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24:31Revolut now has 65. I'm twice the size in number of customers, but the engagement that I have is not as high yet as it is with Revolut. So people may use us less frequently and for other things, right? So what I'm doing right now, what we're doing at Klauna is moving from being kind of your infrequent payments solution to being your high engagement banking provider, right? That transition is going extremely well. It's going extremely well and it's accelerating. People are adopting our banking services at a very rapid pace. Do you look at Robin Hood? I've had Vlad on the show multiple times. And I think Vlad was astonishing.

25:04He's got 11 lines of business that produce over 100 million in revenue. I think it's an incredible model for moving from entry product, be it BNPL or for him, frequency trading, into the full-step banking provider. Do you look at him and do you take lessons from that? Yeah, absolutely. But we all have different entry points. I mean, Revolut to some degree was like an early like, hey, I'm an expat. I travel a lot in Europe and like this is better for my currency or I trade in crypto. That was kind of the early adopter thing. I think, you know, Robinhood was like, I'm trading. I love trading. Klarna is very different.

25:36Like our customers, like I shop online. I do shopping. You know, we skew more female than male. We have a very different brand. I would think of us more like a lifestyle brand, like a digital version of American Express. That's how I think about Klarna. So I think all of these growing fintechs, you know, I know David from NewBank since early days, right? Like I have a funny story where like I was down in Brazil meeting David when he was just leaving Sequoia starting. And, you know, we had a fantastic conversation. We talked about the future of banking. And then he sends me an email, which was like, hey, Sebastian, would you like to like advise me a little bit?

26:08I'm starting this new company. And I was like, I'm sorry, I don't have the time. So I lost out on a lot. I would have been a great angel investor there. But that's how life goes. you know that's how life goes so anyway so david i'm gonna be honest i'm not crying for you no okay okay yeah i don't think anyone will cry for me over that i will cry over myself that's okay i can i can fall asleep crying over that but the funny thing is that like so you have these fintechs now who are actually starting to become really big i mean revolute is really big clown it's really big new bank you know etc so but we're all coming from slightly different angles we're just all coming from slightly different and now the people who are going to be threatened by this is the incumbents primarily.

26:48Like, of course, I'm going to partly compete with Revolut. I'm partly doing that already. But if you look at, like, they're very big in Romania. Romania is not a big market for me, right? Like, I think there's the second largest market or something, Revolut, if I look at, like, number of users. Like, Romania is not a big market for me. You know, I'm very big in other markets. So, like, so that's going to differ, right? But whose market share are we eating? Barclays, Wells Fargo's, Capital One. Those are the companies that we are going after, right? So, I don't really see there's a big conflict between us.

27:13It's more the incumbents that are going to lose customers. You spoke about Newbank and David. I love David. He's amazing. Fucking legend. But anyway, obviously they've just got a banking license in the US and they're very much aggressively planning the US. Is the US the main goal for you? Yes. So going back now, I'm just like, I feel so special in you. No, but listen, it's like this. It comes back to what I said in 15, where like the future of financial services is going to be this digital financial system. Okay. So then the next question is, who is going to participate in that challenge and why would Klana stand the chance?

27:47Those are the two questions we need to answer. And we say, well, first and foremost, there's going to be three types of companies participating. The tech companies, Google, Amazon, Apple. There's going to be FinTech, Revolut. We didn't know. I mean, that point, Revolut hadn't even started. But we knew they were going to come entrance. And then banks. That was kind of our view. So what's going to be critical for us to win in that big transformation? Global. We realized first, if we're just big, at that point of time, we weren't even in the UK yet. But if we're only in the Nordics and Germany, we're not going to have the scale to be able to win this big transformation that's coming.

28:19So we need to be global. And global means US. If you're not in the US, if you're not big there, you're just not going to be big enough. And the risk is you're going to get acquired by somebody in the US. So to us, nailing US was super high priority. Super high priority. Second, we realized that data. The more I understand about you as a customer, the more likely I am to give you that advice that you said, hey, you know, you should pick up the flowers when you go there or whatever. So the key thing we saw is a difference than Revolut and all the others. We have our own payments network. Just like Amex, we have our own rails.

28:52Every time you shop with Klana, the information that flows on the rails isn't just the amount that you purchase for. It's the exact products. We have the full digital receipt. So we know you shopped at Sephora, but also what cosmetics you bought at Sephora. And the benefit of that is if I'm then supposed to advise you on your purchases or your day-to-day finances, I just have much more richer information that allows me to provide you good advice. Oh, these contact lenses were really expensive. You can get them cheaper, et cetera, right? So if I want to help people in their everyday spending, I have more information.

29:22So we said understanding the customer depth is very, very critical and data was going to be very, very important. And so it was being global and having a good understanding of our customer and having a lot of trust and brand. The other thing was brand. Build a brand that people relate to, that people feel emotionally connected to and not just like in utility, right? Create something different. I'm sorry, I struggle. And, you know, I'm a proud European. I struggle when I look at the European neobanks and I look at Chime and I look at Dave and I look at all the other current. I mean, they're all a thought compared to the market cap of Revolut right now or whatever the private latest valuation with market cap is a very different thing, as you know, as a public company CEO.

29:58Like, why if the US is such a focus, Has it been such a lackluster performance from their domestic participants? Well, partially because competition is better. If you take your Amex app in the U.S. and compare it to one here, it is significantly better there, right? Your JP Morgan app is significantly better. So the financial institutions in the U.S. are just better. And the problem is that then people try to find an entry point that is probably, for example, very big lending. And then they walk into a lot of subprime and they make huge losses. Or there are other things, right? So people struggle to find that entry point.

30:32But we have 30 million users in the US, right? Almost like at least 28 or something. So the Batsu is going to be 30. Our card is growing at a very rapid pace in the US. So your core focus is, can I turn those 30 million users from BNPL into core customer account? Yes. And we saw we launched a card in the US and I have to be careful now because we haven't released new earnings yet coming next week. So I have to use the Q3 numbers. But if I remember correctly, we're like a two, three million active cardholders in just a few months in the US. So we are transitioning these buy now pay later customers into full banking relationship customers at a very, very high pace.

31:06Totally get you. When you look at Nubank and Revolute moving both aggressively into the US, if you were to put money on who's going to do better, who would do better? That's a good question. I think I have to go with David. Wow, why? Because I think Nick's challenge right now might be that he is so distributed. I mean, he's trying to go for the whole world, right? I mean, he's launching in Dubai, he's launching in India, he's launching everywhere. Banking is not your standard tech company. It's difficult. And so I just wonder if he's like running out of bandwidth, right? Like, I think it's more risky.

31:41David at least has slightly more focus. He has a very solid base in Brazil, making a lot of money from there. He has this Mexican thing and the other thing that are growing pretty good. But if he then does US, that's just like one more big market. It's very different nick is so thinly spread right now question for you which is you mentioned stripe earlier in the competition there you're a public company ceo now i'm gonna go there and you can do a no comment i have so many public companies i've never met a happy one never are you happy as a public company ceo happy is a strong word no but i think i think look to us it's like we have over the years so many shareholders so many employees like at some point of time it's actually easier to be public for us.

