The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch1 Maalis 2021

20VC: Klarna Founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Scaling Europe's Most Valuable Private Tech Company, How To Motivate and Challenge Your Team Most Effectively & The Biggest Lessons From Working with Mike Moritz

Sebastian Siemiatkowski is the Founder and CEO @ Klarna, the company that makes online shopping simple, allowing you to buy what you need today and pay later. To date, Sebastian has raised over $2.1Bn for the company from the likes of Sequoia, Silver Lake, Blackrock, DST, Northzone, Creandum and even Snoop Dog to name a few. Klarna has been an incredible 16-year journey for Sebastian with it now being the most valuable private technology company in Europe with over 3,500 employees.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

I. The Importance Of Learning To Learn Fast

What is the best way to learn fast?

"People talk about it like there's this learning curve, and the best spot is at the place where you're challenged to the precise point where you're almost giving up, but not entirely. That's exactly it.

"And I have this amazing swim teacher for my children, her name is Petra, and she's just fantastic. I just love watching her because she has this ability of taking my children in the pool and pushing them to that exact point where they are almost, almost giving up, and they're learning at such a pace. And if I can recreate such an environment in Klarna, if I can create an environment, if I can be part of creating an environment where we put people in that position where they just are exactly at that curve where they are challenged, supported, and kind of at the edge and being given the ability to learn really fast and really discover what it means to have an impact."

Does Sebastian compare his work to other companies'?

"I don't think that much about what other people or other companies or other things out there could have done different. And there's pros and cons to that. But the benefits of that is that it speeds up my learning. Because a lot of people – and I've realized that as I manage other people – is that because they're so obsessed with trying to think about what other people could have done differently, and why situations arose, and why it wasn't their responsibility and so forth, they spend a lot of time on that, because we've unfortunately been brought up in some kind of guilt that it's bad to do wrong, and it's bad if it's our fault, and you want to avoid that.

"And these psychological constraints, unfortunately, hinder people from developing much faster, because if you go into every situation and say, the only thing that's relevant here is what I could have done differently, what I could have learned from this – if that's the only thing, it's just like, whatever, I accept my responsibilities. What could I have done differently? If you only focus on that, you just learn much faster."

How does Sebastian transform his self-doubt into a positive?

"I think self-doubt is not nothing. It's not a bad thing, right? It's a very healthy thing, if it represents you continuously trying to understand, am I doing the right thing? Is this something that I want to do? Am I making the right decisions? So I think it's extremely healthy to do that. I'm not saying it's not painful or tough when you have it. But I think it's a very positive thing.

"I'm much more worried when people tell me they have no self-doubt. And then I'm like, uh-oh, because that means that you're not really reflecting on your actions, and you're not learning from them. So I wish I could give you something more comforting than that, but I would actually say enjoy it. Be happy that you have it, and it's gonna make you a better person."

II. Sebastian's Management Philosophy

What does Sebastian believe companies can learn from soccer?

"I love the fact that Michael Moritz wrote this book that I still haven't read, so it's kind of funny that I'm referring to it, but he wrote this book about Ferguson, that manager of Manchester United. And I think it's very relevant, because today, the saying is that for people to be motivated at work, they need to have a higher purpose, the company needs to do something good, and so forth. And I am not disputing that, that is very true that it contributes to people's sense of purpose, and so forth.

But before you even get to that level, we have to ask ourselves, what is it really that makes people motivated and enjoy themselves? And I think when I think about that, I often look at sports, because why do people love soccer? What's the higher purpose of winning Champions League? People say, oh, there's a massive higher purpose, but not entirely, you're not really making the planet better by winning. Still, people are massively engaged in these things. Why?

"Because it's a team effort, there are clear roles, you know exactly what you're supposed to do – I'm supposed to put the ball in that score. And then it's very clear how you win, there is a referee that stops people from cheating. And so there's a lot of things in that environment that makes it motivating, that makes people engaged, and those things are usually lacking in companies."

