much set up as like everyone equals. So if you were like ahead in math or in head in reading or whatever I literally still remember from like, you know, second grade which is 8 years old in Sweden when you're 8 years old, you know, we were having like reading which meant that everyone was reading from a book and like some kids unfortunately for them like they were still struggling really right and I had already read the whole book so I was quite bored sitting there listening to the story that I had already read and then I started disturbing the lesson because that was kind of so I became a person that was quite problematic for the teacher because I was just like I was so under stimulated and that I think is a little bit sad that I hope that like schooling has become better in like, you know, actually understanding that all pupils are different and need different support and, you know, can get a different challenge because you all need to have like a continuous challenge, right.

Yeah. And that point about making sure that the people that attend your institution are also challenged must still sort of be important to you, right?

It's super difficult, right? And I think that's why it has to be about encouraging them and seeing like each individual by individual where they are, right? Think about a great personal trainer, right? When you go to the gym, you know, how do they find the balance of, you know, how much to push you and when to kind of hold off a little bit, let you, you know, breathe and so forth, right? Actually, I, you know, it kind of interesting because my kids have this swim teacher, her name is Petra, and I can sometimes just sit and watch her when she's training my kids swimming because she has that perfect balance. I've never seen a teacher that finds that perfect spot as well as she does. So, she pushes my kids exactly to the point where they're like dead scared like almost like they're almost there where they're like going to want to they want to give up and get out of that but they're doing it and then they're proud of what they accomplished and that to me to your point like that's almost like a piece of magic that a teacher has like the best teachers can spot that in their pupils can spot that and really find that perfect balance, right? But it's very difficult. It's obviously difficult in a company with 4,000 people like how do you try to put mechanism in place to ensure that you find that balance right and that you really allow people to get to that perfect spot where they develop heavily but at the same point of time doesn't move ahead and just bang their heads to the wall and feel give up or you know.

It's a very complex topic. But I think look I think that the look I give you an example right is that um previously which you might found odd Klarna was not really following kind of agile work tactics. Um and then a few years into Klarna's development, we realized that some aspects of agile like daily standups, weekly retros, working as small teams on specific topics, there were some aspects of these that are very productive and really help productivity, help achieve our goals and so forth. Um so then what we did is we said like okay now all teams within Klarna should do daily standup should do weekly retros and I think currently when we look at it our data about 50% of teams are following this right so then the question is like how do you then approach that because you feel yourself very convinced that for example the idea of daily standups is helping to be productive um but if you enforce of course that if you simply go and say everyone has to do this period like check the box. The problem is like you can do daily standups in very productive ways where you're engaged the whole team is engaged you're discussing what can we do how can we move faster etc etc or you can do daily standups only to check the boxes like there are different ways and that applies to almost all such rules and concepts within companies. So I think that like what I'm still and I still I don't feel that I entirely figured this out but there's a balance in an organization around like when are we prescriptive and mandating things and when are we suggesting and highlighting because in the end the reason I believe in daily standups so much is because of my own experience of that but there was also something that I see up myself there was a willingness to I was interested in trying to find out better ways to working. I learned about this. I saw it in practice being done in a good way and then my conclusion was that this was that. So if you think about my learning process, my personal learning process in that situation, it was driven by my interest, my passion and then I accomplished. That's a very different thing to if my board suddenly would have dialed me up one day and said everyone has to do daily standups period because it would not have given me the opportunity to learn and reflect on it. That's when I so a lot when I think about learning within an organization I think about like the karate masters and the Japanese and kind of like remember all this like karate kid and everything like how they learn in those environments. It is like obviously at the beginning there has to be an interest by the individual self to try to learn but then the master doesn't always tell you like exactly what to do. They like they provoke you to try to learn yourselves, right? There's an excellent example from the Toyota way on that topic where like some of the like masters of Toyota way within Toyota would like take a lot of their senior managers and they would draw a circle on the factory floor within Toyota factory and then the managers would have to stand there and observe the manufacturing of the cars and then by the end of the day, you know, the totally silent teacher would come and say okay so tell me what have you observed and then the senior managers within the circle have been standing there the whole day had to say well we saw this we saw that and then he would look at them the senior, you know, senior kind of sensei like the senior he would be like no another day, you know, so they have to do another day so like and I like provoke them because I think that's the you and it's very learning is such a difficult thing right because you don't as much as we think that learning is sitting in a room and listening to somebody um that is, you know, a very inefficient way of learning we learn by doing by doing things ourselves right that's really the truth and I think that COVID is such a good example of that because we had a lot of experiences that we've never had before and they taught us a lot about our life our priorities a lot of people talk about that today because we were forced to do things differently not because we read about COVID and we read about, you know, how things can be different because suddenly we had to experience it and when you experience that's when you truly that can impact your behaviors can change your ways so the kind of it's a very difficult balance in these companies consistently from a culture perspective like how do I encourage and kind of push people to go and find out like, you know, try to experience that and learn for it but not trying to enforce it too much and that's a balance game right you cannot be entirely without rules to your point because like if you join a soccer team like there are some rules like you come into exercise every morning if you just don't come to exercise when like okay look, you know, maybe you have a different philosophy about how you're going to become a great soccer player but like I just don't believe in your flow like it's not going to work so like if you want to go and believe that you never have to exercise to become a great soccer player Hey, you do that, but you can't do it on it. Like, great. So, there is obviously some selection criteria where you have to decide within our ecosystem, within our company, these are the rules that will apply and because we just feel that they're so fundamental and so important. But once you be on that level, then it's more like how do I intrigue you? How do I challenge you to develop that insight for yourself so that you really come to embrace those ways of working and really make them your own and really expedite them? I think and I haven't solved all of this to be very honestly I think we have lots to learn still with Klarna but I think that that just is a very interesting sorry it was a long answer.