32:21We were already reporting on an earnings, you know, on a quarterly basis. We're a bank. So like, I don't, I'm not sure that the difference is that big, to be honest, from our perspective. So it is what it is. But like, yeah, of course, if I could own the company 100 % and be private, I would prefer it, right? But that's not reality. Do John and Patrick with Stripe have advantages that you don't have as private companies in their ability to invest in long-term, invest in R &D, not think about next quarter quite so religiously? Historically, yes. But this has changed due to AI. One of the things I remember vividly is that when we came to the board and said that like the same plan that I said from 15, right?

33:02Grow global, get customers across the board in all countries. And then once you have the love and affection of these customers and the relationship with them for day-to-day purchases, then go deeper with them, offer them more banking-like services and increase the revenue per customer, right? So we had this interesting board meeting where we're like, okay, now it's really going to happen, guys. We are now going to truly start focusing on this transition from just single payments customer to banking. And we're going to launch peer-to-peer. And we're going to launch potentially, which is also leaked to the press already, trading.

33:36And we're going to do a lot of the other banking services that we at that point in time didn't have. And we're going to increase the card. And we're going to increase balances and deposits. and we're going to do international remittances and all these things. And then the board looks at this like, yeah, you know, this kind of transitions can be hard. It changes what the bank is. We have this discussion. An additive thought. Thank you, board. Yeah. This can be hard. Well, no shit. Yeah, exactly. But the funny thing, I went out and I was like, why was that so easy? Like I was like, how come that went so easy still?

34:06Like it makes sense. Oh yeah, now I know why. Because usually when a CEO come to the board and say, we're going to do all of these new services, We're going to launch all of this new stuff. Hence, I need to increase my investment and my cost by$100 million, if it's the size of our company, to be able to do all of this. But I, at the same point of time, was showing them a budget. I mean, Klana has been shrinking. We used to be 6 ,000 or over 7 ,000 people, and we're now less than 3 ,000. And I didn't ask for a single dime to do all this. And the reason for that is because I've seen the acceleration of AI, and I know we can ship all these things on the existing organization.

34:42We've gone from 7 ,000 people. We're now below 3 ,000. We've shrank 50%. And the majority of that is just through normal attrition. Initially, when we had 2020, we did a little bit of layoffs, but that was not that big of a number compared to what has happened since then. So that was the reason. It was the reason it was easy for the board to take decisions. I didn't ask for a single dime in investments. It's 2030. How many employees do you have then? Less, for sure. 2 ,000? No, I think it may very well be even less than that. No. Yes. But listen, again, relationship cannot be replaced. We're going to do a show in 2035 and SAP's going to be the only one.

35:19Yep. I think that the one thing that's important for us are relationships. We have a relationship with merchants, as an example, retailers. And we have those relationships locally. So I have people in Portland talking to Nike. I have people in China talking to Sheen. I have people in Amsterdam talking to Adyen, et cetera, et cetera. So we have over 50 locations where there's people. AI is not going to move those jobs. like that we need. It's very important. The relationships with our partners and the same customer service is going to be, I'm still going to argue that it's going to be vital to offer a human connection there.

35:49So those jobs will remain, but for the rest, it's going to be definitely smaller. So we're shrinking through natural attrition with about 20 % per year. It's just people leaving. They stay about five years and then they move on, which is natural. And then what we have said very clearly is that we're not going to recruit. So we're recruiting a little bit. People then came again on accident. Oh, it's not true. Look, they're recruiting. It's like, come on. Yes, occasionally we hire somebody here and there. But if you look at the neck, you go to LinkedIn and look at the insights, you're going to see how the company is shrinking.

36:17The point is that we've shrank 50%, but we also promised our employees, which is very important. We said, guys, this is going to mean we're going to do much more with much less people. This is going to make more profit for us, and you're going to share in that profit. So our employee compensation has grown almost 50 % per head during the same time. So we have given a lot of that money back, and that creates safety for employees. They know that through this AI transformation and using these utilities, they are getting some of the benefit of that. Weird question. How do you think about the current state of SBC, stock-based compensation for anyone, which is obviously how we give stocks to employees?

36:52You see aggressive from OpenAI, argument being why does Sam give a shit if he doesn't have any stock anyway? Dilution doesn't matter to him. Evan Spiegel is the godfather of SBC. Astonishingly high amounts. How do you feel about the state of SBC? Well, I think it's very clear when we compare American companies to European companies, there's a huge difference. I mean, I think that American companies are 5 to 10x more than European companies do. And from that perspective, we're a European company. We have come from very low levels. We have increased because we need to stay competitive for talent.

37:25And talent today can move between US and EU pretty easily with the help of companies. But I still think also the thing that's going to happen, there's been these industries. They're called Tech and they're called FIN, Financial Services. They have all had this amazing thing, which is that you create this service and there's a huge switching cost. So your customers can't really switch that easily. And hence, you create this money printing machine and then life is sweet, right? And then you build these campuses and you play volleyball in your office and you go and get free lunches and, you know, and you live off the spoils of this money printing machine in your basement.

38:01And that's not how normal business work. If you're in retail, if you run a restaurant, you freaking wake up every morning and you ask yourself, how do I put the right product in front of the right customer, bring them into my store so that I can actually sell them and make them happy and so forth? You have to wake up every day and do care about that, right? And so the point is that this is going to be a brutal awakening for Finn and tech. That's what's going to happen to all of us. Like we're going to have to wake up every morning, make sure that we serve our customers. We work really hard and effortlessly to make them happy with what we're offering them.

38:33And it's not going to be what it used to be. And so I think that like share-based compensation as an example, like everything that was, was it really because it made sense or to what degree was it just the sports? And I think to some degree it's sports, right? And some degree it's relevant, like because some people can make a huge difference. But there's a balance between the two. There is an incredible number of incredible CEOs attacking the incumbent banks. What happens to BNPING 2035? I think so that again comes back to what we talked in 15. Our conclusion was there's going to be different.

39:08So what I thought was interesting, Solomon also recognized this at Goldman Sachs. So he created Marcus. And then talking about public companies, the challenge was that when fintech was like everything was high 2021, 2021, you know, valuations up. Marcus is the best thing a Goldman ever did. And then suddenly what ends up happening is, you know, Marcus turn and it's very hard for Solomon to defend Marcus. But the problem is like Marcus would have needed five, 10 years to fully mature. And when you're a public company, that's hard to defend. I don't know, maybe Solomon doesn't agree and he's like, I did the right thing and I changed it.

39:41But like, in my opinion, he should have sticked the guns to doing that. Jamie is now doing neobanking. He's going in, but he's going in a bit later now. And so you will see different banks. I think some of them will reinvent themselves, become neobanks, become tech-led, use AI to reinvent themselves. Some of them will not, and they will with their way, right? Which is always what's happening in the disruption of an industry. So it will depend on the leadership of those financial institutions. You said about 2021 and high valuations, high prices. I remember the round where you were done at 45. Yeah.

