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You're watching DVPN.
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Today is Wednesday, September 10, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange.
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C
The fortress of finance.
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Of finance.
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C
That's right.
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B
We have a special guest with us opening the show. Introduce yourself for the stream.
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A
Hi, my name is Peter Tuchman, I'm known as the Einstein of Wall Street.
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B
Einstein of Wall street.
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A
And I'm not that smart. I just looked at it.
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C
Who was the first person did you give yourself?
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A
Aaron Burnett gave me that. And I've had a show on her show now on CNN for the last four months. Ever since the beginning of the sort of mini crash that was sort of self induced by our, our. The new leader. The new, the new leader. The new sheriff in town.
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B
But.
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A
Correct. She called me in. So she used to work on the floor with CNBC.
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B
Sure.
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A
And she nicknamed it probably 20 years ago and called me Einstein and that sort of picked up.
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B
But your latest, your latest collaborator is not on TV but on streaming, correct?
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A
Correct. So I had the fortunality of actually meeting. I show speed. Right. Young 20 year old kid who I got invited. So there's a team that's doing his stream thing. There's a young guy named Adam Faze.
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C
We know Adam, he came to our event. We were here about a month and a half ago. He came to us. Really.
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A
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. And we did this whole TikTok thing called Einstein elementary 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, said we're going to be at the Bulls. Yeah guys, 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 and that 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 got set up. He received it totally. He talked about it a couple days down the road. So I got the message across and I've blown up. I've got literally 200. So I have now. I came in at 260,000 followers on Thursday and now I have 419 and counting and I've got 40 million views on some of my posts. 7,000 DMs.
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B
7,000 DMs.
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A
I actually just did a video to answer that.
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C
Anyway, what was the first stock you ever bought?
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A
You know what I very rare. I did not ever buy a share of stock until recently. I went through most of my career because I'm a registered trader broker on the floor and I'm not allowed to be in a stock for a customer and for myself in a 30 day period. And so I built a trading strategy 20 years ago, trading the S&P 500 based on information that I have as a broker on the floor. And I trade all 347 names in the S 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 do well enough here as a commission broker that I said, you know what, I'll invest in my kids, I'll put them through college. And they both graduated without any debt. And that's where my money went.
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B
What about some of the first stocks that you were brokering?
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A
First stocks that I broker. So we're here, we're talking about IPOs, right? And so, you know, I probably have traded more IPOs than anybody on earth. I've been in the crowd on all of them. I mean, I remember 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 because it's based on confidence. Nobody knows it. And then, and so one of, I've had so many fun experiences in IPOs. Jack Ma Alibaba IPO, which was one of the biggest that we've ever had here. He and I bonded, we spent. So IPOs here take probably four or five hours. We just opened Klarna, right? And the process behind that which we do better than anyone in the world, is the price discovery process. That what goes on. It's kind of like building a building. The way you open a stock. The way we open a stock takes time because it's a matter of the information going back and forth. It's a public offering, so the public has to understand what's going on. And so we go back and forth with our customer. It's kind of like if you put the bricks in the mortar in the right place and you. The way a stock opens, if it's built correctly, is going to purport the way it trades forever. Now, it doesn't guarantee it's going up, but it will have structure and foundation. And, you know, you go to Nasdaq, nothing against Nasdaq, but if you go to Nasdaq, it's fully electronic, so it opens when the buyers and sellers meet in an electronic marketplace. Here, it's different. So then you're going to see what you see in nasdaq. 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, not, not financially because he became a very wealthy guy again on that.
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C
Day, someone on our team actually was here at that IPO as well.
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A
Amazing time. And then we've had. Look, then, you know, the whole landscape is changed. When weworked completely blew up the whole IPO market and that affected.
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B
Tell us that story. Well, remember the S1 going out, but then did they get out?
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A
Well, what ended up happening? Look, as I said, it's built on confidence. And when, you know, everybody. There was huge money put into we work. 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 roadshow 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.
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Years.
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A
It literally everyone says windows closed.
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That's what closed.
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A
That's what closed.
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B
And Kramer on Mad Money was saying, we don't want this. We don't want exactly remember that.
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A
And so to think that you know something about what's going on and we didn't know anything unliterally until the night before made such a huge impact on the market. It literally has taken a couple of years grow out of that. Before that we had had some really wonderful robust years. ReMax and a bunch of stock they would open the huge premiums we were trading give us a quick ipos a.
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C
Day, quick history on Klarna. Right, Because Klarna has tried to get out a couple times.
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A
Okay, so I don't know the history about Klarna. All I know is that I watched how it opened here. So it did take a little while. It did open at 52 I think. Right. And so it's not trading. You know what, it's hard to know. So what's important about it is where the bids are, where the offers are and how the foundation looks. So where the bodies are buried within the stock when it opens. Right. There was enough stock at 52 bid on balance, which is what it's called. So stocks pair off that are priced accordingly. So four point something million shares open. That means that they were market orders. They had no limits to them and that's. That was. They pared themselves off. It was a 52 bid for 300,000 on balance meant that there was a stabilizing bid, whether it was by the Goldman Sachs the company or the banker or not. But that's what made it open at 52. If there had been more to buy at the market, it would have opened higher or more to sell. It would have opened lower. It opened at 52. It did trade up to 5720 on a small bit. 70,000 shares traded up and then it came in. It's trading at a couple dollars lower, which is reasonable. It does not have the power and the impact that Figma and. And Bullish did mine.
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B
Bullish.
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C
So, so, so, but, 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 a, at a. At what feels like very reasonable.
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A
Like so you know what they're, they, they're pricing it based on the reaction to, to what the, what the investment community is to give. Yeah, it is. So some of the other ones got priced at 30. There was oversupply 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 a huge premium. My gut is that the sectors that they were in, there's a lot of pressure on this sector right now. And, and so those, those sectors were more icloud and, and AI based. Right. And so I think that's a little more pop to it.
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B
Well, we know you have to get out of here. Thank you so much for stopping by the show. We'd love to have you anytime. I'm always going to talk for another two hours.
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C
Let's go. Love it.
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D
Love it.
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B
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.
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C
Miss on bottom line, double earnings miss.
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B
But a massive spike in the share price due to a large cloud backlog. Is that correct?
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C
Yes.
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E
Okay.
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C
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 the horizon. So they basically reported on their backlog for the next five years which is.
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B
Which we've been seeing from the other hyperscalers. Remember when we went through Microsoft earnings, GCP earnings, we saw really strong backlogs there in the hundreds of billions of dollars that they can just chip away at for years. Unclear how exactly how binding those, those contracts are.
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C
But yes, 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. So anyways people, the stock's obviously up tremendously. Larry Ellison is currently the richest man in the world.
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B
Oh he is. He beat Elon today because of the stockpile.
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C
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 king, yeah he's Betting on his, betting on himself. Absolutely wild. And yeah, I mean overall there's been some negativity in the timeline. People were bringing up that during the 90s.com era there were a number of class action lawsuits against Oracle just due to the way in which they were reporting around revenue. Reporting revenue effectively, like basically reporting like forecasted revenue.
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B
This is so funny because didn't we all just go through this with Carr in the startup world? Like contracted ARR. Yeah. Two demo days ago I think we were talking to Gary Tan about hey.
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C
That was last demo day.
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B
Yeah, maybe last demo day. I think we talked to Gary Tanner. 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 a contract and it's non binding, make that clear. If it's a contract and it's binding, make that clear. If it's actually cash in the bank, make that clear. But don't just come with some crazy ARR number that isn't actually anything like what people expect. And so it's funny that we went through this, we saw the kind of the correction to understanding metrics in the, in the, in the startup world and now we're having a reconciliation.
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C
So there's somebody named Steve Burns said this morning Oracle stock is up 36% on pace for the best day since 1999. And then somebody here is posting a meme of a duck, the goose chasing, saying what happened after 1999, what happened after 1999.
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B
And of course that is, it is crazy to see a 30% move in a stock as big as Oracle. It's now over a trillion doll. Correct.
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C
Yeah. Zero Hedge was posting a trillion dollar company trading like a penny stock. We do need to have the conversation of expanding the Mag 7. Right. The Broadcom, the Elite 8.
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B
Talented or I think we're going to 12. Going to 12, maybe 50, who knows? Fascinating.
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C
Yeah. So, so anyways, Marco Kalanovic was saying yesterday Oracle was looking like a great short. Hopefully, hopefully you didn't get blown out or people throwing. Yeah, 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, you were right on.
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B
Miss the overall narrative.
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C
Yeah.
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B
What I thought was interesting was meta.
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C
I mean people are like, people are the, the, the, the self proclaimed smart money is like really pissed off about this because just come in, miss earnings and then Say, oh, don't worry about it, we have a half a trillion dollar backlog and that's like, okay, it's a lot of billions. Right. Where is that? Like there's not that many and it's from a very concentrated group of customers.
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B
There's only so many. And a lot of them have dance partners.
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C
Yeah. Nvidia sells GPUs to Oracle. Oracle builds a cloud and then is actually renting and then is like providing, providing that cloud, basically selling that cloud back to Nvidia who's also a buyer. Right. So it's a little bit circular, but.
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B
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 the buyer of that capacity. They basically said that they have a backlog of $600 billion of.
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C
So the RPOs, the list of RPOs. Amazon 195 billion, Microsoft 315 billion, Google at 106 billion and Oracle at 455 billion. Lot of revenue. Where is it going to come from? The real AI, the real, if you're incredibly AGI pilled, you're gonna come at this and being like that's effectively spend that might have gone to labor that's going to be rerouted to basically inference. There's also a lot of robotics, obviously self driving cars, things like that coming online. There's a lot of potential demand and we are seeing exponential usage in tokens. But still, yeah, we're starting to get.
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B
Into, I mean, work through those one at a time. It's like Amazon is probably going to be sending that to Anthropic, which cloud code. The revenue numbers are insane and Claude is growing very fast.
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C
And so you have a Microsoft at 315 billion.
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B
Probably Clippy, I mean, but legitimately like upselling 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 going to resell. Right. Whatever they're building, they're consuming internally. But you should think about it in the same way, in the same logic, in the same way they're also building servers. Yeah. The question is for Oracle can You just underwrite that as OpenAI. Like is that is, is open.
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C
Yeah. 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 going to burn an extra $80 billion.
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B
Where's that burn going? Maybe to Oracle.
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C
Yeah, yeah, maybe to Oracle Uncle Larry.
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B
And so if you, if you sum up all those losses and you look at them, does that match Oracle's projected growth?
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C
Well, that would be less than 20% of what Oracle's projected backlog is.
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B
Well, the backlog's over five years and the, and it was like 80 billion in one year was the loss.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So the total loss over the next five years for OpenAI might be similar.
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C
But if this backlog is like really real and the demand is there, it's going to pan out. It's going to be contingent on OpenAI continuing to just raise more and more and more capital.