And I would say one more thing on your specific like work from home thing which is also another thing to take into consideration is that what ends up happening and this is not a problem when you're 10-20 people in the startup but when you start becoming 4,000 people the what ends up happening is you have obviously unfortunately that's the only way to describe it layers of management and then you have the people actually doing it and that's just how most organizations are structured. But what ends up happening is okay how are we going to do with this work from home? What are the rules that going to be set and there is a tendency for people to go and say management team the top people have to tell us what the rules are and if you write those rules the problem is like look at Klarna we're active in like 40 offices across, you know, 20 countries each one which will be in a different phase of COVID or not and stuff like that right so try to write a rule that is applicable for each team and then you're going to have individuals maybe some individuals have immune diseases and are extremely worried about, you know, moving into that environment are more careful than others. Maybe you're going to have like, you know, some people that have religious concerns somehow tied to that. You know you're going to have a flora because you have so many people you have so many different individuals with different perspectives. So what you then sometimes need to do in my opinion is you need to say look you will decide for yourselves and what then ends up happening is the in my opinion what happens is that the people actually doing the work they usually find that quite attractive that they can take that decision. So the managers of those people they may find it's more difficult because to them it's nicer that the top management team has written a policy and they can say like this is the rules but why are these rules because it was said so right and so then they can hide behind that right and if you don't allow them to hide behind that they will actually have to motivate why are we going to do like this we've decided in this team that we're going to work in office so we're going to do this and that forces them to do that which is good for them they need to do that they need to provide that. But there's always a risk when you write too strict rules on the top is that they're being used and then there's just management said so and that is just so bad for the culture and everything. You want to provoke an environment where people feel like the rules are there they were well intent they had a good purpose but they also need to be challenged if on a specific individual on a specific situation do not apply. There needs to be a mechanism where those rules comes back and say let's what if we were in this and in the end rules can never be an excuse for not thinking for yourself, right? That never happens. They always have to be there's going to be exceptions in a large company. There has to be exceptions because those are healthy signs of the fact that people are thinking for themselves and judging by themselves and not just hiding behind the rules. I always reflect on the that made me reflect then on the example of the someone told me certain country I think it might be Germany where pilots were having a huge amount of crashes and it was because the culture was you don't challenge the pilot. So even when the co-pilot knew there was

Was it South Korea? Yeah. Yeah. I think it was Yeah. The planes were crashing but because the co-pilot didn't feel challenged.

Sure. No. So, look, as I said previously, like it's kind of ironic. I always had tons of business ideas. And I even remember like when I was like probably 13 or something in Sweden was the first time we had private radios, private radio stations. And I thought the one in my home city sucked. So, I kind of wrote the business plan for them how they should change the shows and the internet and actually called them and tried to convince them to change.