How do you know when someone is at that crucial point of the learning curve?

"The problem with a company is that it's a much more complex environment with a lot of other things going on in parallel in people's lives. And so I have definitely occasionally missed to see that people are beyond that point."

"In Sweden, there's this course called Situation Adopted Management, which basically means that there is no single management technique. You look into the situation, you try to understand it from multiple angles. And then depending on where that individual is, and how you perceive the mental status, and the mood of that individual, and so forth, you try to adapt. Either you coach or you challenge or you instruct or you do different things. There's not a single methodology that will allow you to deal with those situations. But a lot of it is empathy. It's the ability to look at people and read them, and try to understand, and ask them questions, and understand where they are."

III. How Sebastian Manages Complexity At Scale

What are Sebastian's biggest lessons learned from Klarna growing to 3000+ people spread across multiple offices across the world?

It's the manager's job to deal with the complexity in a company
It's not for everyone

What role does Sebastian believe a manager should play in a company as it scales?

"I think a lot of times as a company grows, what ends up happening is the thing just becomes so complex. So management tries to organize the company in a way that makes sense to them and that is easy to understand for them. But the consequence of that often, unfortunately, is it makes no sense for the person who's actually doing the job. So they lose the purpose. Why am I coming to work? What are we trying to achieve? All of these things get lost.

"So what we said is, we have to do the exact opposite. The critical element is that the people who are actually supposed to do something – not the manager – the people actually supposed to do something, if they program or to do a marketing campaign, or whatever they're doing, they need to come to work every day and feel I know exactly why I'm coming, I know how I'm contributing, I know who I'm contributing for, I know what value I'm creating.

"And if that thing creates tons of complexity for us, as managers, because the whole system becomes much more complex, then that's what we're getting paid for. That's the one. That's why we're getting a good salary. Because we need to manage that complexity."

What does Sebastian look for in talent?

"Keep very close on the recruitment … Especially in a country like Sweden, a country where a typical saying is, alla ska komma med, which means, everyone should come, everyone should join. And it's very nice. And I appreciate that with Swedish culture, I'm not trying to really call it. I think it's fantastic and it's a fantastic society. But as a consequence, it took us some time to conclude something which maybe in the US or maybe even in the UK as it would have been much more obvious, which is that it's not a company for everyone. It is a company for the people that want to have that challenge, that want to be in that environment, that think that's interesting, that want to learn a lot fast, and want to get a lot of things done. And that's not everyone, and that's okay.

"Like when you play soccer – some people play soccer for fun, other people play to win the Champions League. People do it for different reasons. And they have different ambitions with it and different objectives with it. And the same applies to us.

"So it took us some time to realize that we need to tell people, look, just so you know, this is not going to be your standard company, you're going to be expected to do a hell of a lot of things, you're going to be expected to be challenged, you're going to expect it to do your utmost. And we're going to try to support you and help you and grow. So just know what you're getting into, before you get into it."

IV. Retail Banking 10 Years From Now

What does Sebastian see as the future of everyday banking services?

"One thing I would say, it's going to be a much smaller industry. And that's because it is ridiculous that moving money back and forth is a trillion-dollar industry. That is ridiculous. There is no good reason for that whatsoever. This is going to be a much more cost-efficient, much smaller revenue business than it is today. But even though it would be much smaller than it is today, it's still massive, and Klarna has the opportunity to be one big player in that industry, similar to what Tesla is doing in cars or whatever, that's what I want to do. And I feel we have all the prerequisites to accomplish that."

"There's going to be this push that's going to transform this industry and the people are going to lose on it are the suits in the marble offices in the city centers. That's where the pain is going to be felt, but the winner is going to be the consumer."

What do the next five years look like for Klarna?

"It's a little bit like self-driving cars – we all know it's going to happen, the question is when. And based on what I've seen in the last 15 years, and I've seen how retail has gone from retail to ecommerce and all these trends, this decade is going to be the disruption of retail banking.