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B
Capital. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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C
And, and other players haven't had trouble yet.
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B
So yeah, greatest will continue. I, 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.
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C
Here he is.
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B
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.
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D
So boring.
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B
Yeah, it was late your time. Right. But we appreciate you staying up and we appreciate you coming on the show today. Yes. Good.
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C
You seem relaxed. Just a regular day. You're, you're posting, you're posting yesterday. If you should just document.
- [18:20]
D
Exactly.
- [18:20]
B
Yeah. I'm glad you put down the vibe coding.
- [18:23]
D
I'm still getting stressed when it's not coding and I know it's like sitting and waiting for my input.
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B
Yeah, well, hopefully I do too much waiting today. No. What's the process been like? What time did you wake up? Take me through the day.
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D
I Woke up at 6, 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.
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B
Nice.
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D
Get dressed. Was like, should I wear this cap or another cap?
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B
Okay.
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C
It's a blockbuster ipo.
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D
I know. Thank you for recognizing it. Everyone's like, why are you wearing that 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, all, hello, hello. And then some breakfast, and you had to have some speech and you have to say some nice words.
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C
Had to ring the bell.
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D
Ring the bell. 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. What, ever.
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C
What was he doing ever?
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D
No, he just, like, you know, he.
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B
Joins the West Coast.
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C
He's more west coast guy.
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D
So this was actually his first.
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B
Wow.
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D
His first, my second and his first.
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C
Did he thank you for giving me?
- [19:39]
D
Of course. We know we. But I was very, very happy that he did it because I had to, like, be a little bit persistent. Like, please, Michael, join.
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B
What's it like working with him on the board?
- [19:47]
D
Fantastic.
- [19:48]
B
I mean, how would you characterize him relative to other board members? What's his style?
- [19:52]
D
What I tell you is what's amazing about that man is that I say this a little bit laughingly when I say, look never into the details. Always right. Most people have to really be into all this, 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 fantastic.
- [20:19]
B
Yeah. Take me through him, you, the rest of the board, processing the last few years, what were the crucible moments? To put it in Sequoia's language, Just a few. Just a few.
- [20:29]
D
It's been of a roller coaster, so.
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B
People will be familiar with what you're referring to. But I imagine the roller coaster started on day one. It always does. Yeah. What was the first roller coaster moment?
- [20:40]
D
There were tons. You know, like, the funny thing is that obviously, since we're a factoring company, meaning that, like, we. First thing we were, like, first time we were ever giving people credit. We were just like, let's wait and see if somebody actually pays. You know, like, we were sitting there, I remember first weeks like, oh, oh, wonder now. Now they're supposed to pay. Hopefully some money comes in. Yeah, they're paying. It works.
- [20:57]
B
Yeah.
- [20:58]
D
So that was important. Then there was like, you know, Christmas sales came, and we were just like, oh, my God, we're supposed to pay out so much money.
- [21:04]
B
And you have. And you need to get.
- [21:06]
D
You need to pay for that.
- [21:08]
B
Yeah.
- [21:08]
D
We have a crash crunch. And not almost. There was a real cash crunch. And I remember sitting. This is 20 years ago, but I remember sitting there and, like, calling some of our employees and like, hey, I think something's wrong with the. With the bank. So your salary may come a little bit late. May come a little bit late.
- [21:24]
C
It's a bank's problem.
- [21:25]
D
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.
- [21:32]
B
Well, speaking of factoring, you have a partnership with Chipotle. We wanted.
- [21:35]
C
You.
- [21:36]
B
We wanted to celebrate by getting you to sign a Chipotle burrito. Would you mind autographing?
- [21:41]
C
Yeah.
- [21:42]
B
Our Chipotle.
- [21:43]
D
I love it. I love it.
- [21:45]
C
We're building the museum of business. Exactly. And we're gonna. We're gonna.
- [21:49]
D
Oh, sorry, I broke.
- [21:50]
C
No, it's perfect. It's perfect. It's authentic.
- [21:53]
B
Thank you.
- [21:55]
C
What? Yeah, give it. Walk us through, like, the past, like, few months.
- [21:59]
D
Well, no, it's been interesting, actually. I must say.
- [22:01]
C
I.
- [22:01]
D
You know, we obviously been planning them, so. So to be a little bit serious, the point was that me and Michael always felt that the Google IPO was like, the ipo. Like, that's how you're supposed to do it. You have a globally successful company that's profitable. But at the same point, I have IPOs and has so many years of growth ahead of themselves, so much success and so forth. So we thought, like, okay, that's the time you want to do it. And for us being from Europe, to be global, you have to be successful in the U.S. like, otherwise, you're not global. So. And then you have to be profitable in the US and these things were achieved last year. When they were achieved, then we're like, okay, now we're starting to get ready, and we think we have decades of growth ahead of ourselves, and then it's more to the bankers and the timing and the market. And, you know, I was very fortunate that your beloved president and 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 then the IPO happened.
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B
Now, that's great.
- [22:59]
D
It's amazing.
- [23:01]
B
So, yeah, walk me through the long term. How does. What does the company look like in a decade. I'm wondering how, how oligopolistic is this category? Is their plan to expand into a financial super app? Like what does the bar future look like? Because that Google example they've been building, what, two decades in the public market?
- [23:21]
D
Yep, yep, yep. No, I think that is. So it actually started 10 years ago when we pivoted. So we used to be a competitor of Stripe and Adyen, 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 what could we have done better? And then let's go for the consumer side instead. And in 15 we sat down, we said, the future of financial services is going to be somewhere in the future. You're going to have like a digital financial system wakes you up in the morning, say hi, analyze your mortgage. I realized I could save you 20 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 going to happen eventually. So it's a bit like self driving cars. I don't know when, but we know that it will happen. And then, you know, suddenly I'm in San Francisco doing Awaymo and I'm like, wow, it's actually happening right futures here. So the same will happen here. When ChatGPT came along, we're like, okay, it's going to happen faster than we thought, but still directionally, that's it. So you want to be a digital financial 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, seems very likely, that's going to be a very valuable position to be in. And it's going to be a big global company. But like why Klarna? Why us? Why would we be the ones that accomplish this thing? And then we say, well, there are a few things. One, you have to be global. So we've achieved that. Us, Canada, Europe and so forth. That's critical. You have to be scale 111 million users. We're now, you know, 111 million users. Yeah, exactly, thank you, that's important. So those two are critical and you have to find a way to kind of grow the brand. And thanks to our amazing partners with Macy's and Sephora and Walmart and all, you know, that's growing the network. And then the next thing is now to offer more financial services. So we launched a card Here in the U.S. 700,000 people sign up in six weeks, 5 million people on the waiting list. So we feel like it's going. So that's kind of how we're going to grow into the full retail banking offer. And I think that's the future to be that.
- [25:25]
B
Yeah. Can you explain to me how some of those partners you mentioned, they might have their own credit card. It was always powered by Visa. What does the partnership look like with a large retailer over time? Do they have a white labeled product? Do they never do that? Do they try and roll their own and compete with. You seem super smart but I mean.
- [25:43]
D
Sometimes it happens that, you know, some merch has done that. Our experience from Europe is that over time it's a little bit like, you know, there will be co branding stuff happening. 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 co brand deal. Right. It's just going to be Delta but with Amex and stuff like that. And that's very similar to what Clona does with with some of the bigger brands. It's more of a co brand while more for the like maybe more smaller merchants. Just Klarna. But yeah, there's gonna be some of that.
- [26:15]
B
Good, that makes a lot of sense.
- [26:16]
C
What's the number one thing that people misunderstand about the core buy now pay later products?
- [26:23]
D
I think the key thing is obviously, you know, there was a lot of like burritos on installments and stuff like that going on and we don't necessarily mind but it is a misunderstanding. It's just because in Europe Klana is used for all categories. It's like your PayPal wallet, you use it for everything. And here in the US we were so successful with Buy now, pay later. So it's a little bit of like a blessing but also curse. 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? You know like. And I'm like, yeah, but we work with Disney, 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 doordash. It's not that they want to put things on installments. What they want us to help them do is think about ways to aggregate payments to drive down the payments. Cost. Payments cost is a huge issue. And you have an average order value of $20, $30. Visa charges a fixed payment fee for every transaction. So they want to find ways to. That's why, you know, somebody like Uber will always ask you, hey, upload 100 bucks. Why are they doing that? Because that lowers their payments cost.
- [27:23]
B
Right, yeah, that makes sense.
- [27:24]
D
So we have helped them build products that help them try to do that. Still very early. Still early. But like there's.
- [27:29]
B
So there's just so much source of the compounding advantage. You're. Over time, you have more and more data on how to underwrite people. And then also more and more ACH integration.
- [27:38]
D
Exactly.
- [27:39]
B
More customers that can pay with lower rates.
- [27:41]
D
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 where payments is regulated. I'm competing with companies that has 20 bips for debit, 40 bips for credit. That's the fees that we're seeing here in the US people are paying 200 for credit cards.
- [28:01]
B
Right.
- [28:01]
D
And 100bps 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. Yeah, we're coming into this rich market called the US where like the margins are just, you know, gigantic.
- [28:18]
B
Yeah, yeah. I want to hit the size going. How much did you raise today? This is a fundraising event for you, right?
- [28:24]
D
Yeah, not that big. Actually. We did only $200 million.
- [28:27]
B
That's pretty big.
- [28:30]
D
But the full round was like, I think 1.6 or something. Billion. Yeah.
- [28:33]
B
Wait, so. Yeah. What is the structure of that?
- [28:35]
D
No, because the company.
- [28:37]
B
Think about that.
- [28:38]
D
The company didn't need to raise much money. I mean, we're very efficient with our capital and, you know, we've been close to profitability for a while. So this was more a secondary event.
- [28:47]
B
Okay, sure.
- [28:48]
D
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.
- [29:00]
C
It's evolving.
- [29:01]
D
But the primer itself was quite limited, actually.
- [29:03]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:04]
D
And I didn't sell a single stock.
- [29:05]
B
Oh, there we go. There we Go 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, there's a lot of opportunities to save with AI, but then there's also some. You could throw some really diesel inference at things and throw a reasoning model at every single transaction and all of a sudden you're like, my cloud bill is really expensive.
- [29:34]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:35]
D
Well, the truth is, if you look at, I sometimes joke that at the end there was only going to be a build for an Amazon and one from, you know, Claude.
- [29:41]
B
Sure.
- [29:41]
D
That's the only thing the whole company will be two bills and they might.
- [29:44]
B
Be the same company.
- [29:45]
D
Yeah, exactly.
- [29:46]
B
Running on the same servers.
- [29:48]
D
But I think, I mean you looked Oracle today was insane, right? Yeah, but I think that the. No, I think, look, I think we maybe 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.
- [30:02]
F
Yeah.
- [30:03]
C
Remember you built your own CX tool just directly with OpenAI, right? Yep, yep, yep.