Yeah. 13. Like I can imagine they were like laughing their guts off like this 13 years old is calling us like you should do this programming instead. You should have a show about this. And

Exactly. So for whatever reason I always had this like inclination to wanting to do something. And then um I did two years at Stockholm School of Economics which is one of the like top schools in Sweden around if you're, you know, want to study at an economical direction. Everyone at that point, this is 2000, everyone wanted to work at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey. That was really the vibe. It's actually interesting because they had this survey where they said like at that point of time when they asked students, 7% wanted to start their own company. Today it's 70%. It just gives you like how much of a shift has been during that period of time. But anyways, and then in 2002 because I went directly from college to university, I was like, okay, I just got to do something else. I mean, all my friends had like backpacked and stuff like that. So, um, ended up me and actually what became my co-founder, Niklas, we went backpacking, which at that time, because we always wanted to do something that was a little bit different, we ended up going around the world without flying. Which was a lot of fun. So, if you want to go to YouTube, you'll find the videos when we're like from the YouTuber.

Because we had this idea that we were, this was just at the beginning of all these like, you know, Big Brother and all these like, you know, documentaries and stuff. So, so we thought we were going to like we recorded the whole thing and we did we thought we were going to like air this as a TV show. That's very funny.

Um, yeah. So, you had to we took a cargo ship from Singapore to Brisbane.

And then we had a cargo ship from Sydney over New Zealand up to Mexico. So, that's how we and then we actually took the Queen Elizabeth II between New York and Southampton. So, so that was kind of how we did that those were the expensive parts of the trip. I mean, we did it on an extremely low budget. I think on average we spent like $10 a day like we spent, you know, we're sleeping in the streets. I actually slept on Piccadilly Circus on the street when we were in London that night and when we're passing through London and then I went we went to Hyde Park when the sun had risen and slept because you don't sleep really well in Piccadilly Circus at 4 a.m. I tell you. So, like you can imagine how, you know, the vibe there at that point of time. But anyways, so we came back and then I missed to start my semester and so instead I was like on the second sabbatical year that I hadn't expected and it was 2003 and I was looking for a job in my home city of Uppsala and I couldn't get a job. I was actually on welfare for a time because I just couldn't get any. It was a low economy. It was very hard. Eventually ended up working at this account receivables factoring firm which was like the last place in the world I ever thought as a sales guy.

And I was like okay but now I'm here I'm going to do the most out of this right so I started calling and trying to sell these services and then it was very difficult to sell such services to companies because they're all like yeah you can save me £400 a year but I don't really care because we work with this other company for 15 years and they're great and whatever but then I started talking to entrepreneurs and these entrepreneurs were starting small e-commerce companies because some of them had figured out at that point of time you could buy Google Adwords super cheap because no one was buying them and then you can get some traffic and you can sell some stuff and like it was all kinds of stuff right so we started talking to them and they were really keen like oh I can save £400 a month a year that's awesome I'm going to work with you guys so then I started like thinking about payment services and I was asking them what are your problems what are the things that you would like to be solved so that was kind of where the idea came from but then a year had passed and I want to go back to school so I came back to the Stockholm School of Economics to start my third year I left my job and um but there was an incubator at the school and it was very early at this point of time now everyone has an incubator but at that point time it wasn't that common so I went to the CEO of the incubator and I said, "Hey, you know, I have this idea. It's kind of payments offering buy now pay later services. It would look like this and, you know, whatever." And she was like, "This is awesome. You have to do this." And when she said, "So, I was a little bit like now I can't just like give up on this, you know." So, so I was kind of looking around and then I stumbled into one old friend of mine, Victor, who I knew a little bit, and he was like, because I was sitting in the cafeteria of the school and I was telling some friends like, "I want to do this company. I was going to do this." And everyone was like, "Yeah, good luck to you, man." kind of like patronizing.