40:14It was SoftBank, no? It's not entirely true. That's also a little bit of media. But yes, there was some shares bought at 45 as well. Yes, that's right. Knowing what you know now, are you happy you did that? And is there anything you would have done differently? That's a good question. I think that when you're in that kind of high growth phase, one thing to keep a close eye on is your multiple expansion going faster than what your revenue is growing. If your revenue is growing faster than your multiples, then you're probably fine. But if you start seeing the opposite, where multiples are expanding faster than revenue growth, that may potentially be a problem longer term, right?

40:51So I think today maybe that I could have been more careful, specifically on the hiring side, because it was very sad and difficult to me to a few quarters earlier be hiring at a high pace and then a few quarters later have to announce layoffs. That I felt that I should have predicted and been more cautious about. You mentioned the board meeting earlier where it was like, oh, that was kind of nice and easy with the expansion. You've got an amazing board. We're not talking about bored in any other capacity. I'm just talking about a hard-bored me. Does Mike ever get angry, by the way? No. He doesn't?

41:23Angry is not the word for Mike. I would be shit scared if he was... No. Actually, it's less scary because he doesn't get angry. He's disappointed. Disengaged is the worst. The worst thing you don't want to get with Michael is disengaged. That's the big warning sign. He's never lay on the floor and pretended to sleep. No, but you know. I mean, yeah. He's so amazing. I love him so much. I think he's fantastic. But you obviously care a lot to make sure that, like, you want to see that he's engaged. Can I ask you, what's been your biggest lesson from working with him? Because you're, like, his chosen child in the nicest way.

41:54Look, I've worked with him so many. It's a funny story how we ended up working with him because at that point of time, Sequoia, there was a guy called Chris Olsen, which is amazing, still a friend of mine who was at Sequoia, and he did kind of found Klana in Stockholm. He did Drive, no? Yeah, exactly. And he did Klana Investment. So, you know, there was just, like, this story where, like, I'm talking to this guy saying, hey, do you, because there was a guy in Stockholm that knew Sequoia a little bit. So I was like talking to him, hey, do you think that Sequoia could be interested in investing in Klarna?

42:19And he's like, no, that would never happen. And I was like, okay, fine. So we just talked to the European funds. We were just like, it's not even worth, right? But I was still looking there in Google Maps. I was looking like Sandhiller Road. And I was like dreaming, you know, could I have the chance to work with these guys? And then suddenly my phone is buzzing. And I'm like, oh, I had a message. I was like, this is Chris Olson from Sequoia. And I was like, oh, my God. I was like, uh-oh. So what I do is like, I know like, okay, this is like dating, right? I can't call back in three days. I have to wait.

42:47I have to wait three days before I call back. So I'm just sitting there, like, counting the hours. Like, I cannot. I don't want to look too interested. Yeah, exactly. And then I call Chris, and we take a meeting, and they get super excited. And we instantly wanted to work with Sequoia. We were like, they're the best. That's how we saw it. Like, we saw this was going to be a huge, you know, brand uplift for a company. At this point in time, you know, Daniel Ekka, Spotify, is getting all the tech credibility. Like, all the engineers in Stockholm wants to work with Spotify. Klon is some boring invoicing company.

43:14People are like, what the hell is that? So we're like, we need tech. We need tech credibility, right? Sequoia's going to give us that. So anyways, what happens is, a little bit later on, Sequoia decides to make the investment. Chris flies to Stockholm, and we had met Michael in a hotel breakfast here in London. And then Chris comes, and he makes this beautiful presentation, right? And the presentation is like, these are the Apple guys in the garage, these are the Google guys in the garage, and these are the Corona guys in the garage, and you're going to be the next Google, you know? And we're just sitting there, like, oh my God, we're going to be Google.

43:42You know, like, we're just like, we're buying it all. And then I feel afterwards like, this is not good. Like, we have to do something cocky here. We can't just like, you know, just swallow this and be like, okay, please, can we work together? So when Chris exits the room and is just about to leave, I say, hey, Chris, just one thing. If we are genuinely the next Google, how come you're the only one from the Sequoia partnership that's here in Stockholm today? And then Chris looks at me and says, oh, I'm so sorry. The other guys couldn't make it. You know, whatever. You have to remember, they invested.

44:11They took a 25 % stake at$100 million valuation, right? They took a 25 % stake. Yeah, at$100 million. That was the deal they eventually did that. Oh, my God. So Chris is like, I'm so sorry. I couldn't make it. And he goes into the elevator. And literally, 20 seconds later, this is so impressive, 20 seconds later, my phone starts buzzing, and it's Michael Moritz. And Michael Moritz is like, hey, I'm so sorry. I couldn't make the meeting. And if we get to do this investment, I'll join the board. So thanks to me saying that and being a little bit cocky and not being so freaking Swedish, we actually got Michael on the board.

44:43and then since then I've worked with Mike and gotten to know him. The thing people don't understand with Mike is that Mike has this... I always think that for you to be really good, for you to really understand the topic, you need to be in every freaking detail. You need to read up a lot. And he does. But the point is, it's almost like sometimes I feel like he can just take this huge mass of information and he can, without a second of thought, he's just, that is important. And he just gets that at a level. Other people I interact with, he's just brilliant at that. It's just amazing. He called me in 2019 in summer.

45:17I don't know why he called me, but he was like, and this was when we had been in the US for a few years. We weren't getting any traction. The business wasn't doing. And then another Nick from Afterpay in Australia was starting to get traction in the US with Buy Now Pay Later. And Michael just calls me out of the blue and is just like, Sebastian, I think it's now or never. If we don't do US now, we're never going to do it. And I was just like, I don't know how the hell he knew that, but he was like so spot on. It was exactly the thing. And I just dropped everything and I was just like, we have to win the US.

45:46And then I just spent the next two years focusing 100 % on that. Do Sequoia move the needle for a company? In my opinion, they do. Yeah. I mean, I think I've been very impressed with all the people I work with there. I think they're amazing. And there's a new generation now with Sonia and Andrew and the new guys coming. So it's really cool. Pat and Alfred. Yeah, I think they're amazing. When you talk about the expansion of products, you've said obviously about kind of Afterpay and BNPL. God, I'm going to get in trouble for this. I'm pleased to hear about the movement away from just pure BNPL, because is that not just evidence that for all the people that said lending's a shitty business to be in, they were right?

46:21Landing? What does that mean? Well, like BNPL's a shitty business. Why would it be a shitty business? Oh, it's really hard to build like a$20,$30 billion business on BNPL. Consumer lending is a hard business to make a lot of money. Oh, consumer lending. Okay. You know, when I get a startup pitching me consumer lending, I'm like, sorry. Look, you're like, wow, he's honest. these days yeah i think the way i thought about this is like when we started clama 20 years back we were just like okay look why are we not just making these banking products better working online because you got to remember in 05 the bank's internet offering were shit you know 2026 so it's just like they're all so we were just like okay we're going to take some of the stuff that the banks do and we're just going to do it better online we did that and then that grew and we were successful i mean people don't know this but we were we raised 60 000 in our first angel investment,$30 ,000 of that was spent, and then we became profitable.