- [30:08]
D
So we've took out 1200 SaaS software, but to be honest, like Salesforce, $2 million in license fees, it's nice. But on a P And L of $3 billion, it's not like, doesn't make much of a difference. 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 because the less of a mess, the easier it is both for human and for AI to use it to something productive.
- [30:36]
B
Right.
- [30:36]
D
And so that's been kind of the key thing. But I would say we over index slightly on productivity.
- [30:40]
B
Sure.
- [30:41]
D
Now we are indicing more in growth.
- [30:43]
B
Yep.
- [30:43]
D
And unfortunately for human labor, which I find unfortunate, is like, we don't feel we need more people.
- [30:48]
B
Sure.
- [30:48]
D
Like we are already gone from 7,400 to 3,000. I think one of the most shocking things people saw, the investors were like, how come you're growing your revenue so much and your OPEX just coming down? It's like the opposite where you, what you're supposed to be talking about. But in our case we haven't laid off people, we have just relied on attrition. So 20% of the workforce leaves Every year, naturally, because they go on for other adventures and we just rely on that. And then we become fewer and fewer and we get more and more done, which is amazing. So the only thing we could ever consider where I would say it makes sense potentially to spend more money is marketing. But right now we're very happy to do within the budgets we have.
- [31:25]
B
Yeah, we talked to Alex.
- [31:26]
C
Yeah, he was saying the exact same thing.
- [31:27]
B
Very similar thing. Yeah, what about? I'm interested to hear. So I understand the over indexing on productivity, then maybe pulling back, but it feels like two years ago every company was kind of seeing AI as a hammer. I mean, all you got is a hammer. Everything looks like a nail. And so every single business process, every single thing is like, can we throw AI? Can we throw AI? And a lot of consultants made a lot of money selling slide decks, doing that. I feel like we are now in the scalpel era and there are incredible use cases for LLMs, maybe within software that you're already paying for and you're not even implementing it, maybe to, 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, but it's something that you're, that you're excited about. The early glimpse of what's possible.
- [32:25]
D
I think more recently I've gotten all the senior managers at Claw now to start using Cursor regularly. And I still think that there's like there. I am still unfortunately quite negative on Sass 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, 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.
- [33:03]
C
Well, in your position of getting all the benefits of AI but not having not being threatened in the same way that other, you know, you guys make software, but you're a payments company, right? Yeah. Financial services. Somebody can't go on a cursor and be like, build me Klarna. Don't make mistakes. Right. Like it's.
- [33:21]
B
Yeah, we're getting a bunch of data on whether or not we should underwrite this person's risk profile.
- [33:26]
C
How have you been seeing 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 Lego legal mumbo jumbo. It's confusing. 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 getting this product today and then I'm going to pay it in these parts. Do you think that lending broadly is in for a reckoning as everyday consumers start to get access to. Again, ChatGPT is not advertising itself as a legal tool, but you can get a lot of insight from loan documents.
- [34:09]
D
It comes back to what I said about, you know, that vision we had 10 years ago about where we're still on. Exactly. Which we're still on, which is just like digital financial system. So what I believe is that if you look at a lot of industries there are making excess profits because of the switching costs. So we customers are just not that keen on switching, especially when it comes to banking. But also electricity carriers, all these things, they're not. It's not like I really love my carrier, phone carrier that much, it's just that I don't bother to switch. Right. And that allows them to charge more, allows them to pay, you know, to have lower quality services at higher cost. So when you imagine a world where you have a digital financial system 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 that thing for you. It must lead to a better functioning economy which with less success profits, especially in this. It doesn't matter for Prada or sorry, I shouldn't say this is Prada for whatever it might be.
- [35:14]
C
Man of taste.
- [35:15]
D
Yeah, thank you for Prada. Lvmh doesn't matter. Irrelevant for the brands for Nike, irrelevant for utilities. And so what is banking then? I would say it's a mix. It's a little bit of a mix. It has both some aspects of trust and customer preference and so forth, but there is also utility aspect to it. So I believe that all of the excess profits we've seen in banking are going to come down. And I've been very clear with our investors that if you're investing in 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 pie.
- [35:52]
B
What's next for you? Are you going to stay running the company for the future?
- [35:56]
D
I hope so. I've only been doing this for two decades. Come on, guys.
- [36:01]
C
Just, like, just getting started.
- [36:02]
D
I mean, at this point, are you.
- [36:04]
C
You seem. You seem incredibly calm, and it does.
- [36:07]
B
Feel like this is just another day for you. It is crazy.
- [36:09]
D
Partially another day for me, but I.
- [36:11]
B
Think that's a special day. Congratulations. But also. It's good. Yeah, it's good to be in that mode.
- [36:15]
D
Look, as I said, like I. I tell you, emotionally going to Bentonville, Arkansas.
- [36:20]
B
Yeah.
- [36:21]
D
Standing at the grave of Sam Walton.
- [36:23]
B
Yeah.
- [36:23]
D
And being at the cusp. 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.
- [36:31]
C
Entrepreneurial, the greatest retailers of all time.
- [36:33]
D
It is fantastic. That, to me was. I'm sorry. Like, I love this, but emotionally, that was in tears. That was very special. Just reading that air.
- [36:41]
B
Yeah.
- [36:41]
D
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.
- [36:51]
C
Was there anyone 20 years ago that believed that you'd take it all the way here?
- [36:55]
D
Apart from myself?
- [36:56]
B
Yeah.
- [36:57]
C
Yeah, exactly. Look, because by the time Sequoia is investing, then everyone's like, okay, they'll be at the. They'll be at Nicee soon enough. It seems inevitable.
- [37:09]
D
It's funny. 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 off to the band Global. Become global? You know, wouldn't that be awesome? Like, it's kind of fun. 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. I'm sitting there. Yeah, exactly that. Like, you know, I actually predict. But. But I think it's a little bit like, you know, if you ask a soccer player or 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.
- [37:49]
B
Of course.
- [37:50]
D
As a founder, I was dreaming of.
- [37:52]
C
Being Here in the league.
- [37:53]
D
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 going to do everything that I could. And you know, all the energy and all the hours spent and all the sacrifices. Right.
- [38:06]
C
So feels like the biggest misunderstanding of, of this company broadly is just like your intentionality around building this right of like actually trying to build fair, transparent products that are going after those excess profits like you just said. Thank you.
- [38:26]
D
I'm happy to hear that. But 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 let's give.
- [38:37]
C
It up for McKinsey. Yay. They don't get enough love.
- [38:42]
D
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.07 they tried a credit card themselves because they were supposed to get a good scoring and then suddenly they find themselves with $4,000 worth of, 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 depth. 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 cashback. That's not them. Those are the prosperous and content the Amex users. The Chess Sapphire card, that's a different group. This group wants fixed installments, 0% interest, budgeting tools, clarity, honesty, no overdraft fees, no negative surprises. Just give me like a robust, solid product that I can use for my purchases, debit and then occasionally when I 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, you know, the cashback programs. They're doing them for themselves. You have to ask your customer, what does my customer want? And not everyone wants that. Right? Like, and it's fine, the other people want it and that's okay. But for this group, it's something different. Right? And that's what we're trying to do.
- [40:14]
B
Okay, last question. You're wearing the last Blockbuster hat. What's your favorite movie?
- [40:19]
D
That's a good movie. Like, I have to tell you recently, 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.
- [40:30]
B
That's great.
- [40:30]
D
It was awesome. So, so that is probably.
- [40:33]
C
But did you bring the family today?
- [40:36]
D
No, I did not.
- [40:37]
C
It's just another, this is just another business trip. This was.
- [40:40]
D
I did a road trip.
- [40:41]
C
I'm gonna go to Wall Street. I'll be back.
- [40:43]
D
We made 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 go. And so this is from the store.
- [40:55]
B
Not from the movie.
- [40:56]
D
This is from the store. This is from the store. You should go there. 50% of the revenue is still DVD rentals.
- [41:03]
B
Wow. So.
- [41:04]
D
And it's fantastic experience here.
- [41:05]
B
We have a new hat.
- [41:06]
D
Oh, I'm not gonna have to answer this one now.
- [41:07]
B
So that's good to put it on.
- [41:09]
D
Yeah.
- [41:09]
B
Thank you so much.
- [41:11]
C
Last question, last question. Last, last final, final question. Is your profile picture AI or is it real?
- [41:16]
B
Oh, yeah. Are you that flight Photoshop. It's Photoshop.
- [41:20]
C
Handmade. Well, your stock chart looks like that. Thank you guys to the whole team. You're the man.
- [41:32]
B
We'll see you later. Have a good one.
- [41:35]
C
What a legend. Just another, another day. Just another day.
- [41:40]
B
I just got to go take my company business trip.
- [41:42]
C
I'll be right back. Just raising. I'm not even selling shares.
- [41:46]
B
Yeah, I'm not selling.
- [41:47]
C
I mean, yeah, I, I, I do think people have this massive. Miss, come on the show.
- [41:53]
B
Welcome. How are you doing?
- [41:54]
G
I'm pretty good. Hi, I'm David.
- [41:56]
B
Nice to meet you. Just pretty good. It's pretty good. Should be fantastic.
- [42:01]
G
I am absolutely fired up.
- [42:03]
B
How you doing?
- [42:05]
C
We got lots of, lots of sound effects here.
- [42:08]
G
I am David Sandstrom. I'm the CMO at Klarna.
- [42:11]
B
How did you get introduced to Klarna? How did you meet Sebastian?
- [42:14]
G
I used to run one of the biggest ad agencies in the Nordics in Europe. And we actually started to do the Klarna transformation from this blue, boring B2B company into this consumer franchise. Yeah, I started out agency side and after a couple of months, Sebastian was like, why don't you do that here?
- [42:32]
B
What were you, 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. Because there's so many different niches. You could be video, you could be billboards, you could be. You know, there's a whole bunch of different things you could do.
- [42:45]
G
Now. We. I did all of the above.
- [42:48]
B
You did everything.
- [42:48]
G
No, but I'm. I'm. This strategy is probably my thing. I'm super interested in consumer behavior. Like, why do people pick a Coke over a Pepsi? Why do people walk into a McDonald's versus a Burger King?
- [43:00]
C
Like, the science.
- [43:01]
G
Yeah, the science behind something that cannot be science. Right. The thing that. That really intrigues me, like, the psychology.
- [43:07]
B
Part of, like, the labubu thing now. Right?
- [43:10]
C
Yeah.
- [43:10]
G
How does that. How does that happen?
- [43:12]
B
Yeah.
- [43:12]
G
How do people fall in love with ugly plastic dolls?
- [43:15]
B
And like, we've been asking. We were asking the same question on the show two weeks ago. We tried to dig into the thing.
- [43:21]
C
Right.
- [43:21]
G
And those things intrigue me. And I do think marketing done well and done correctly, isn't that, you know.
- [43:28]
B
Yep.