You do that and I'm going to go to Morgan Stanley and make all my like that's like that was like kind of the perception. So, so that's kind of but Victor then was the only one who was like, "Wow, that's awesome. I'm with you if you do it right." So, I was like, "Okay, that's cool. Let's do it together." We didn't know each other that well and I had Niklas who was an old friend of mine who I did the trip around the world with. So, so we kind of joined forces but then but it was still like a huge decision to us like starting a company at that point of time felt like wow crazy are we giving up on careers? What's going to happen, you know? So it was only when we came to the conclusion we're like okay, you know what let's not think about this as a lifelong decision let's think about this as a six-month decision. I often tell this to people today like we said like we're going to do this for 6 months but if we do it for 6 months we're going to do like all of our energy all of our time is going to be this for the next six months. So we even had like a rule we had to eat breakfast in the office. We had to be there we were counting the hours who everyone else was there so it's fair. So we were like we were living in the office for the first 6 months and we were just like focused on that and nothing else and but it was when we decided it was going to be a six months and then we're going to evaluate then we kind of was easier to take a decision because you're like yeah 6 months whatever that's fine right um so so we got off and then what we did we realized that we couldn't code to your point right we couldn't code we needed a system right so we're like how are we going to solve that so are we going to raise money try to pay some engineers and hire them what are we going to do and eventually we ended up the incubator we're in, they had this like Christmas drinks thing where they invited some business angels and they invited the companies that were in the incubator to pitch. And so Niklas, my co-founder, did like a 30-second pitch. And after that, a woman called Janne Wallerud kind of approached us and she was like, you know, she almost like pushed me up to a corner. She's like, "This is awesome. Tell me what you're going to do." She was like, she just heard that pitch and she was like, "I like this business idea." And she told us, "Look, I have these engineers and they're like the best engineers. They're amazing." Because she had actually done one of the few really successful exits during the dot-com era where they had sold a company for 150 million pounds. Um, and so she had money from that and she had the engineering team from that. So she said, "I'm going to connect you with those guys." And so we sat down with those engineering guys and they were much more senior than us than were like in their 40s and, you know, we were 20s and there unfortunately a misunderstanding arose right where our understanding was that these five engineers or four engineers they really were they were going to join us full-time and work on this and continue developing the company with us. Right? Their understanding was they were going to give us some source code some code and a system that works and then they're off and doing something else. And so but, you know, as it is and I now try to tell other founders this today like if you found a friends and you want to start a company together don't only talk about all the amazing stuff you're going to do and everything you're going to accomplish. Also sit down and ask like how many hours per week are you going to spend on this versus because you love exercising and you love, you know, hanging out with your friends and so forth. Just so like not that, you know, you can do it on 30 hours a week or you could do it on 80 but just so you're aligned. There can't be two big misalignments. It can be one person doing 30, another one doing 80. Make it super concrete exactly what expectations you have on each other because otherwise there's just such a big risk of like misalignment and conflict.

Right. So then what we did so we brought those engineers on board and they started coding and they were excellent. They were amazing engineers. So they started coding the system in December. In April, four months later we launched with the first customer. So it's four months and they put together a

A lot of the fundamentals that actually still today are part of what Klarna offers as a service. So they were super, but then after that they were like, 'Good luck guys, see you later.' And we were like, 'No, no, no, that's not what we agreed.' And then we looked into the contract and we had given off 37% of the company to them for the technology, and then we had given 10% to Jane as a business agent, but she gave us £60,000, right? And so each one of us then had equal, so we had 17% each. And so that was kind of the setup after that. And then we had basically given away now all these percentages to these engineers and they just left us. And so that became a quite tough conflict obviously, but legally speaking they had followed the contract. So there was nothing for us to go into contracts and say, you know, whatever, because the contract was... we just hadn't talked about this and we were under different assumptions of what they meant. The contract was just there, like we didn't think about, you know, this consequence. So they ended up leaving us. And it was kind of funny because in that room at one point of time in the boardroom, one person said, 'Well, you know what? Just so you know, Sebastian, you have to calm down on this topic. Klarna is never going to be the size of a company where it's going to need four great engineers like this.'

It's kind of funny. I almost laugh. It's kind of funny now as I think back about it.

No. So, what ended up happening is to some degree I think just because they didn't understand the potential of what they had built together with us, they also sold much too early. So as a consequence, I mean, they sold at a very early day when maybe the company was $10 million worth or something.

Yeah. So I mean, well, it's not awful in a sense because to me it feels a bit fair because they got the upside of what they did. If they would have participated longer and so forth, they would have seen a very different upside and they would have built the company with us. But you know, but this was a challenge for us as a consequence to your point because at least what it allowed us to do is very quickly get a system live and get something going. But then as they left I needed to figure out, okay, I need to hire engineers and I have no clue how to code and how do I evaluate a good engineer from a bad engineer? I have no clue. You're like, architecture, what is that? You know, like there was like zero knowledge, right? And that is one of the biggest challenges I think for a lot of people. Like managing people that do the same thing that you know yourself is one thing, trying to manage somebody that does something that you have no clue how to do is very, very difficult.