47:14And we were running this as a profitable company from 2005 to 2019. We had almost 10 consecutive years of high growth and profitability that actually got us this reward because we were only one of two companies in Sweden that ever had such a long streak of high growth and profitability at the same point of time. But what we realized also over time was suddenly I'm sitting one evening and I'm looking my P &L and I'm like, wow, what is that line? Oh, shit, that's late fees. That's a big revenue line. And I was like, that's not going to be long-term sustainable. So at some point of time, I started thinking, wow, you know what?

47:48We're actually doing lending. What does that mean? What does it mean for consumers? What does it mean for their financial life? What's the implications of this? And at that point of time, I thought to myself, okay, there's two things I can do here, right? I can either sell this business and say, oh, shit, we're making a little bit too much on interest and late fees. Let's go and do something else. Or I can try to change this. And one of my co-founders left at that point. But I said, no, I'm going to stay and I'm going to make the change. And I realized that the buy now, pay later credit offering is a healthier one than your credit card.

48:18On your credit card, you put all your spending, full month on that, and then the bank tries to push you to revolve. You build up a balance of a few thousand pounds or dollars, and then you pay very high interest. So I was like, but I remember when I worked at Burger King, it used to be like press one for debit press two for credit when i would swipe my card and so like where did that go well banks didn't like it because the problem was if you were pushing debit now and then your bill at the end of the month was much smaller and you were less likely to revolve and borrow money and they would make less money so they removed the debit button and i was like no no no let's bring that back let's make sure clown offer is press one for debit 20 of our transactions are debit and then the rest is credit but the credit is interest-free fixed installments, no revolving.

48:58Revolving we've removed. It cost us. We gave up$100 million of revenue when we removed revolving because we used to do it in Nordics. We took it away. We even didn't have late fees in the UK for a period of time at all. But it turned out that that wasn't great either because then people to some degree were overextending themselves. So it's good to have a little bit of fees, some kind of consequence of not paying on time. We got that back, but you have to be mindful of not making too much money on it. So you just have to find the balance. But over the years, we iterated on a model that we feel like, is a better alternative to credit cards.

49:27If 10 years from now, less people have credit cards, more people have debit cards, and then use buy now, pay later occasionally, I would argue it's a better society. And that's what we've been pushing. And the consumers now, we see they love that. They reward us for that. They agree with that. And that doesn't mean you're still in credit. So you're still going to have, unfortunately, occasionally people who overextend themselves. You have to be mindful about that. How do you help them when they're distressed and so forth? It's a difficult business in that sense. It's a bank, right? So you have to be mindful about these things.

49:53But generally speaking, the type of product we're offering is a better product than the traditional products of the banks. You mentioned starting with Spotify and Klarna in Stockholm together. And obviously Stockholm's been the birthplace of great AI companies in the last year with Lagora and Lovable, to name a few. I'm a young 18-year-old Stockholm entrepreneur. Seb, you've got this incredible experience and you've been to the US and oh, how wonderful. Do I have to be in the US if I want to build a big startup today? No. Do you disagree? No, but every US experienced founder tells them, yes, you do.

50:28Yeah. I mean, to some degree, from a European perspective, it's obviously partially sad to see that a lot of the successful AI and companies in the US where actually the founders are European. 100%. All right. It's a bit sad, but that's just how it is. I remember Truecaller are friends of mine, also a fantastic company, European. I was at Atomaco when they did that. Yeah. Nami and Zai. and they were like told by the VCs, the American VCs, like you have to move your engineering center to Silicon Valley because otherwise everything's going to go to shit. And they did. And it was a disaster. And they had it for a year.

51:03They tried to recruit, but obviously nobody in Silicon Valley knew what like Truecaller was and they were already a pretty grown company. So they couldn't like attract as a startup in that sense. And they had a hard time recruiting and whatever. And they're just like, why are we doing this? And then they shut it down. They lost a year on that. They lost a year on that, lost so much traction. and then some of these VCs were like, oh, you're not doing well. So now we're not going to put our partner on your board anymore. We put some junior guy on your board because we don't care because you're not our top priority of companies.

51:27It's the most savage indictment, isn't it? When you get the associate join the board and you're like, oh, fuck. Yeah, exactly. I've been relegated. Exactly. So first they're advising them to do this thing and then when they actually go and execute it and it turns out to be a disaster and then like, I'm sorry, your company is not that good. Like, I mean, it's just terrible, right? It was terrible. And I think that like... Do you think the state of VC is very good today? I think again it's changing so fast. I think that the challenge right now is a lot of them are piling money into AI that they don't necessarily fully understand.

51:54Like how good is it? How differentiating is it? Does it have a real note? Well what should I know then as one of these VCs piling money into AI? Well I think what you should be doing is coding with Cursor and building things yourself. If you do that, I think you do that if I remember correctly. Yeah, exactly. But lovable. Yeah, well you only lovable or only have you tried Cursor as well? I've tried Clawcode. Okay good, yeah. So the point is like I just think that Like if I meet investors today that haven't actually downloaded and tried to build something themselves, I think they don't have the skill set to make an evaluation of the company they're looking at.

52:25I think it's so critical to actually just understand how powerful these tools are today before you make those decisions. If you have that insight, if you understand that, and then you make your decisions, fine. Like there's going to be opportunities. I think Cursor will lose half of its revenue in 2026. Is that your prediction? Yeah. Why is that? Because CoreCode's just eaten their lunch. I don't see any engineering team that's still on Cursor. We love it, actually. We use it all the time. Really? Is that because you have an enterprise deployment and contrast? No, I don't think so. I don't know why.

52:53I kind of switch between Claude. I'm a big Entropic fan. I love Claude chat version of it as well. I use that all the time. I just find that it depends on the tasks. I'm almost using them as like I would go into Cursor, I would write some things, then I go to Claude code, then I'll ask Claude code to do some other things. I still feel they have almost distinct personalities and skills. So I kind of enjoy still and I need an idea. The problem is also, because I wasn't an engineer, I never used VS Code or any of these tools. I still need an IDE today. So Cursor is my standard IDE, just as a consequence of that.

53:24So you could be right, but I'm actually more optimistic about their future than that. You can invest in Anthropic at 360 or OpenAI at 500. I'm giving the discount to make it easy. God, don't make me answer this question, please. I think they're going in very different directions. I think that if you, at least my experience with OpenAI is that it's becoming a consumer company. And if I'm building AI for like a billion people, I'm building AI that I would focus on making sure that like, for example, there's going to be people that are going to seek AI as a friend. As a friend in their day-to-day life.