- [43:28]
G
Is. Is in that vicinity of being, you know, whose idea you make money.
- [43:33]
C
Whose idea was pink?
- [43:35]
B
That.
- [43:35]
G
That was actually my idea.
- [43:36]
C
I knew it.
- [43:37]
A
I knew it.
- [43:37]
C
I knew it. Well, the thing. So the thing about. The thing about ideas, guys, you know, market, you know, marketers, is like, you can sometimes you just have a great idea and it's incredibly simple. And. And that. That one idea ends up paying just massive, massive dividends, which I feel like Klarna is just consistently so recognizable and really owns. Owns the color.
- [43:59]
G
Yeah, we do. But I think looking back at what we've done, everything, the strategy, everything has been fairly easy and simple.
- [44:07]
D
Right.
- [44:07]
G
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.
- [44:17]
D
Very blue.
- [44:19]
G
Everyone is blue. Like, everyone is blue. Just put the logos up. Everyone is blue. Someone sprinkled some black on top. But everyone is blue. And we knew that, you know, only politicians and social media were more disliked than financial institutions. So it's at the absolute bottom of trust. So I just said, like, what's not blue? Like, what's the opposite of blue? Here we have it.
- [44:41]
B
Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Where was the Klarna brand before you came in? Who was it catering to? Was the key oversight that it was just fully B2B. Fully B2B. Is that the.
- [44:54]
G
No, it wasn't. But it wasn't a brand. It was a fantastic product. Guess the color Blue.
- [45:00]
B
Blue, of course. Blue logo, of course.
- [45:03]
G
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.
- [45:19]
B
Right.
- [45:19]
G
It's a transaction. And that is what we try to change, like in everything. And what we did with Snoop and Paris and A$AP Rocky Pink and how we show up and you know, talk.
- [45:29]
C
About the, talk about the cultural differences between the European market and. And then coming to America because I feel like they.
- [45:37]
G
From my perspective and from the financial perspective, the big, big difference is that US is a credit heavy market. Everyone understands we love to spend money, love credit cards, love credit cards, but also understand credit. If you ask a random European, like, what is apr? Like, nothing really interesting. And Europe is a debit market.
- [46:00]
B
Right.
- [46:00]
G
And understanding those dynamics, how that works, the power of credit cards in the US and the stronghold they have versus Europe, that is a debit market. Different. What we see now also the digitalization. Like, I haven't seen cash or a car like a physical card in, I don't know, five, 10 years. I just haven't seen it.
- [46:20]
B
Yeah.
- [46:20]
G
That's the only thing I always forget when coming to the US My physical card. So I show up, they're like, you need a card.
- [46:26]
C
But I have Apple pay, I have a phone. Yeah. You're like, what's going on?
- [46:30]
B
Yeah.
- [46:30]
G
So that's the biggest difference. But then, I mean, I love the U.S. i love the spirit in the U.S. the American consumer is undefeated. Everything is bigger. Nothing is impossible. Like, there's just this, I think, greatness to think 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.
- [47:05]
B
Really?
- [47:05]
C
I was about to ask a celebrity.
- [47:07]
G
Exactly like, you're a sellout. Why do you do this? You only want to make money in the US when someone does something where they're like, you're the best.
- [47:16]
B
Yeah.
- [47:17]
G
Make as much money as you can. This is awesome. So there's a huge difference in that as well.
- [47:22]
B
Yeah. No, I feel like Shaquille o' Neal in particular has built a whole brand around, like being just everywhere in every ad possible. And some of the folks that you've worked have done the same thing. I've seen Snoop all over the place.
- [47:34]
C
I Love it.
- [47:34]
G
It is like. And if you pay me, I'm down.
- [47:36]
B
Yeah. And it becomes there. 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 world.
- [47:48]
G
You can't even guess.
- [47:49]
B
What about in terms of actual, like, the distribution of marketing materials? Is there any difference in America, you know, there's this power law in TV advertising around the super bowl, there's obviously a ton of stuff going on on social media, podcasts, live streams. We have a bunch of advertisers. Where. Where, where does. Where. Is there a difference between where the actual ad impressions are coming from? Is there any difference or is it.
- [48:14]
G
Pretty much the same? I think the interesting thing with the US is that you still have these tentpole moments.
- [48:18]
B
Yeah.
- [48:18]
G
Like the super bowl, you have that thing everyone gathers. You have these, like, not millions of viewers, but tens and hundreds and millions of viewers. In Europe, everything is so distributed digital is very strong. So there. There is hard to build a brand.
- [48:32]
B
Yeah.
- [48:33]
G
When you don't have these tentpole moments. Because a brand is very much about. Like, you and I have seen the same thing and we think it's cool when every ad is personalized. I don't know, like, have you seen. Seen the clown ad? I saw it, but that was. That was only on my TikTok algorithm.
- [48:47]
B
It should always be a bad circle if everyone saw the same ad because you know why it's going viral.
- [48:51]
G
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, part of the culture. Exactly. Part of the culture. And you don't have that in Europe.
- [49:04]
B
Yep.
- [49:04]
C
How involved did you get on the road show side? Clarnos is interesting in an interesting place where the consumer brand, I feel like, is almost different than the brand within tech, for example.
- [49:17]
B
Right.
- [49:17]
C
Because, like, in our world, a lot of our audiences are high earners, founders, investors, executives at technology companies. They maybe aren't using Klarna nearly as much as the average American, let's say. How. What's the. What's kind of like the disconnect between those kind of the two brands?
- [49:35]
G
Sometimes that's. That's a difficult bridge to gap. A lot of our investors don't use the product on a daily basis.
- [49:40]
C
Right.
- [49:40]
G
If you look at a Spotify, for example, from Stockholm as well, like, the investors might use that on A daily basis.
- [49:45]
D
Exactly.
- [49:47]
G
That was a thing with Figma, right? Figma, fantastic company. Investors don't know how to design. Right. They haven't used that.
- [49:53]
C
Yeah. But even the only thing different there is an investor knows that every one of their portfolio companies uses Figma every day.
- [50:00]
B
Right, Exactly.
- [50:00]
C
So it's.
- [50:02]
G
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.
- [50:15]
B
Right.
- [50:16]
G
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 Klarn is the least. Some of our competitors as well, of course. But I do think that's the story to tell.
- [50:30]
B
Right.
- [50:31]
G
And we're seeing that shift amongst consumers as well. Like they're sick and tired of being screwed over by their credit card companies. High fees, predatory APRs, all of that. So I think we're seeing that seismic shift and that has been a very important piece for us to tell that story from a consumer perspective. Working a lot with testimonials, our own customers. But you're completely right.
- [50:54]
C
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 incredible wait list. But how are you thinking about going multi product in the US Market specifically?
- [51:08]
G
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. North of 30 million consumers in the U.S. 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.
- [51:42]
B
I mean, I want to make 30 years of monthly payments. I mean, there you go.
- [51:46]
G
I mean, Amazon started out as a bookstore store and now it's the everything store. And we started out with payments and now we're the everything company.
- [51:53]
B
We're excited to keep following the journey. Thank you so much for coming.
- [51:56]
G
Thank you so much for having me.
- [51:57]
B
Congratulations.
- [51:57]
C
Congratulations.
- [51:59]
B
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 Jordy 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.
- [52:16]
C
Some of them if you're just tuning in for the first time. I just wanted to share. We have a burrito by burrito.
- [52:24]
B
It's actually, it's not just any burrito.
- [52:25]
C
It'S a chipotle burrito.
- [52:27]
B
And Klarna does have a partnership.
- [52:28]
C
This will be going in the business hall of fame that we're putting together next.
- [52:33]
B
Let's bring in our next guest. Oh, I I It has been, it.
- [52:37]
C
Has been too long. Great to see you.
- [52:41]
E
I'm bringing you some sweets.
- [52:43]
C
No way.
- [52:44]
E
Thank you.
- [52:44]
B
Like when you came Monday. I told you don't be they own they I don't hear from you for Clara owns Pink and here you are.
- [52:52]
C
Clarna owns Pink. No no other branded to be here.
- [52:54]
B
See you guys again. This is nice too. Thank you. Yeah. Pink. Pink.
- [52:58]
E
We overtaking the the whole trading floor.
- [53:00]
B
Yeah. How did you, how did you become a board member? How did you meet Sebastian?
- [53:04]
E
So I joined the board recently. I joined earlier, earlier this year. Of course. Klarna is investing heavily into AI and figuring out how to combine the best experience with a lot of the AI innovation. And that's how Sebastian and I met and now over a year back started speaking about AI, how we can innovate to build. The financial assistant of the future.
- [53:24]
B
Was the actual intro through like Sequoia folks or something?
- [53:27]
E
It was initially we met on the event of Sequoia's event.
- [53:30]
B
Sure.
- [53:31]
E
I was on one of the panels. Sebastian asked the question is this AI ascent? It was the Europe 100, which is another of course amazing thing about the connection where Klarna is one of the few European companies that started in Europe and built a global brand that everybody recognizes even today. Earlier working through the trading floor, 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 another founder that started a company in Europe and is trying to build global business. Sebastian and I got along well and started speaking about.
- [54:07]
B
Yeah, 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 understanding of your understanding of AI could potentially get him up to speed on what was coming.
- [54:19]
E
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 adoption. He was one of the first to jump into the AI, start figuring out how you can deploy agents in customer service. A few hundred people work could be elevated through the AI work and eventually optimized on the bottom line as well. And we started speaking about a lot of other ideas of what could happen, what is possible working in voice. Of course there's an interesting angle of how you can combine the part of voice experience across the customer service where people can call in, whether it's a claim, whether it's to understand a little bit more. And that's where we.
- [54:58]
B
What about on the B2B 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?
- [55:37]
E
I'm optimistic for like a scenario where you have like Klarna, a lot of inbound, a lot of partners that want to work with you now, a lot of the requests, you need to figure out a smarter way to handle those requests. So instead of waiting for a longer time to, to speak with a human, could you validate the workflow within voice agent and go through that quicker? We've actually seen and deployed that for ourselves where if you want to accelerate the pipeline, you can speak with the voice agent and tell them about use case and actually what happened is that a lot of people are more keen to tell you a lot more than they would otherwise. But then there's so many other areas where that's relevant. A good example is training people internally. So whether you are on the talent team and I think that's how a lot of people in 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 agent on the tech side, whether it's voice agent. You can actually learn and do that better. And then there's of course the last angle, which is the easiest one, but only easy if everybody adopts it is how you can use AI in the internal process and internal tooling. We actually just spoke with one of the execs across the C suite at Klarna who is now deploying herself some of the AI tooling to improve the switch from to do into the actual project management flow with the right metadata with who is the specific tasks for. So it auto fills a lot of the information that otherwise would be manual and take a long time. So that's kind of those all three domains. Whether it's delivering better customer experience with AI, whether it's improving how you actually get customers through the flow and how you train the stuff internally or optimize process internally. I think all are so relevant with that work.