Well, first and foremost, I think unfortunately, you know, in what ended up happening in our situation was that one of the guys from this engineering team stayed on because they were still shareholders for a period of time, right? So he stayed on as an adviser and we started hiring some engineers and some of which were better, some which were worse, some, you know, as you will always have a mix. And we also got a CTO eventually who came in. And the CTO, he as a CTO was an amazing programming and developer but he wasn't necessarily the CTO that would, you know, hire the right talent, build it. He wasn't business-oriented. He was very much like technically interested and wanted to build like really beautiful code bases and stuff like that, which you know some engineers tend to have more that tendencies. And what was a frustration to me is that for a long period of time, and this was a challenge in Sweden and Stockholm at that point of time, the advisors that we had around us, none of them had built a $45 billion company like we are in today. None of them had that experience but they were senior in our opinion compared to myself. They had done great corporate big jobs. We had like, you know, advisers and board members that had corporate backgrounds and been in big institutions and so forth. And so they were giving us a lot of advice on topics like, is this the system that you're building? Is this fast enough? Should you be able to build it faster or slower like the progress and things? And so when they were giving us that advice, it was bad advice. But we were too young and too inexperienced to be able to recognize that. And so unfortunately, it took us some time and it created a lot of frustration because I was always sitting there like, does it really need to take this long time to build something? And is it really unfair of me to expect that the engineers are like a little bit interested in the product they're building as well and the business side of it? Or are they only always going to be interested in the coding itself and the technical challenge? Like, shouldn't I be able to engage with them on the product side as well? And a lot of times we were like, they were like, 'Oh, we want to build this product, you need to give us more clear specifications.' And I was like, 'But if I write those specifications, what's left to do?' Like, that's part of the creative process to sit together and create these. So, you know, you get stuck in a lot of these things. And then eventually I remember I was very frustrated because at one day when Sequoia invested, and that was why Sequoia was so important to us because in 2009 we got Sequoia to invest in the company. Michael Morris joined our board and one of the ambitions we had with that was to get some kind of contact point to somebody that had actually seen large tech companies grow, had seen real success of a tech company and start understanding their mindset. And at that point of time I unfortunately concluded that like it was not going to work with our CTO because he didn't have that right mindset for it and he was interested in something very different. He's a great guy in many ways, but he wasn't the person that would be able to allow us to build our engineering organization and bring us to become a true tech company and be really technology-driven. And I remember going into the board eventually and saying like, and at that point of time the representative of the engineers that built the original system who was on my board, he had been telling me all over and over again like, I was like, 'I'm a little bit worried. Should it really be this slow?' And he was like, 'Yeah, you know, it's different. It's this and that.' And then eventually I came to him one day and said, 'Look, now I've taken a decision. Unfortunately I have to change CTO.' And he was like, 'Good decision.' And I was like, I almost wanted to smack him in the face. I was like, 'For four years you were telling me that this is okay and now I'm doing this change and you're saying good decision? Like, that's not... you should have said you're wrong, that would be respecting him more, right?' So there was in that setting we were coming up for, there was a... it really nowadays I appreciate much more like how I have to really look through a person, ask myself, is this a believable person? Is this somebody I should really take advice from? And I think a lot of entrepreneurs that will listen to this and startup people, like, be careful with who you're listening to. Have they really contributed to success? Have they really built success or have they simply been in a company that was successful? Like those are very different aspects, right? So being very careful about who you get advice from. But that's kind of how we solved it. So it was just like we had to learn and test. And then the last piece of very practical advice that we did which was one of the best things I ever did was because I was so mixed up like, engineering, whatever, what does it mean? And then I said to my CTO a very practical thing. And I was like, 'Hey, can you show me how you fix a bug?' And so we sat down together by his screen and he basically took one bug that we had and he started searching in the code and then he wrote, you know, the fix and then he wrote the test case for the fix. And just sitting and watching him do that made a huge difference for my understanding of like, you know, how long... So I think as much as sometimes you may feel like very, whatever, you're managing that you don't understand, you may feel like, 'Oh my god, it's so difficult and they're talking about all these technical terms and so forth,' sit down next to them. Spend half a day, spend a day, just look at when they're doing it, a designer or whatever it is, something that you don't know how to do yourself. Just sit next to them, see them do it, and that already will at least put you at a different level of understanding of, you know, the job and so forth. So, there are practical ways in which you can try to gap that, you know, bridge that gap.

Exactly.