53:58As somebody more like from that movie, what's the movie again? The Scottie Hansenman? Her. Yeah. Her. Exactly, right? So some people are going to more look for the her experience. And I think that's ChatGPT to me. Because if I'm so big, I'm such a big consumer brand, I'm going to start looking at my KPIs and I'm going to optimize for emotional connection, for people wanting to like, you know, how much time are they spending with my product? Is that really going to be a ChatGPT there? Or is that going to be a companion product? And there's maybe 15 provided, which is so specialized. I don't know.

54:27It could be. But my point is, if I'm just looking at who their audience is today, it's very likely that they will optimize for that relationship aspect of being your counselor, your provider, your play friend that you're playing with or playing games with or whatever, right? Claude to me is very different. Claude is like my intelligent advisor. And I'm trying to push and I say to Antropic all the time, like, I don't want an AI that tell me, you're so great, man. Like, I understand that that's like a nice experience. And some people may enjoy that. Like, I actually enjoy somebody just telling me how awesome I am every day.

54:58Personally, I'm not that interested in that part. What I'm interested in is rather somebody's telling me, Sebastian, and that's freaking stupid. Like, don't do that. That makes zero sense. Like, I want an AI to tell me you're wrong, man. Like, don't do that. That makes no sense. And I feel currently, it's more likely that Claude provides me like less biased. It's trying less to please me. And I think if you're building a product OpenAI, the risk is you becoming into the pleasing because I think a lot of people like that. And I would, I mean, I understand if I would use AI for entertainment, then also I want to be like, I want to be entertained.

55:30I want to feel pleased. I want to feel happy. i want to feel you know it's a different product you know i mean it's just a different thing you're looking for and i have less interest in that i have more interest in somebody telling me you're totally off don't do that so i would rather be anthropic yes for that perspective yes yeah 150 or 149 billion i didn't look at the valuation i didn't listen to the number of dollars was your revenue expectations by 2030. oh really yeah which was phenomenal yeah you invest now a lot as well through flat no what have you changed your mind on since also being an investor No, I have changed my mind on software, right?

56:04So I think that software is getting much more risky and it's much more unclear what the future of SaaS is. So we, for example, Flat made a big investment in Defensor, which is like a military arms type of thing. Not arms, but military defense. And that's very much like not, you know, there's some drones in there and there's stuff like that, but it's very different. It's not SaaS, right? I think data center is the one as the most under-invested categories today. When you look at inference needing to run for 24 hours a day for most of the knowledge worker population and it running for like 1 % of knowledge worker population today, I'm like, why the fuck is more money not going into data centers?

56:43Do you agree with that? And do you think - I have a very, it's funny you asked me about this. I actually play, I play around sometimes when I have time, I play around with Suno. Have you played around with Suno? Dude, I love Suno. I actually sent Nick at Revolut a song to get him to come on the show most recently. and it helped get him on. It worked? Yeah, it's awesome. It helped get him on, yeah. I love Suno. So what I've done with Suno is like I was playing around and I've been doing some songs. I even published it on Spotify for the fun of it. So you can go to Klaun and Sepp. I have like 74 monthly listeners.

57:14And my kids get so annoyed when I publish songs in my name. It's really funny. But two of those songs are called Compression. And this came from a conversation I had with Claude. So I blame all the lyrics on Claude. Don't blame them on me. I was only the producer. Claude wrote the lyrics. Then I had to give Claude some artistic freedom. I'm very interested in this. I got this question. I was on a conference in Yellowstone and I was on the stage, crazy enough, with Sam Altman and Eric Schmidt. And from the audience comes this question, how is it possible that you can take the whole of ChatDBT5 as an example, one of these models, once they've been trained, once the training is over and the whole thing is done, and fit it on a USB stick?

57:54How is that possible? That it's not bigger in size, it's just a few hundred gigabytes or whatever the size of the models are. And then they gave different answers. And I had an answer in my head, but I felt embarrassed in that setting to say, and I think what people underestimate with AI, it's a compression technology. So what that means is if you historically put data in a database, you say a database record, okay, Klana has a customer called Sephora. And then we write again, Klana has a customer in Sephora. You created this tremendous amount of duplication. If you look at any large enterprise company, they will have the same information over and over and over again.

58:28But if you look at Wikipedia, how many articles is there about Klarna? One. Why aren't there 15? What do they do so magically? How can it be that Klarna historically had a customer relationship with Sephora and we had information about that customer relationship in Slack, in Salesforce, in Google Docs, in Google Slack? Kind of the same information over and over again, but on Wikipedia is just one article. How do they do that? And I realized when you train the model, if I tell that like Harry is not only running a fantastic podcast, but also runs a VC, that like if you tell it once when you train it, it will forget it.

59:02It will ignore that information. But if you tell it enough number of times, it will remember it. And then when you go and ask it, it will know that information. But it's not storing it twice. Because if it's getting the same information that it already knows, it doesn't move the tokens. So it's automatically compressing all the information. This is why you can take the whole freaking internet, all human knowledge, and compress it down to a few hundred gigabytes. That's a huge amount of information. Now, obviously you lose precision. This is why it's very worthless to go and ask, what is the opening hour of the Starbucks down on the corner?

59:33And like the AI would be like, I have no clue. The equivalent of ChatGPT5, I asked this AI, so AI is responsible if I'm wrong. But the ChatGPT5, as an example, the equivalent of the number of gigabytes that that model is, is the equivalent of about two, three days of weather data from the whole globe. That's it. So how can it then be so capable of answering all these questions? Because unfortunately, despite what we humans would like to say, the amount of true novel information and knowledge in human society is quite limited. What we see is repetitions and variations on the same themes over and over and over again.

1:00:12So the point being to answer your question, when we realize this, we also realize that we're compressing knowledge at an extent. that's why people are playing around doing this. Like, oh, look at my iMac mini. I was running my own model on it. It actually works. Like, I can run this on a Raspberry. You know, like, the thing is, like, Romeo and Juliet, that story exists in a hundred different variations. And the unfortunate thing is, when you compress it down with math, it knows, AI sees that not as Romeo and Juliet and then another love story, another love story. It sees a love story and then knows it has slightly different names in different variations.

1:00:45So, it's a massive compression. And now comes the question, do we need all of that compute in the future? And I am, you know, I happen to have this amazing conversation with Michael J. Burry about this the other week. Wow. Because I was talking about this because he's doing those bets that it's not, right? And I said, look, I think there's two arguments for and against. One is, if you look at enterprise, enterprise, what does enterprise want? Enterprise wants highest quality at lowest cost. Why would I recompute my information about Sephora over and over again? If somebody could help me to compress that down to just one single source of truth and not having all that information unnecessary, I'll take it.

1:01:23I'll save a lot of money. I don't need that all at compute. Why do I want to do that? So in enterprise, you're going to see a dramatic squeeze and compression. The counter argument to this is you and I then go out and say, hey, we've had this amazing podcast. Now, let's watch a movie together. We want to watch Star Wars, but with our faces. So you'll be Darth Vader and I'd be Luke. Now, that needs generation. That needs a data center to generate that for us. So the question is just like, what power will be greater, the compression of enterprise data or the regeneration of new stuff for entertainment and other things?