- [57:14]
B
Yeah, it feels like it's part of this like narrative that we're seeing where for a lot of companies AI was just kind of like okay, get a big deck from a consulting firm and it's going to do everything, it's going to replace everyone. But now we're in kind of more the AI as a scalpel era and plugging in 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.
- [57:42]
E
You were like a stitch up of effectively phonies to make your voice work. But I think 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 voice, as 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 product delivery through that first steps in the flow are happening all with AI.
- [58:24]
B
Is there some sort of parallel to draw between the fact that I feel like Both Klarna and 11 labs are not the do everything all at once. It's like do one thing really, really well, grow, own that and then maybe expand. Is that. Am I jumping to conclusions there? Does that feel like something that you and Sebastian can kind of bond over?
- [58:48]
E
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 Karna did it incredibly well being so early in the E commerce, then digital payments now with so many of the AI innovations. And I think understanding the customer working backwards and then expanding is the right move. At 11 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.
- [59:28]
C
What's coming down the pipeline in Europe? Are there exciting companies that I'm sure you guys, when a company starts showing promise, I'm sure you and Sebastian get hit up pretty quickly. What should we expect?
- [59:38]
B
Europe?
- [59:39]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:40]
H
The Godfathers.
- [59:41]
E
You probably are seeing the 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 like a stuff. Sebastian has also a little bit of Polish roots as well where I'm from. Poland is also very excited for Sebastian 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 going to go for it. Lots more to do, I think to bring it to the level to the US innovation. But the energy is there. That's very clear. The founders are realizing that that's a real path. Real path. And you should. Even if you start from Europe, you can build a global company. And I think that realization wasn't there five, ten years back.
- [60:33]
B
Totally.
- [60:33]
E
And now it's like you should start thinking about the global space from the start and it's possible. Examples like Sebastian are great examples. Being 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 all of the work. So I think that's a good inspiration for all the founders there too.
- [60:55]
B
Yeah, it is a different story. I mean, I feel like nubank has not expanded into the US in any meaningful way and they build a fantastic business. Sequoia company.
- [61:04]
E
Obviously Fintechs are amazing in Europe, in Poland it's.
- [61:06]
B
But there's something special about you and Klarna like starting not in America, but actually being able to. 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.
- [61:20]
E
100%. I think you need to from the start think globally and especially now. Like if you are starting a company.
- [61:26]
B
I mean 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 quarterly trips or make sure you have someone on your cap table in Sandhill. Like how can you concretize, I mean without making too many generalizations.
- [61:49]
E
I think the first piece would be you. Even without the physical presence, you should be reaching out to people, writing the newsletters. A lot of the AI people that are active on social media and don't try to pitch them on the work. Show them the samples, show them the product, let them test it if they like it. That's your cracked footsteps.
- [62:06]
B
Just be a live player in the community online. Exactly.
- [62:09]
E
And you need to be, you need to go direct, you need to show them the work. You don't want to go the fluff way of the promise of the future. So I think this is like the very concrete thing that worked really well for us and I think for a lot of other companies we see currently. And second to your other point, you do want people on the ground in US sooner rather than later. The ecosystem is thriving there. You want at least few people that, that can be in Silicon Valley or they can be in New York 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.
- [62:43]
C
You don't want your competitor competitor going through YC demo day and signing up, you know, half the batch before.
- [62:49]
E
Exactly. You need to be with the YC companies before, before any other player. 100%.
- [62:54]
B
What's the fundraising environment out like in Europe like?
- [62:59]
E
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 plenty. It's more about the usual. Get the smart capital, get a smart investors that will help you scale to us. That will help you get the talent that, that are in there 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 100% there is a lot of Capital of money that everybody can get. And I think surely you're seeing a lot of European companies are going with pretty great funding rounds as well, especially.
- [63:39]
B
In the recent months. Yeah, I mean, Deli and Aspro from Founders Fund on the show. And he invested in. Was it in Durasat, the satellite. Satellite bus company. And it's just like a crazy, crazy company out in Eastern Europe that's just built like a phenomenal business in Hardtack, which is like total narrative violation and yeah, there's definitely stuff all over the place.
- [64:02]
E
Exactly. And then you might have seen N8N, which is. Which is another of the agentic workflow builders which everybody uses across the engineers to go to market teams, which is another great example, of course, Lava Ball, we spoke about.
- [64:15]
B
So I mean, we have to ask. You came on the show on Monday, you announced some fundraising. It sounded like you weren't in a position where you needed a ton of primary capital. Are we going to see you out here soon?
- [64:27]
E
That's the hope we are building to, you know, to create a generational company that tender offers. Exactly. For that to get people liquidity so they can focus on that long term. So that's the hub. We'd love to, of course, be here and follow Klarna's path one day.
- [64:42]
B
Well, hopefully we'll be there and thank you. We love to ask that so we can get a sheepish denial and then play the clip when it happens in a couple of years.
- [64:49]
C
Yeah. Year two, year or two from now.
- [64:52]
B
Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much.
- [64:54]
C
Yeah, cheers.
- [64:58]
B
Legend coming in the studio. Let me tell you about some more advertising.
- [65:03]
C
Careful with that burrito. That is a piece of business history.
- [65:06]
B
TBVM is made possible by wandering. Find your happy place. Also ad quick, we mentioned billboards earlier. I didn't get ad read in, but there's a lot of billboards over here. Billboards all over New York City. Go to ad quick.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@getbezel.com also numeral hq.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 also adeo adeo.com you can go to ado.com tvpn customer relationship magic. Adeo 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 Fin 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 Mati talking about how Klarna has been using AI in their customer service organization. If you want to bring AI to bear in your customer service organization, go to Fin AI and we will bring in our yellow who we got leave. We have the next person. We have two minutes.
- [66:29]
C
Two minutes. We get to hang out.
- [66:30]
B
We get to hang out. Let's play some sound.
- [66:34]
C
Let's amp it up. First time on the soundboard.
- [66:40]
B
Yeah. If you put this thing within. Within striking distance of me, I'm gonna have some fun. Anyway.
- [66:45]
C
It is one of the most beautiful views in the world.
- [66:48]
B
It really is the fortress of finance. The east coast edition also.
- [66:51]
C
They out trust me process too. We've got a big.
- [66:53]
B
Oh yeah, the trust is really, really good.
- [66:55]
C
This thing is just a real monument.
- [66:58]
B
Fantastic. And I see Andrew Reed down, incredibly active.
- [67:02]
C
Look, there he is. There he is.
- [67:03]
B
Hey, there he is. Come on up. Come on up.
- [67:07]
C
He's working on it. He's working on it. He's on the schedule.
- [67:11]
B
Yeah, we'll bring him in.
- [67:12]
C
Joining us.
- [67:12]
B
I think we have him on it.
- [67:13]
C
But yeah, it's great. Can we see Kramer? Is Kramer around?
- [67:17]
H
I don't know.
- [67:18]
B
I do believe we're gonna see.
- [67:20]
C
I do see cnbc.
- [67:21]
B
Yeah.
- [67:21]
C
Over there.
- [67:22]
B
But yeah. What. What I was. I mean, the. The whole floor is buzzing and it's. It obviously Klarna IPO is a big deal, but just seeing all the different pods. Everything is really cooking today. The IPO markets fully back something like seven. 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? There is a lot going on.
- [67:47]
C
Yeah. There's figure in the works. StubHub is in the works.
- [67:50]
B
It's not figure the robotics company. It's figure the blockchain company. Is that correct?
- [67:54]
C
Blockchain lending.
- [67:55]
B
Yes, blockchain lending. Okay. We will have to get sharp on. On figure at some point.
- [68:00]
C
Yeah, we're working on getting the founder.
- [68:02]
B
On in the timeline.
- [68:03]
C
I don't have WI fi, so I am guessing. But you can pull up the timeline. Daniel. Daniel Pronk 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. Of Larry.
- [68:32]
B
Yeah, it's a big. It's a big backlog. Backlog. It better be heavy open AI if it's.
- [68:39]
C
Well, well, this question is just asking what, like, how do you plan to physically build? Like, assume the demand is there.
- [68:46]
B
Yeah.
- [68:46]
C
How do you. How are you physically going to build a bigger tent?
- [68:50]
B
It's going to be a lot of tents. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of tents. I mean, how much is. How much are they spending on. I mean, Stargate 500 billion, supposedly. And like Zuck is penciling out $10 billion clock clusters, the trillion dollar cluster. I mean, like, if you talk to the folks at situational awareness anthropic, like these numbers line up with straight lines on log. On log graphs. Yeah. So, you know, it is sort of like somewhat unexpected from. From Oracle specifically.
- [69:24]
C
Here he is. Here he is.
- [69:25]
B
How you doing?
- [69:26]
C
Man of the hour. Boom. Throwing on the hat.
- [69:29]
B
Here we go, second ipo. Great to see you. How you doing? How you feeling?
- [69:33]
H
Thank you.
- [69:34]
C
They really treat you like the mayor.
- [69:35]
H
Sorry for being late. I was picking up some market color.
- [69:38]
B
Okay. What's that?
- [69:39]
H
From the four traders. You know, I feel like I needed to accumulate a little bit more.
- [69:44]
B
Okay.
- [69:44]
H
I need to know where rates are headed.
- [69:45]
B
Okay. Yeah.
- [69:46]
H
I need to know where interest rate spreads are going.
- [69:48]
B
What'd you get for us? What's the market color? What are people saying?
- [69:50]
H
Everyone's talking about Klarna.
- [69:52]
B
Okay.
- [69:52]
H
Yeah, yeah, everyone's very excited.
- [69:54]
B
What about interest rates? Anyone?
- [69:55]
H
That's good. It's proprietary.
- [69:56]
B
Proprietary. Okay.
- [69:57]
C
Proprietary alpha. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. It's great seeing you back here. I love hanging out in the stock exchange.
- [70:05]
B
That's fantastic.
- [70:05]
H
I also love hanging out in the stock exchange.
- [70:07]
B
Tell us the initial story. How did you initially wind up investing in Klarna?
- [70:12]
H
Well, when Sequoia first invested in Klarna, I was a sophomore at Amherst College. I think I probably could have pointed roughly where Sweden was on a map, but I certainly never been there. And Mike Moritz, who had famously invested in PayPal and Google and a bunch of other great companies, and a guy named 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 an associate. And we invested.
- [70:47]
C
In 2010. Right.
- [70:49]
H
2010, in a company that was a Swedish alternative.
- [70:55]
B
Jump scare Whoa.
- [70:59]
H
It was, you know, Swedish slash, maybe Pan Nordic alternative payment company for E Commerce, where, you know, you wouldn't pay until the thing arrived, so you knew you're gonna get what you were getting.
- [71:09]
B
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 rail. So it was like. You pay cash to the delivery driver.
- [71:16]
H
Exactly.
