I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that they are committing, but because they in my mind are much less interesting companies with less volatile upside than the Stripes and Squares and Adyens of the world.
It's tempting to think of these companies as a successor cohort to Wachovia and other since-departed financial firms — organizations that survive and persist in a commodity landscape due to operational rigor and process power and existing momentum more than for any other ineffable asset, a sort of fintech Yes, Dear. [1]
It is in that deeply cynical light that I listened to a pretty delightful interview with Klarna's CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Most CEO interviews are in one of two buckets: "this person is abusing stimulants and has a lot of points to convey" or "this person's PR team has coached them into complete banality". Conversely, Sebastian here has a lot to share: I thought this was an uncommonly honest and insightful interview, and I'm not sure I'm used to a CEO of an active company admitting so many mistakes in such little time. Some notes:
- Klarna, like many technology firms that quietly grew in Europe before exploding onto the US scene due to one particularly wide-eyed VC firm, has been around for a long time, and history has its own innate advantages.
- Obviously the full story is in the process of being told (as I write this, Klarna is still not particularly close to profitability) but Sebastian delivers the story of Klarna's pivot from largely back-office infrastructure to trying to compete in full-stack payments to pivoting to fighting the BNPL wars to doubling down on consumer-facing surfaces in a way that is much more useful than other corporate bildungsromans. Nineteen years is a long time for a software company in a blood-soaked industry to stick around.
- The insight that Klarna can outcompete legacy providers because of their ability to ingest and surface SKU-level information is a great one, and an example I think I will return to often. Even if it's a little post-hoc, I think taking a look at the downsides of deeply-integrated systems and understanding how you can exploit their coordination problems is... interesting.
- I get
klarna.com(and that entire genre of wrapper-browser) now! Insanely clever. [2] - Life is long, and relationships change, and organizations you consider rivals may be your trusted integration partner in three years time. (And five years after that, they might be trying to put you out of business.)