1:01:56I don't know the answer to that question. I think you can argue both ways. But in enterprise data, there's going to be a massive compression that's going to come naturally through this technology. That's why I'm a little bit like, and I don't want to be the guy who said, there's only going to be four computers in the world. Like, I don't want to be that guy. So I want to be a little mindful here. Clips stay forever, Seb. Don't do this, Seb. He said there was only going to be... In 2040, they're going to play this clip. I was like, can you believe it? He was so stupid. No, but I'm just saying that, like, it will...

1:02:22So I don't know which power is going to be greater, right? Like, which one is too... If you run with that enterprise compression, what does that mean for data centers and for chip companies like NVIDIA? Well, that would mean that you would need significantly less. That's the consequence. else. The problem is, why do we have so much big software? Why do we have so much data? It's all a mess because we had humans who were trying to do their best, but the right hand didn't know what the left hand were doing, and they were overriding that, and the code over there didn't there, and then people start doing transformations and stuff, and it all becomes a big mess.

1:02:54And actually, Wikipedia is the most successful knowledge graph in the world, I would argue. But if you look at the standards that they apply, how do they do that? I'll give you a very simple, like I love this principle. So if you go to Wikipedia and you try to create a new article about a new topic, it's very hard. Like if you go to Google Docs, you just click new, boom, you start writing a new document. If you go to cursor, you start new, new code base. Wikipedia, where's the new button? There is no, do you know how to find a new button? No, you have to search for an article and if you search for something that doesn't exist, then you're allowed to create new.

1:03:26See what I mean? And that's so different. And companies doesn't work like that. In companies like, hey, I have an idea. I think Clona should be doing this. And like, okay, let's just start coding. But let's go and check. Maybe we already have code doing this. Maybe we already do that. So the point is that the reason that compression hasn't happened historically is just because so many people have been involved with different experience, knowledge, and so forth. And it just creates this massive mess. And nobody has been as disciplined as Wikipedians has been to keep it to one source of truth and so forth.

1:03:55They've really been amazing at that. You can read up a lot about how they're doing. But AI is going to help with that. AI is going to help organizations say, hey, should we really be doing this thing because we already have code for this and so forth? It's not there yet, but that's going to happen. Not because AI gets smarter, because it's economically sound. In a business, it's not economically sound to duplicate. It's economically sound to reuse what you already have. That's the reason it's going to happen. It's not because it makes sense economically to not do what you've already done again.

1:04:25Were there any other takeaways from your conversation with Michael Berry. He's a phenomenal thinker. Yeah, yeah. No, we enjoy it. I think in this regard, I think we were aligned, right? But it was funny because we were talking about this, how much novelty is there really, right? And it's an interesting concept because as I said to him also, there's other data that suggests otherwise. I've heard data that suggests that 30 % of the searches on Google every day are new. Like, I don't know if that's true. It sounds crazy to me, but there are some data to suggest. So maybe there is more novelty. And I think that's like, I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think this is very, very fascinating to me to see the counter effects of these.

1:05:00Before we go into a quick front, speaking of not knowing the answers to the questions, I'm sure you're in CEO groups, go to CEO events, sit in green rooms. And there are topics or themes that CEOs discuss about AI that they do not discuss publicly. What do you think they most are? First of all, I don't go to that many of those, to be honest, because I'm hard coding and working with my teams and trying to make sure that Clon is as successful as possible through this transformation. I spend very little time on those kind of things. Does this generation make every CEO, even public company CEOs, a builder again?

1:05:32I think it has to be. Yeah. Doesn't it? Well, again, I was with Mike last night from Atlassian. He's like, I'm up at 5 a.m. coding. I'm like, was that the same before? He's like, no. Well, I think so. But it's also amazing, right? I mean, I think for somebody like myself who didn't use the code or couldn't code, I think it's fantastic to be able to take my ideas and thoughts and turn them into something I can show others. It doesn't mean to have to be production ready, but I can articulate things at a very different level of quality than just like trying to explain something on a whiteboard or, you know, whatever.

1:06:01Now I can actually bring things to people. I had this very, very unique experience with Claude just last week where we were trying to talk about to kind of communicate a very specific thing that was like touching on accounting and finances and predictions and stuff like that. It was pretty like very, very complex thing and we were just talking about it. This was like the first time I went to Claude and I said, hey, can we like interact a few times? I want to like see if we can like explain this concept. And after a few iterations, I got this like beautiful animation. It wasn't even a slide because it was an HTML file.

1:06:34I thought to myself, wow, you know what? This is actually the first time I felt that AI could do something that humans couldn't. And it was the first time I had that experience. And the reason was because if I would have liked to do the same animation and beautiful pedagogical explanation of a very complex technical accounting finance thing, historically, I would have brought in an animator, a designer, an accountant, a finance Google sheet guy, et cetera. one of them may have been extremely skilled at what they do, but didn't necessarily know what the other person needed in order to perfect that outcome.

1:07:09And so the animator would have been like, yeah, I can animate like this and that, but they don't really understand what they're animating, right? The financial concept. The financial guy may be like, I can do the numbers like this and that, but I don't really understand why we would need this animation because I read the numbers and I get everything. I don't need this freaking visualization, right? So the point is, but here, Claude, Claude had all the skills in one and then created this. And I was like, I could not, a human would not have done that. And it was just like such an experience to me.

1:07:33There's a special moment when AI exceeds human capabilities. And I think in this experience to me, it did. Like it did something that I don't think a single, it's not like a single person could have done each part of different parts, but what was, like how many people are going to find in the world that are great animators, great visualization people, super pedagogical, knows everything about financial accounting, understand financial services. Like, you know, who are you going to find? Rare Venn diagram. It's going to be hard to find the person that's good at all of these things in one, right?

1:08:00Final one for a quick fight. What happens to Elon with Grog? I would never dare to bet against Elon. No, but the trouble is I would never dare to bet against is when you have two people you would never dare to bet against in the same market. And most people would never dare to bet against Sam. And so if you'd never dare to bet against Sam, but you'd also never dare to bet against Elon, one of your prior assumptions has to be wrong. Yeah, I think he's going to do really well. I mean, I think it's, if you think about the fact that he could in a few weeks in a few weeks put together a frontier model at that quality level you gotta give the credit to the guy like I mean that's just like it's insane do you use it ever?

1:08:38I actually you know what I love about it is and this is funny because this is exactly what Elon has been saying all the time and nobody wants to give him credit for this but the point is Onyx people spread all these rumors like we were saying like yesterday there was a rumor that like Klana like company offers buy now pay later for rent yeah you're doing rent yeah we're doing rent you're doing rent and we're like no we're not doing rent and nobody cares right but one thing that makes you late yeah it's too late and people are just like it was clana like next and now they're disappointed you don't do rent exactly and the next tweet is clana does rent and then we're trying to like our comms teams jumping on and trying like but like if it was established media they would fix it but like these x posts and tiktok posts like nobody just it just goes one answer right but then people write at grok is this true and grok actually almost always answers correctly.