- [71:16]
B
And Klarna was like some. It was like part powering that and building on top of that. Those rails, like, not even. I don't even know, call them rails hands.
- [71:24]
H
And you go into the. You know, you go into the memos from back in the day, and it was, you know, how might Klarna find success in making its next hop? You know, 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 the Netherlands seemed like if they do that, we're money good. 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 founder.
- [72:03]
B
No.
- [72:04]
H
Yeah, Sebastian. Sebastian. He has that dog in him.
- [72:08]
B
He does.
- [72:09]
H
Truly.
- [72:10]
B
It's crazy.
- [72:10]
C
Yeah, I can see that. I mean, he comes. 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. No, like, he's all in.
- [72:22]
H
He is all in. No, he's. And. And he.
- [72:24]
C
And the other thing that stood out to me, I just thought this was hilarious. He said he didn't bring his family here. It's just like a work trip. He just came to Wall street, to ipo. It's just another. Another week.
- [72:34]
H
Yeah, he is very eager.
- [72:35]
B
He's.
- [72:36]
H
He's very eager to get back. Back to. To work.
- [72:39]
C
Yeah, he's.
- [72:40]
H
But Nicholas, the cfo, I don't know. Has anyone shout out Nicholas?
- [72:44]
B
No.
- [72:44]
H
Legend Nicholas de Glien Karna cfo probably.
- [72:48]
B
Incredibly important for this business.
- [72:49]
H
He has been.
- [72:50]
C
Yeah.
- [72:50]
B
For.
- [72:50]
H
For all the reasons you might imagine.
- [72:52]
B
Pay some salaries.
- [72:53]
C
Exactly.
- [72:54]
B
You can get into cash crunch. And he was describing that in the early days, Christmas came and they had a ton of cash that needed to go out the door.
- [73:01]
H
Yeah, Nicholas is, I'm pretty sure, taking a nap right now. I think he is. In fact, I can guarantee you that he's taking a nap right now before dinner.
- [73:08]
C
Is our nap on the tricks hat off?
- [73:10]
H
It's a little too tight. Okay. Yeah, I'll Put it back on when I leave.
- [73:13]
B
Yeah.
- [73:15]
C
Where I, I guess like walk through. By the time they were going to enter the US Market, you were, you were on Team Sequoia, right?
- [73:23]
H
Yes.
- [73:24]
C
You were able to witness that. Yeah, 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 even know if you could have underwrote that as they were starting.
- [73:38]
H
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 Diplomatic. Morgan Chase sort of felt like that sort of a company. But coming from northern Europe and in the mid 2010s, the whole brand of the company was repositioning much more consumer first, different. We're going to go after the retail banks and not just try to build a nice profitable compounding pan European business. And 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. 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.
- [74:37]
B
Right.
- [74:37]
H
Like right now a huge portion of the Swedish population uses Klarna every month. And you know, for, for those customers, you know, Clarina has seen them a zillion times by now. Right. Like when they are underwriting a transaction, it's the, you know, zillionth transaction for that customer going to a new market.
- [74:55]
F
Right.
- [74:55]
H
You're having a lot more first time customers. So the business model is very different country by country by country.
- [75:00]
C
And just culture. Yeah. Cultural differences between the US and cultural and merchants and.
- [75:04]
H
Exactly. Frequency.
- [75:05]
D
Yeah.
- [75:05]
C
American consumers don't have the same like loyalty to Klarna. Right. It's not like a national.
- [75:09]
H
No one even heard of us. Yeah, exactly. But then Klona got into the US in the end of 20, sometime 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 hope we get these numbers right. You know, Q1 year over year growth in the US was 33%. Q2 is 38%. Right. So like the actual like forward looking momentum or not forward looking statements, the real time. The real time momentum for Q2 is very, very impressive.
- [75:48]
B
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 or almost 100 billion. You're invested in many of them founder led, big, you know, big markets already but going into super apps and everything apps. But at the same time throughout history going back to like Goldman and J.P. 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?
- [76:32]
H
The thing I find most interesting about fintech, especially for a company like Klarna which has footprint across Europe and the US like fintech penetration in Europe is actually quite high. If you think about Revolut's market share in some of these European countries or Trade Republic for trading or Klarna for payments and you know, they've really started to make a dent on the legacy retail banks in the US Fintech market share is still tiny.
- [77:01]
B
Yeah.
- [77:02]
H
Right.
- [77:02]
B
That's where they're eating from.
- [77:03]
H
And I think the US market which obviously is the biggest profit pool in the world. That's right. It's still pretty much it's JP Morgan, it's Wells Fargo, it's Citigroup and then that huge long tail of, you know, from the next tier down to the credit unions and also I mean with.
- [77:24]
B
ACH like Visa and MasterCard. Yeah. There's also market share to take from that.
- [77:28]
C
Yeah.
- [77:28]
H
And you know, not to mention stable coins. There's so much interesting stuff happening in US Fintech and somehow US Fintech is like lower penetration than Europe Fintech and I think of a company like Klarna which is obviously going to be growing here.
- [77:43]
B
How are you thinking about early stages, 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 McLarna, you know, Max Levchin's active founder. You got Brian at Coinbase, Vlad at Robinhood.
- [77:57]
H
Yeah, I'm using that YouTube video dog Eric.
- [77:59]
B
You got Eric. It's just like every category has like a serious person with like A billion dollars on the balance sheet and they're ready to go and they're bought in and they're not asleep at the wheel at all. It's not the early days of, 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 gonna take everything. So have you been. How do you think the next wave of fintech at the early stage looks? Is it just. Yeah, yeah.
- [78:27]
H
The last, you know, like I dabble in fintech. I wouldn't say I'm you know, specialist. Go to him like Ruloff who knows everything about everything. I'm certainly not a specialist. The last, last fintech investment that I led was, was in a company called Phantom Wallet which is, you know, to me it's sort of the, you need a discontinuous shift in the market. It needs something meaningful to be, to differentiate yourself along. So Phantom it was you know, centralized to decentralized wallets and yeah.
- [78:55]
C
And then benefiting from Solana like picking the right chain to originally partner with.
- [79:01]
H
To get out the gate. Now it's multi chain and it's all non custodial and that's a different business model, different footprint. That to me is the sort of market change you need to be like to plant your flag and go up and compete against people who have big prints. Because you're right, these like the founders you just mentioned. The founders you just mentioned are they're.
- [79:20]
B
Not asleep at the wheel.
- [79:21]
H
Not just the wheel.
- [79:22]
B
And so it feels dangerous to go like head to head with any of these guys. But, but yeah, something completely different counter position like that you carve out and then you can weave and build and eat off of someone else's plate.
- [79:33]
H
For sure.
- [79:33]
B
It makes a ton of sense what.
- [79:34]
C
Was going on in 2021 and 2022 when Square bought afterpay. For now if you just look at the transaction value it's like 7, I think it's like 65, 70% of their current market cap paid or their current market market cap. What, why, why do you, you think. Yeah, was that just like fintech overheated broadly also I think there are a.
- [80:01]
H
Few of these stock for stock deals during that era. I think octa 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. Yeah, I think like you know that Peter Thiel thing about how in 1999 there's a moment of peak clarity at Some level where like, you know, we saw the future perfectly. We just totally overestimated how fast it would come. I think a lot of the E Commerce Things in 21 remind me something of that. Where we were on a straight shot.
- [80:27]
B
There was so much demand.
- [80:28]
C
It was also the, you know, the crazy puff E commerce and it was a. You know, and I think we just actually got back to the same level of E comm penetration that we had in like 20. 20, 2021.
- [80:39]
B
Yeah, we're back to the same original growth trajectory.
- [80:42]
C
Not growth trajectory, but I think overall penetration.
- [80:44]
H
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 it's happening so quickly. And then 2022, 2023, the narrative was like, E commerce is dead. It was all pull forward, you know, and then sure enough, like, no, we are in fact headed towards E commerce penetration.
- [81:05]
B
We're seeing those levels.
- [81:07]
C
Yeah.
- [81:07]
H
Now you look at like, you know, the Shopify numbers that came out. The quarter was incredible.
- [81:12]
B
Right.
- [81:12]
H
Like on top line and everything else. So it's like, yeah, E commerce is still a long term trend and that's.
- [81:17]
C
Even during this rocky year with tariffs and uncertainty on the vendor side or on the merchant side.
- [81:22]
B
Yeah. Anything else? I hear we have some people waiting.
- [81:27]
C
Yeah.
- [81:27]
B
Okay.
- [81:28]
C
I have a bunch more questions, but come on the show again.
- [81:30]
H
I'll be. I'll. Thank you for being here.
- [81:32]
C
I'm sure we'll be back here.
- [81:33]
H
I meet you guys at the stock exchange.
- [81:35]
B
It's fantastic.
- [81:35]
C
It's the best place to hang out.
- [81:37]
H
Thank you.
- [81:38]
B
Thank you. Have a good one.
- [81:39]
C
The mayor.
- [81:39]
H
Thank you.
- [81:40]
C
The mayor of Nice.
- [81:40]
B
Bring in Marcus. What? Okay.
- [81:49]
C
That's not really some breaking news.
- [81:52]
B
One second. Yeah, we're. Okay, let's. Let's bring in Marcus. Yeah. And. Hey, Marcus. Good to meet you in person.
- [82:01]
F
Absolutely. Likewise.
- [82:02]
C
Great to meet you.
- [82:03]
B
Please take a seat. Would you mind introducing yourself for the stream and then we can talk about everything? Sure.
- [82:08]
F
Hey, I'm Mark Zvilig, founder and CEO of Bolt.
- [82:12]
B
And do you remember the first time we interacted online?
- [82:14]
H
I do.
- [82:15]
B
I made a. I made a YouTube video essay all about Bolt. I had a friend on my team who was obsessed from Estonia, and I dug in and it was the most fascinating story. And I remember asking you, like, so did I get the story, like roughly correctly? I should have just asked you because I wasn't doing. 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.
- [82:39]
F
Sure. So I started Bolt as an entrepreneur when I was 19 years old back in 2013, and back then I was looking at our neighboring country of Sweden, where Klarnav already back then was one of the biggest tech companies. So I was always following it. When we were building Bolt from Estonia.
- [82:54]
B
Just as like a role model.
- [82:54]
F
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.
- [83:04]
B
Yeah.
- [83:05]
F
So that was big role model for us. So that's how I sort of started following the company.
- [83:08]
B
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 in the acts.
- [83:18]
F
Sure, sure. So, I mean, with, with Bolt, we took, I think, a lot of lessons from Rudder 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 US.
- [83:34]
B
Sure.
- [83:35]
F
And then we just first saturated the home markets and then started expanding. And I think Klarna has done the same strategy really well.
- [83:42]
B
That's fantastic. Is this your first IPO, first public company board?
- [83:46]
F
It is, actually. So for the 12 years, I've only been focused on bolts. I haven't wanted to take on any distractions, but grown 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.
- [84:05]
C
It took a couple hours.
