Klarna

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• bullish endorsement Sahand Dilmaghani

  So we work with them. They obviously are, you know, hugely valuable in that sense that they help us be able to reach more customers and without us kind of assuming their credit risk.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  If you're a FinTech company, you probably want to have some AI pixie dust on you. So I totally get that point.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  in an interview with Alex Kantrowitz from big technology that came out, uh, today, in fact, um, Klarna CEO, Seb said essentially that they're handling more customer service work to AI, but they're hiring humans for the higher end problems. So I think we're seeing a bifurcation of how AI impacts jobs versus it's all or a retrenchment.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I wonder if the Klarna thing was a bit performative in some ways, Alex, where maybe that was like, I want to be the AI first CEO, you know, and I want to, I'm not saying pander, but I want to get cred for that.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  the reason the Klarna story became the Klarna story was because he was like wholesale, we're down 700 people out the door. Right. And everybody was like, what? Like, why wouldn't you cut 10%, see how it goes, cut 20%, see how it goes.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  they had let go of a whole bunch of their customer service people and replaced them with AI. And now they're sort of backtracking a little. They're like, we may, we were a little aggressive. We're having some low quality issues.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Yeah, that's why it is not public yet. But we don't know that much about what we do know they have now they I think they released some numbers for 2021. It was a pretty robust business 80 billion in GMV. This is a gross merchandise value. This is like what they sold. So $80 billion worth of product was done on a buy now pay later, you know, that's that for installation kind of payment. Um, their operating income was 1.6 billion. So they get a fraction of that 80 billion in gross market value, it

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  There was a story that suggested that, uh, it was like as many as one in four, um, were, were in default on these loans. That seems incredibly high to me.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Risk here, but more attractive, right? I mean, they already have a payback problem.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  Buy now, pay later, I think is going to be more. I, my theory would be, it would be a more attractive product in a down market.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  The people who do get, um, will take the brunt of this will be the employees and the founders who, you know, might have thought they had six times as much shares.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And, um, this is what happened. We thought private market valuations would come down slower. Mm hmm. So this is kind of matching, I think what happened to a firm coin base and, you know, some of the other really big pullbacks in the market. So, uh, this is still in negotiation. Supposedly it's 650 million, um, is what they're trying to raise. And sure it's a haircut. But again, if the firm is growing 30 or 40% a year, if it's a high growth company in that space, they'll be able to catch up maybe

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  there is news now that Klarna is reportedly raising money at a six and a half billion dollar valuation, which is about a seventh of what that company was valued at a year ago in June of 2021.

• bearish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  And Klona is apparently raising around at a $6 billion valuation. Remember, they were they were up in the $40 billion club. So that is quite a striking markdown if it's in fact true.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Klarna announced on November 25th, Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later giant that went public here in the US this year, a major venture-backed victory for a lot of its early investors, announced its own stablecoin on Stripe's Tempo blockchain for stablecoins. So we are seeing this happen as we speak.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I saw the Klarna story where they said they were going to rip out Salesforce and Workday because they're able to write their own bespoke code using AI. I mean, I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical of that story for a couple of reasons. One is, if that's their goal, why wouldn't they have open source these products they created? You might as well get the whole ecosystem working on it because they're not trying to sell this product that they've internally created. They're just trying to rip ou

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  Well, I'll tell you how it's possible. And so this is like this next crazy thing that's been happening. We've been doing a version of this to go after some other sources of software. We haven't had the balls, to be honest, to go after Salesforce or Workday, but here's how they do it. They write these agents and these agents can spawn other agents, right? So it's very classic kind of machine that builds a machine. And you start to observe the inputs and outputs of a system, right? I'm hyper-simpl