1:09:25And I think that to me is very, very impressive. I think it speaks to Elon's vision of X, that over time it can become the trusted source of information. And what he's done with Grokipedia, where he's taken inspiration from Wikipedia, what I said, and so forth. So I think that there's something there and that's going to be critical for our societies because right now we have this scam ink, the scams flowing over, like AI is creating virtual versions of everything. So I think that's to me where there's something really, really exciting. I agree. Do you know what? I just wish you could hide the Acroch because I'm too embarrassed to ask, like, what is an IDE?

1:10:00Yeah, exactly. So you can have a direct message. Yeah, it's like a personal idea. Can you just explain it? Yeah, just like quietly. I don't want anyone to see this. Dude, I want to do a quick fire with you. So what have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months? I've changed my mind most about the pace at which the transformation is happening. I was probably in the camp of, I thought it was going to happen faster than it did. But I think I'm always, my problem is that like I overestimate it takes time for people to change habits and ways of working and stuff like that. So I actually think it's going to take a little bit longer.

1:10:32The adoption, it's not necessarily the capabilities of the technology, but like how fast people will adopt it and how it will change. Do you think that differs for enterprise versus consumer? I'm actually the opposite. I'm like surprised by how quickly consumers adopted it when you look at the wow numbers for chat. Yeah, but consumers are always going to be faster, right? Way faster. Yeah, way faster. I think we underestimate how fast consumers adopt and overestimate how fast enterprises adopt. Yeah. I think in kind of work life, it's definitely going to be slower. What criticism about you stings because it's partly true?

1:11:05No, I think the criticism that stings is the one that isn't true. Which is? Well, I think people sometimes say that like, oh, he's just trying to make an exit. He just tries to make a big fast buck or that like I just want to. And after 20 years, I feel like, hello, you know, haven't I proven now? I'm in it for the long term. I think the other one is that like he just he doesn't care about the consumer. He just wants to make money on interest rates, et cetera, et cetera. You know, reckless lending and all that stuff. None of that is true. I deeply care about our customers. I deeply care about them being financially well off.

1:11:36And I think I'm providing a product that is better than the alternative. So like that's the one that stinks because it's just it's not true. I've never I don't understand how you'd ever level that criticism against you. battling public company CEO ship every day. I mean, it's like the opposite of like quick buck. Anyway, what would you do first if you were not a public company and had no scrutiny on you? Like if I said, here's an invisibility cloak, you can do anything, spend any money on anything internally. What would you do? No, I think the only thing I would do different is spend less time on communicating and talking to investors, right?

1:12:12That's it. I mean, to be honest. But when I look at the strategy, and what I'm trying to do with the company, I honestly feel like, as I said, that 2015 vision, let's be that digital financial service assistant. That's the one I'm executing on. We're executing on it. The company's executing on it. I feel we're having tremendous momentum on it. We see the affection of our customers picking up our banking products is amazing. Do you think you've told a good story around that? No, I think communication is hard. Because I respectfully, I didn't know this. Yeah. I feel terrible. But you and I talked about it even before this podcast started.

1:12:45I think my problem is, right, is that like, and this is definitely what Michael gives me as feedback. Like, I need to stick more on message. I need to, I failed probably at this podcast again. And I tried to talk about all the kind of things. I'm just like, I love my work. I love what we're doing. I think so many things are so interesting and complex. And then I sometimes want to tell people everything. I want to explain everything to them. I should be better at like sticking to a clear message. No, totally bad advice. Oh, you think so? People buy you, not what you sell. Yeah. Okay? We don't release 30 % of shows because CEOs come on and they just sell.

1:13:22Let me tell you why our banking products are about it. It sucks. People buy you, not what you sell. I hope so. I hope that over the years that will pay off. But I also see what's funny is when we were the most highest valued fintech in Europe, blah, blah, blah, then I could do no wrong. Whatever I said was like, that's brilliant. He's so smart. And then when we came down to 6.5 and we had to do layoffs, it was like everything he does is a disaster. Was that a brutal time, P? Of course. Of course it was. How do you deal with that? To me, it's also like one story. I had this crazy thing, which is I've been doing this for many years now.

1:13:58So I'm a little bit more like thick skin. But what happened is I'm on this interview with MSNBC. And I've been with an interview with them many times. And generally speaking, questions have been, I would say, balanced and fair. But suddenly on this interview, they bring this new guy on board. And this was exactly when this was happening. And I'm sitting in my home because I was doing this interview for my house. And the guy comes in and he's like, this is a disaster. The company is going to shit. I basically didn't say that word. But like basically, oh, you know, this is the end of Klana. It's all going down.

1:14:29And it's like, and he's just like putting this massive pressure on me. And I'm just sitting there and I'm almost starting to crack up and laugh because it was just like so insane. I was like, come on, the business is doing really well. Like obviously we need to do some changes. but like it's going to be fine and i'm trying to kind of deal with it as professional as i can i was like no i don't think like less i don't know as you try to do in those situations but the point is i go out of that i was like oh my god that was intense so i get in my car i drive to to the office and i was like there's only one song that i can listen to now and obviously i put on queen under pressure i put it on max volume and i'm just sitting there under pressure and i crack up And the thing is, I said to myself, look, one of the biggest idols of mine, obviously, Slater Ibrahimovic, born in Sweden the same day I am, 3rd of October, 81.

1:15:15And I think of him and I say, I wanted to play Champions League. How the hell does it feel to go into the finals and play Champions League? He actually never won the finals, unfortunately, for him. But the point is like every soccer player dreams about being in the Champions League finals, right? Or a football player. The pressure. Can you imagine the pressure when you're going into that stadium? Everyone's screaming. The height of your career. this is the chance you got at winning this thing. That's what I signed up for. I signed up for being on that interview with MSNC. This is what I signed up for.

1:15:44It is stressful. It was hard as hell, but this is what I wanted. I wanted to play in this level of league. So I also have to cherish and be happy about the fact, look at it and be with gratitude that I get the fantastic opportunity in life to experience these things. It's amazing. I'm going through this amazing experience and And that's the only way to look at it. So as much as it's half and I can cry and I cried and I can be sad and, you know, I've had really tough times where I feel like super depressed about stuff. But at the same point of time, I'm always looking at it, putting on the pressure and being like, but this is what I signed up for.

1:16:20Yeah, I love that too. Yeah. Did you ever interview him? Do you know what? You should bring him here. No, we should do. And there's a brilliant video where he's like, when I step on the pitch, I think I am God. Yeah. I don't think I'm God though. But yeah. Did you always think you would succeed there? No, but it's exactly the same. There's funny, there's this email that I found that I wrote only six months into the company, and it's to my co-founders. And it basically goes like this. This is like six months into the company. We just started. We're getting our first customers. And basically, the email goes like this.