- [84:07]
B
What are the benefits of being a founder, CEO on a board? I know that there's people that do public company board work and that's how they pay the bills, but for you, it must be more about the connections and the industry insights. Is that something? How do you think about it?
- [84:20]
F
Absolutely. So, actually, I mean, Sebastian pitched really well to me, so I was like, hey, I think there's three unique angles here. A, we're one of the largest European technology companies with 110 million customers. So I think you can learn a lot from what we've done. Second, they're one of the few European companies that's really made it big in the US and obviously for any company in the world, like Coming to the largest market and succeeding here is a big lesson to learn from. And third, he was like, we're going to have a blockbuster ipo. So you want to join and see how that's done. And I think all of those three things have proven to be true over the last year.
- [84:54]
B
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 check out. And you're in a similar business where you have drivers and riders. What lessons have you learned from their branding, their business, their marketing, anything like that?
- [85:12]
F
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 it always starts off on the supply side because unless you have the right supply available, 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 Solarna 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.
- [85:42]
B
Yeah.
- [85:42]
F
Otherwise, you know, you can bring millions of consumers to the platform. If they can't use it to pay anywhere, it's useless.
- [85:46]
B
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?
- [86:02]
F
So first of all, I think it's great. Self driving cars are completely going to revolutionize cities. I think for Bolt specifically, we're really well positioned. So this kind of 100x the size of the business and we're really looking forward to the next decade. On the other hand though, like we got to be a bit more realistic. And I mean, I'm always the pragmatic guy in the room. So when I look at the numbers, like we got to admit, like these things are still a number of years before the commercial unit economics makes sense.
- [86:26]
B
Sure.
- [86:27]
F
I think it's one thing to put a couple of thousand cars on the roads and I think what Waymo has done is absolutely unique and impressive. But they are operating only in the wealthiest cities in the world, it's still going to take a number of years before the costs come down to level where you can actually offer this in most cities, not to mention in Europe, but in emerging markets as well. So in that sense I think Paul's business is quite well insulated. Like we have five to 10 years before this can have a major impact in terms of any downside risk to our business.
- [86:51]
B
Yeah, I think the bull case for at least Uber in the era of self driving is that Dara Kosh Ashari ran, was it TripAdvisor before Expedia? Expedia, and that is an aggregation platform. They don't own any planes, they don't own any airlines. They route you to the correct airline. Are you thinking about the business? Similarly, if there's an owner of a self driving car in 10 years from now and they want to bring their, their capex or their asset to the Bolt network, you act as an aggregator for customer demand for them.
- [87:27]
F
So correct.
- [87:28]
B
Is that the correct partnership?
- [87:29]
F
I think the industry is for sure going to evolve over time and it's still not clear how it's going to end up 10 years from now. But I think in the short term we're absolutely ready to own the cars on our own balance sheet as well.
- [87:40]
B
Interesting. So do you own anything right now, scooters or anything?
- [87:43]
F
We do actually. So I think that's a core distinction Bolt has versus any other ride sharing.
- [87:47]
B
Company in the world, which is the craziest thing. You went into scooters and you didn't get destroyed.
- [87:53]
C
But to me, to me, to me that feels like again, something we've been asking some of the other guests is like cultural differences between the American consumer and maybe the European consumer in America. I was living in LA during the bird scooter era, the lime scooter era and people used to destroy scooters from, for sport. It was like, it was, it was.
- [88:13]
F
Wait till you saw what happened in Paris. So I mean they were like we were at some point losing 2% of the fleet each week.
- [88:20]
C
What are they doing? Throwing it in a pond or something?
- [88:22]
F
Literally into the river.
- [88:23]
C
Into the river?
- [88:23]
B
Yeah, into the Champs Elysees.
- [88:25]
C
But there are markets that it work where people respect the, the robots and they, they take care of it.
- [88:29]
F
Absolutely. And I think overall though, like when we just like compare the journeys of, of Bolt and Klarn, 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.
- [88:43]
C
You don't want to lose 2% of the fleet weekly for that long.
- [88:45]
F
No, no, exactly. We didn't raise hundreds of millions for the squirter business. We had to be very clever in how we operate it. 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 scooters or we have a car sharing business with thousands of cars. We operate in more than a dozen cities around Europe. So in that sense like we're not really afraid to similarly operate self driving cars if need be in the early stages of the market. Long term, once this gets into hundreds of thousands of cars, obviously the industry is going to pay out differently.
- [89:13]
B
How did the initial Sequoia deal come together for you? Because I don't think they have an office in Estonia but is through the stripe mafia or the Skype mafia.
- [89:21]
F
So actually, I mean Sequoia, back when they invested in US back in 2021, they hadn't made too many European investments. I think actually Klarna was probably the first one they did a long time ago and, and I think that was a successful one. So they started looking around more in Europe and actually funny enough, I met with two of the stripe founders really. So they came to Estonia. It was a great fun time catching up with them years ago. And then actually they went back to Silicon Valley and then they were chatting with Sequoia about what are some interesting startups they've seen in Europe. And then Bolt came up and that's where the original interest came from.
- [89:54]
C
What's the state of the Estonian early stage startup scene?
- [89:57]
D
It's fantastic.
- [89:58]
F
Honestly, I think the Estonian startup scene per capita is the best in the world. Tallinn is half a million people. We got 11 unicorn companies. So for sure there's something in the blood in the Nordics. When we look at Tallinn or we look at Stockholm, they're just absolutely per capita better than almost any city in the world. And when we look at just the number of entrepreneurs coming out of these companies, whether it's Bolt or Klarna as well, it's absolutely fascinating. I mean this is booming now, the second and third generation of companies.
- [90:23]
B
A couple of the narratives that I've heard thrown around about why Estonia punches way above its weight relative to population size is a huge investment in high speed Internet early on and then also just the, the, the geopolitical situation of becoming an independent country and Having the entire population animated. Hey, we got to take this stuff seriously, guys. Do those two narratives sit well with you? Does that sound about right?
- [90:51]
F
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.
- [91:02]
A
Build businesses they couldn't.
- [91:04]
F
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 actually a third very important factor that I think is same for Sweden and Estonia is that we have some of the best education in the world. So when you look at all the PISA rankings, 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.
- [91:27]
B
How are you thinking about artificial intelligence? Just AI generally, either applying it to your business or this idea of.
- [91:36]
C
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 finding what that balance is?
- [91:57]
F
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, meaning 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.
- [92:24]
B
Yeah. What about a data center? A national champion? An AI national champion in Estonia. Do you think we'll see it? Do you think that there's. Is there a potential for. Even if it's like latent capacity, there's just like a cheap data center down the street from the school and we get another wave of that story of the fast Internet and there's a 13 year old kid who's like, yeah, I'm gonna fine tune llama4 or something and you get the next generation of entrepreneurs. Do you think that's possible.
- [92:51]
F
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 page that have a very good grid connectivity, that have cheap power, stable Internet, etc. Etc. And actually Nordics has been one of the most dominant places for it.
- [93:06]
C
Yeah, Nabius is I guess main data centers in Finland, right?
- [93:09]
A
Exactly.
- [93:10]
F
Which is literally between Sweden and Estonia. And I mean you saw the announcement probably today for them. So overall 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.
- [93:20]
B
Yeah. What about the geographic footage 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.
- [93:35]
F
So again for us the first priority was we needed to win 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.
- [93:46]
B
Sure.
- [93:46]
F
So we did that first in central Eastern Europe, which we're now by far the number one player. Then after that we looked at the emerging markets. So Africa was top of the list, but also some markets like Paraguay, Mexico, Thailand, where we're again now doing extremely well. And then actually we did this a bit unconventional story where then after that we went into more established markets like Western Europe and Nordics.
- [94:07]
B
Sure.
- [94:07]
F
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.
- [94:14]
C
Like same. Same, same with. With Klarna.
- [94:17]
F
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 Clara has been taking so much share here and then winning the market.
- [94:31]
B
Yeah. Do you think that you'll expand in the US or has the capital fight already played out? Is there any opportunity left?
- [94:39]
F
Not something I can disclose today, but keep watching us and there's probably going to be some news in the future.
- [94:44]
B
We will definitely be following. Very excited. Well, thank you so much.
- [94:49]
C
Thank you for joining us. Great to meet you.
- [94:51]
B
We'll talk to you soon.
- [94:52]
C
Come back on the show anytime.
- [94:53]
F
Absolutely.
- [94:54]
C
Zoom you in some crazy news. Hitting the timeline. I don't know if you saw.
- [94:59]
B
I did not.
- [95:00]
C
Charlie Kirk was shot at an event. It's unclear yet if he is alive or Dead, but absolutely tragic otherwise. Sam Altman was on Tucker Carlson. Sam Altman was confronted by Tucker about the Death of the OpenAI whistleblower Sue Cheer. Sam Altman says, I haven't done too many interviews where I've been accused of murder.
- [95:26]
B
I mean that makes sense. Yeah, that is a crazy, crazy story.
- [95:35]
C
3 I guess Oracle and OpenAI have signed a 300 billion dollar computing deal. So you basically called this earlier in the show.
- [95:47]
B
Yeah.
- [95:48]
C
Where is that, where's that revenue ramp?
- [95:52]
B
And it has to be underwritten on the growth of OpenAI's cloud business.
- [95:59]
C
OpenAI's losses, OpenAI's losses are, are Larry's.
- [96:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, his, his revenue and then. But OpenAI. Yeah, I mean they should be losing, burning as they grow but you know they will still be bringing in a ton and ton of revenue on top of this, both on the business to business side, which they're taking more seriously in the, in the, in the, the provision of tokens, they're starting to take coding more seriously. This has been kind of the narrative around GPT5 was that GPT5 was them, you know, kind of redoubling their efforts in just selling, being token sales for B2B. And so my, you know, the thesis that everyone's been kicking around is basically we could see an oligopoly in frontier model inference sort of play out. You have GCP with Gemini rolling out. You have, you have Anthropic obviously teamed up with Amazon and then you have OpenAI teamed up with Microsoft. But also needing to scale their own business, they've been hitting rate limits. Ben Thompson's been talking for a long time about why do I have a rate limit on my consumer app? Your consumer app is fantastic. Pull back on the business to business side. Well, if Oracle can deliver these massive tents of age 100 equivalents, they're good to go. And OpenAI has been co developing chips with Nvidia. Put those, you know, but you need a, do you need someone that's like a hyperscaler like Oracle to actually go and implement that?
- [97:35]
C
Yeah.
- [97:37]
B
Anyway, our next guest will be here in a few minutes. Do you have any other prayers? Yeah.
- [97:41]
C
This is shocking news for Charlie Kirk. Regardless of your political beliefs, it's absolutely tragic. I feel like X needs to figure out some type of give people content warnings. There's been a lot of videos floating around but. Absolutely tragic.
- [97:59]
B
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 and.
- [98:20]
C
See what the Chat has to say we miss you guys.
- [98:24]
B
Yes. We've been on the road for two days. We will be back in the TVP ultra 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.
- [98:49]
C
Yeah, everyone's saying don't open X. So if you're watching this on X.
- [98:54]
B
I guess go over to YouTube, I.
- [98:55]
C
Guess over to YouTube or log off w rough.
- [99:01]
B
Well, we have two or three minutes until our next next guest is joining. We are going to be hanging out. Here we are again. If you're just tuning in live from the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, Manhattan. If you couldn't tell if you've been maybe, maybe you're listening to the audio, you know.
- [99:19]
C
Yeah.
- [99:19]
B
We are at the Klarna ipo. We've interviewed the CEO and other folks, board members today. Marcus Vilig, Marcus Village. Such a. 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.
- [99:43]
C
Seems like a chad.
- [99:44]
B
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.
- [99:55]
C
Yeah.
- [99:55]
B
And he's just like I'm, I'm gonna work on myself. I'm gonna be over in Europe building. Anyway. Anything else you want to talk about?
- [100:07]
C
Really nothing like a shooting to kill the vibe.
- [100:14]
B
Incredibly vibe killing.
- [100:16]
C
I agree, I agree. Still unclear what is happening.
- [100:25]
B
I'm sure the story will develop over the next 24 hours. Hopefully there will be some good reporting from the folks who cover this sort of thing type of stuff. It is a thankless drive.
- [100:40]
C
Not our wheelhouse.
- [100:40]
B
Not our wheelhouse at all.
- [100:44]
C
Anyways, we're hanging out. Yeah, it's tough. We like to have fun on this show but doesn't feel right when a tragedy like this strikes.
- [100:59]
B
It is rough.
- [101:01]
C
Yeah, I feel bad for people that people are sharing around a close up video of the shooting which is like rough. Seems like. I'm sure Nikita can figure out a solution so that X does have the.
- [101:15]
B
Ability to add a sensitive content warning.
- [101:18]
C
Yeah, but who's adding that?
- [101:21]
B
Also I'm not exact. I've seen people use it as like a meme. As a meme. So it must be a button that you can click. But I have yet to actually see that used. And if it kills your reach in the algorithm, people won't do it because they want to grow their accounts no matter what. Very, very rough. Tough day in the news business. Well, on some other Good news, in 10 days, Jason 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.
- [101:58]
C
Work this morning, Buco Capital bloke said my timeline is literally just Oracle earnings and a woman being murdered. Obviously the.
- [102:07]
B
Yes, yes, yes.
- [102:07]
C
The other, the other murder. Really, really tragic.
- [102:20]
B
We condemn violence of all forms, of course.
- [102:23]
C
Yeah. And it's just you. Violence generates more violence, unfortunately. Very rough.
- [102:33]
B
Well, we will be closing out in just a minute. In the meantime, let me.
- [102:40]
C
What else?
- [102:42]
B
We've unfortunately been missing a few big fundraising announcements, but we will be catching up with tons of founders tomorrow. Be sure to tune in. And we'll also be taking you through, hopefully a bigger deep dive. I would love to go deeper on the iPhone. I don't know if you saw that X ray photo of the iPhone Air, but folks were speculating that this looks like the future coming over. Fantastic. Oh, she has her hat.
- [103:09]
C
She's got her hat on.
- [103:10]
B
She has her hat on already. Welcome to the stream.
- [103:18]
I
I gotta put it on quickly.
- [103:20]
C
Here he goes. Good to see you again.
- [103:21]
B
Good to see you. How you doing? Thank you. Thank you so much for hosting us once again.
- [103:26]
I
Got the hat.
- [103:27]
B
You got the hat. Thank you for wearing it.
- [103:30]
C
Walk us through the day.
- [103:31]
B
Yeah. How did, how did today go?
- [103:33]
I
Great. Today went great.
- [103:35]
B
I mean, just since we saw you, how busy have you been? I feel like we, 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. Walk us through the last couple weeks. Like, what's been.
- [103:49]
I
There's been a bunch. There's been bullish, there's. There's been quite a few that have been coming out. I mean, I know we talked about. You're obviously here for Figma day.
- [103:59]
B
Yep. It's fantastic.
- [104:01]
I
We have Klarna today. We got via on Friday.
- [104:05]
B
Friday.
- [104:06]
I
Excited about that one.
- [104:07]
B
Very cool.
- [104:07]
I
Next week it's going to be busy too. So we got. The market is open. You know what? I really feel like the market's open because the traditional media just said, yeah, the ipo Windows Open. It's been open.
- [104:21]
B
Yeah.
- [104:22]
C
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.
- [104:37]
B
Yeah, it went very smoothly.
- [104:39]
I
It went very smoothly.
- [104:41]
C
Smoothly.
- [104:41]
I
And this IPO had a different pop, but it's, It's. It stayed there, which is good. Yeah, it's still healthy. It was like a textbook IPO traditionally.
- [104:49]
C
Yeah.
- [104:50]
I
Like that 20 pop. And that's kind of where they are. I think they're about 25.
- [104:56]
B
Let's give it up.
- [104:58]
I
That was. It was great. It was great. It was great. But I mean, this. This deal has been thinking about going public for a couple of years now. It's been rumored for a couple of years. Been working with them for a couple of years on IPO readiness.
- [105:15]
C
So everybody had to be patient.
- [105:17]
I
Everyone had to be patient. But now that this one went well, I think the next few are gonna go touchwood. Okay. As well.
- [105:27]
C
Give us your thoughts on the market overall right now. Obviously, yesterday was crazy. Oracle earnings.
- [105:35]
I
I was gonna say this is double. Missed a huge day here as well. I mean, we're so proud to be partnered with Oracle. And Oracle will be one of our. Our list of companies. Last I checked, it was up 35%.
- [105:46]
C
Which I think it's more than that.
- [105:48]
E
Normal for a company.
- [105:49]
I
It is. Because they just announced.
- [105:51]
C
They just announced a deal with OpenAI. It's like everyone was wondering, okay, where.
- [105:56]
I
That's your plus. Good news.
- [105:57]
C
That's a lot of RPO.
- [105:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [106:01]
I
I mean, thrilled for them.
- [106:02]
B
Yeah.
- [106:03]
I
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.
- [106:18]
B
It's good to see Larry finally get a win. He's been a bit of an overlord. Success.
- [106:22]
C
He's been working at Oracle decades in the making. Brian, give us the update on Texas.
- [106:29]
I
Yeah.
- [106:29]
B
Yes, please.
- [106:30]
I
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 Dallas. Dallas Cowboys Stadium. Although I'm a Giants fan. Although Sunday was rough for the New York Giants.
- [107:00]
B
I don't know if you Watched what goes into the decision to go to Texas instead of New York for a company.
- [107:07]
I
Yeah. So the reason we launched NYSE Texas was because of the amazing pro business legislation that Governor Abbott's been pushing forward, really filling a gap around company governance and a variety of other measures. It's been met with tremendous positive reception. You see companies moving their headquarters, changing where they're incorporated, from state that y' all are based in, in California in particular, to Texas. But also some of the New York companies have built huge presences.
- [107:46]
B
Yeah. Joe Lonsdale at ABC has talked about it a lot. Elon Musk's talked about it a lot. Starbase is a company town now. It's become a whole. I know, economy onto its own friend who went and toured it. And they have their own shops and their own housing, everything. It's become this massive movement over.
- [108:02]
I
Yeah. And Illinois as well. A lot of companies have moved out of Illinois to. To and to Texas. So you.
- [108:09]
B
We were just being responsive to our customers in Texas. Does that just align you with being registered as a business in Texas?
- [108:18]
I
It allows you to benefit from some of the pro business legislation.
- [108:23]
B
And is it. But is it a prerequisite to be headquartered in Texas?
- [108:26]
I
You don't have to be an.
- [108:27]
B
It's an.
- [108:27]
I
Or.
- [108:28]
B
Okay. It's an orange.
- [108:32]
I
Our first company to do a list on us was Trump Media and Technology.
- [108:37]
B
Okay.
- [108:37]
I
Which is based in Florida.
- [108:39]
B
Sure. Yeah.
- [108:39]
I
So they're not even based in Texas. But they were such proponents of the pro business mentality. The pro business legislation that was going through.
- [108:48]
B
Yep.
- [108:50]
C
Taking a step back, what. What is the. What is the right profile of a business for in the current IPO market? I think that there's so much capital available in the private markets, we haven't seen as many. You know, I would have thought we'd maybe see some AI companies getting out with like, you know, 50, you know, sub nine figures of revenue. We haven't seen that, at least from our view, a ton so far. So what is the right. What does the investment banking community see as, like, the right profile for a company today?
- [109:23]
I
I mean, there's always the question around the rule of 40. 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 onto those products. There was a question for a while of whether a company needed to be profitable or not to go public. I don't think you do. I think you need to have a path to profitability that you can articulate to an investor. But you don't have to be 30% EBITDA margins, things of that nature to go public.
- [110:13]
C
Yeah. Do you think it's helpful? I mean, how helpful is it that Affirm reported earnings like a couple weeks ago did very well. I think people woke up to the, you know, that felt like kind of a turning point in people in the way that people were kind of viewing PNPL as a category. Does that help at all with the road with, you know, Klarna's roadshow and give people more confidence in the category?
- [110:38]
I
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.
- [111:03]
B
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 you think the story that people should be telling or are there other companies that have done it really well?
- [111:26]
I
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?
- [111:35]
B
Yep.
- [111:36]
I
Are you going to return it to shareholders or are you going to reinvest in the business? I think any of those answers are good, particularly with companies during an IPO process. Investors do want to. Many investors, not all, but many investors want a medium to long term growth story and that's going to involve reinvestment in the business. But there's new 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.
- [112:19]
B
Well, thank you so much for coming on the stream.
- [112:20]
I
It's always fun. Thanks for having me. Gonna put my hat back on.
- [112:23]
C
There you go. Thank you for representing.
- [112:25]
B
Yeah. And thanks for always.
- [112:26]
C
Great to be here.
- [112:27]
I
Great to be here with you.
- [112:28]
C
Hopefully. Hopefully we'll be back soon.
- [112:30]
I
Hope to have you soon. Absolutely.
- [112:34]
C
It's open. It's open. We'll come find you after this.
- [112:37]
B
We'll talk to you soon.
- [112:38]
C
Cheers.
- [112:38]
B
Bye.
- [112:39]
C
And on that note, I think we can. Yeah. Wrap it up.
- [112:44]
B
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 Ultra Dome in Hollywood, California tomorrow.
- [112:55]
C
Again bring you thoughts and prayers to Charlie Kirk and his family and loved ones. Absolutely tragic.
- [113:02]
B
Thank you for watching.
- [113:03]
C
Thank you for tuning in.
- [113:03]
B
We'll talk to you soon.
- [113:04]
D
Cheers.