1:16:51I'm sitting here. It's late evening. It's written like 11.30 p.m. You know, something. Oh, dear. Yeah, and it goes like, I'm sitting here myself, and I started thinking like, you know what? What if we're actually successful with this thing? What if we start like growing maybe from Sweden to Finland and Norway and then we go to Germany? What if we actually grow this globally? What if we actually go and then we go after the banks and we start building financial services? And so I basically in that email, I write everything that's happened the last 20 years. So the point is that obviously, did I know that was going to happen?

1:17:23No. But just like Zlatan when he was kicking a ball down in Malmö on the street, did he dream about being in the finals? Of course he did. And of course, I did as well. I dreamt about being where I am now and even more so where I want to take the company in the next decades, right? You dreamt about being here with me? Of course. Sweet, Sam. I did see it. This was a very vivid dream. But I think visions are bullshit. All VCs are saying, hey, what's your vision for a pre-seed company? Dude, if I told you that when you were starting your business 20 years ago, you would not have been like, we're going to be a fully fledged banking provider.

1:17:59We're going to have BNPL as the insertion point. We're going to own the US as well. You would not have been like that. You unlock the next chapter with every achievement in my mind. And so I think visions are the most actually constraining thing that we force founders to try and articulate. Am I wrong? Well, I think you're wrong with me. I mean, and again, I don't, I'm not telling you that I know how we were going to do it. I had no clue. But I was dead dedicated to doing it. And I did see, or when I was, I don't know why, when I was a kid, I was an immigrant kid, my parents quarreled a lot. They divorced when I was eight.

1:18:34My dad started drinking. Quite a chaotic upbringing. And in that, my childish interpretation of what was happening in the family was that they were always fighting about money. If I fix money, then everything will end happily ever after. That was my childish interpretation. And so I got, for whatever reason, also very interested in Richard Branson. And I read his book. And I now met him, which was a fantastic experience for me. But I read him, and I was just like, wow, this guy built Virgin. He had the records of this and that. And then the other guy that really inspired me was Ingvar Kampra, the founder of IKEA, who built this.

1:19:11He was, for a period of time, seen as the most wealthiest man in the world. And so I just, for whatever reason, I was always so enthusiastic about building businesses. I remember we had this like school night in middle grade where like the cafeteria was always the place that did the most money. And then there was like tons of other businesses, but they all failed. Nobody was really making a lot of money. But the point was to raise money to go to like on a class trip or whatever. And I started a pizzeria. You know, I started selling pizzas and we out competed the cafeteria and we took all the money.

1:19:40And my class could go on a nice school trip because we made all the money that the cafeteria was making. I've always wanted to like drive a business. I've always had this. And then eventually I said to myself, the coolest business to build must be a bank. Like that must be the ultimate business because banks always wins. Banks always prevail. Like banks, you know, you see these things, you see like the JP Morgans of the world and all this. And they go through this. Yeah, of course, like sometimes they get financial crisis and whatever. But like in the longer term, the bankers always wins. You know, so that was always an inspiration to me.

1:20:11Can I ask a hard question? I've invested in 13 unicorns. Well done me. VCs congratulating themselves. and the single most common feature is a broken relationship with their father. Did that drive you in a way that you wouldn't have had otherwise, if you don't mind me asking? No, I think for sure. I think it's a combination of that and being an immigrant kid. I think that seeing all these other Swedish kids going to their summer holiday houses and having a surplus that to me looked great and then us eating pancakes seven days in a row because it was the cheapest food that mom could put together because we were out of money.

1:20:48Even though I love pancakes, I thought they were really delicious. I think it created this, like, I felt my parents were smart. My dad deserved something. Better is the wrong word, but, like, he started driving a cab, you know, and he was very smart, very intellectual. That was not the right job for him. You know, he was saddened when he saw drunk people and he was driving them and seeing what people were saying. And I think he was just not his place to be in life. and just it broke him down and i felt that like if i was going to fix things if i was going to get money and i was going to fix this now the problem was once i got money it turns out that life isn't like that because i i gave a lot of money to my father and he used it to drink more and he drank himself to death so like it turned out that money was not going to solve those problems there are some problems that money won't solve right and again i'm not talking i don't want to have that discussion about like you know does money make you happier and all blah blah blah because obviously when you've been as fortunate as I have in life and I can take my kids on an amazing vacation, I can do things and I don't have to think every day about, you know, can I afford this?

1:21:50I mean, can I do this? That's a tremendous luxury and privilege in life to be in that position. But at the same point of time, I've also experienced that, like, it doesn't solve all problems. Like, and it's sad because that was partially my aspiration with doing this, right? Final one. I'd like to finish on a, like, theme of positivity. What are you most excited for in the next 10 years? Like, my mother's got MS. I'm very excited for developments with diseases and treatments for diseases like MS. What are you most excited for? I think with AI, obviously, the thing is that if you, five, ten years ago, could say that, like, well, I kind of think I know what's going to happen in the future.

1:22:26Like, it's going to kind of continue like this or whatever. And then suddenly came COVID and the war in Russia. And, you know, it's like the world just changed. And suddenly came AI. And you suddenly sit there and, like, I have no idea how the world is going to be in two years. Like, I'm not. But for myself, what I'm most excited about is like, A, I'm still an optimist at heart. I do believe that these technologies will make life better for humans. I think it will actually lead to something positive. I'm in that camp. You can have an intellectual debate with me if you want to, but I think that's true.

1:22:54And then what I'm most excited about for me is I want to realize the vision of Klana. Against what you said about not having visions, I want to put that vision into reality. I want to bring finally a banking product that truly helps people save time, save money, being controlled their finances. That excites me. It excites the hell out of me. And I think that like all these incumbents have been having all these excess profits. They've made so much money because people don't switch. And honestly, because they didn't care enough about their customers. They didn't wake up like that restaurant or retailer every day and said, what can I do to make my customer better off?

1:23:27They didn't do that. I'm honestly excited about that. That journey is exciting to me. And I know that if I make more money, I'm not going to be happier because I have a bigger pile of money. It's not the point. But the journey of trying to accomplish, to make Klana into that global retail bank and the adventure it encompasses, that excites me. Going through all these different challenges and opportunities and trying to make the best that I can of delivering on that, that thing really excites me. And now AI is enabling me to do things that I couldn't do with this company before. I can realize those visions faster and at a higher quality than was ever possible before.

1:24:06And that's super exciting. Dude, I've so enjoyed this. Do you see it's so much nicer to do in person? Yeah. Thank you so much for being so brilliant and being so open. But it's been such a joy. Thank you. It's been a joy to be here. But before we leave you today, as an investor, I'm always on the lookout for tools that really transform how I work. Tools that don't just save time, but fundamentally change how I uncover insights. That's exactly what AlphaSense does. With the acquisition of Tegas, AlphaSense is now the ultimate research platform built for professionals who need insights they can trust fast.

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