"At the end of this decade, there will be a couple of new total players that will be very dominating in this space, and the rest will either cease to exist, will merge and try to acquire some of the new ones, or maybe a few of them will manage to reinvent themselves. But this is going to be an extremely interesting time."

Sebastian's Favourite Book: The Neverending Story

As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Kokeile Premiumia

Nauti 14 päivää ilmaiseksi

Tilaa Premium

Jaksot(1391)

20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com

Rich Socher is the Founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of the AI startup MetaMind, which Salesforce acquired in 2016. He is widely recognised as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford. In Today's Episode We Discuss: 04:10 Winners & Losers: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude 08:59 How Partnerships Could Decide the Winners in AI 12:42 China vs US: Who Wins the War for AI 25:50 How Society and Economics Needs to Change in a World of AI 34:04 What Jobs Will Be Replaced, What Will Not 36:04 How Europe Needs to Change It's Approach to AI 41:06 How AI Will Change Health and Longevity 43:10 AI in Consumer and Enterprise Markets 49:30 Quantum Computing and AI Misconceptions 56:57 Longevity, Personal Reflections, and Future Outlook Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile's Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.

18 Huhti 1h 3min

20VC: Why Seed is for Suckers | a16z's $20BN Fund & Founders Fund's $4.6BN: What Makes Them So Good | Why Josh Kushner Is the Master of Venture Capital Strategy | Why Extended Private Markets Screw US Citizens with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll

Jason Lemkin is one of the leading SaaS investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat, Saleloft and more. Rory O'Driscoll is a General Partner @ Scale where he has led investments in category leaders such as Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX), DocuSign (DOCU), and WalkMe (WKME), among others. In Today's Episode We Discuss: 04:23 What is Wrong with Billionaires on Twitter: Are They Depressed? 08:49 Why Does product Market Fit Mean Less Than Ever 11:50 Why is Venture Capital More Risky Than Ever and No One is Discussing It 16:17 Will Private Equity Save a Generation of SaaS Companies and VCs 23:53 a16z's $20BN Fund: Seriously? 31:29 Why Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital are Masters of the World 38:21 Why is Seed Investing for Suckers 45:49 Why Are $50 Million Seed Funds Useless 46:21 Founders Fund Raises $4.6BN: Analysis 52:00 How WIll LPs Change Their Approach to Venture in the Next Five Years 59:53 When Will IPOs Comeback? 01:09:15 Why Does it Not Make Sense for the Best Companies to IPO 01:09:51 Lost Ethics and Morals in Founder Secondaries and Term Sheets 01:22:58 Quickfire: OpenAI, Cursor, Deel vs Rippling

17 Huhti 1h 29min

20VC: Benchmark's Victor Lazarte on Why Portfolio Construction is BS| Why SaaS Spreadsheet Investing is Dead | Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US | Three Traits All the Best Founders Have & The Lie All Big Tech Companies Have Been Telling

Victor Lazarte is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the mot renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Victor has led deals into the likes of HeyGen and Mercor. As an angel, he was the first investor and board member of Brex, and as a Founder he scaled Wildlife Studios, bootstrapping into the largest gaming company in LatAm, with about 4 billion downloads. In Today's Episode We Discuss: 04:10 Lessons Scaling Wildlife Studios to 4BN Downloads 04:49 Why Predicting the Future is Wrong When Starting a Company 07:11 Three Different Categories of Company in an AI World: Who Wins & Loses? 09:25 Why You Should Always Ask What a Founder Does in Their Free Time? 17:30 Two Traits That All the Best Founders Have? 23:17 Why If You Start a Company in SF You are 1,000x More Likely to be Successful? 35:30 Why Spreadsheet SaaS Investing is Dead 36:10 Why Replacing Humans is the Most Exciting Opportunity in AI 37:02 Why Knowledge Work Will Be Destroyed and What Happens Then? 37:30 Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US 38:59 China vs. US: The AI Race 42:33 Why All Students Today Should Study Computer Science 44:38 Why Portfolio Construction is BS 47:04 What Makes Peter Fenton One of the Best Ever 51:31 Why Duolingo Will Be One of the Most Valuable Companies in the World 01:00:17 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions

14 Huhti 1h 7min

20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak

Aatish Nayak is the Head of Product at Harvey where he oversees product vision, strategy, design, analytics, marketing, and support. This is his third hypergrowth AI unicorn having previously held product leadership roles at Scale AI from 40 to 800 people, and Shield AI from 20 to 100 people. In Today's Episode We Discuss: 04:21 Biggest Product Lessons from Scale AI 7:18 Why Product Managers Are Wrong: They are not the CEO of the Product 12:28 Why Market Selection is More Important than Anything Else 16:40 If Distribution is King then Product is President 22:06 Effective Product Strategy and Execution 26:24 How to Write the Best PRDs 31:01 Balancing New Features and Technical Debt 33:17 Analysing Retrospectives and Postmortems 33:55 Introduction to Pre-mortems 38:25 Biggest Product Mistakes and Lessons Learned 41:40 Evaluating AI Models and Lessons Learned 45:03 The Future of AI in Product Management 55:21 What Should Product People Learn to Win in a World of AI 59:37 The AI Talent War in San Francisco 01:01:26 Quickfire Round

11 Huhti 1h 5min

20VC: How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem | Why We Need to Flood the UK with Venture Capital | What the UK Can Learn From Sequoia, Stripe and Norway | Why Now is the Time to be Bullish on China & Lessons from Jensen Huang with Tom Hulme & Stan Boland

Tom Hulme is a General Partner @ GV and leads GV's European investing. He has led rounds in Monzo, Nothing, GoCardless, Lemonade, Snyk and is widely considered one of the best investors in Europe. Stan Boland is one of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the UK. In 1999, he co-founded Element 14 which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 for $640 million. Following this, Boland co-founded Icera Inc. in 2002, a fabless semiconductor company which he sold to Nvidia for $367 million. In Today's Discussion We Cover: 04:26 Is The UK's Biggest Problem a Talent Problem 09:50 Why We Need to Flood the UK With Venture Capital 10:38 What Europe Can Learn from Stripe and the Collisons 15:21 How the UK Can Use Visas to Retain the Best Talent 16:46 Why the Government Needs to Put 10x More Cash Into Fund of Funds 24:32 Is the London Stock Exchange F****** and Does it Matter? 34:38 What The UK Can Learn From Sequoia and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund 40:42 What is a "National Goal for Wealth Creation" & How Do We Implement It? 48:10 What are the Most Broken Elements of the UK Tax Regime 52:11 Is It Stupid to Remove the Non-Dom Tax Status 53:15 Why is Now the Time to Be Bullish on China 01:00:19 Biggest Lessons from Working with Jensen Huang 01:08:04 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions

10 Huhti 1h 24min

20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America

Ernest Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Carvana. Under Ernie's leadership, Carvana went from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a $50+ billion public company, became the fastest-growing online used car retailer in U.S. history, and landed on the Fortune 500 in under 10 years. However, it was not all up and to the right, in 2022, the stock plummeted 99% to a market cap of just $400M. Today they are back with a market cap of $35BN, that is a 100x in the public markets and selling 400,000 cars sold annually, with a logistics network that rivals Amazon. In Today's Episode with Ernie Garcia We Discuss: 04:12 Are all great founders just "stubborn egomaniacs"? 06:55 How Carvana Almost Died on Several Occasions 08:46 Is Carvana's Inability to get VC Funding a Sign the VC Model is Broken? 11:58 Operators vs. Strategists: What Hires Can Make or Break a Company? 21:46 Billionaire's Biggest Lessons on Parenting 26:52 Is Life About Happiness or Achieving 32:21 The Reality of Being a Public Company CEO 39:07 Why Companies Should Go Public 43:55 Why You Should Price Your IPO to Perfection with No Pop 50:50 "What I Wish I Had Known About Debt in Building Carvana" 52:32 Quick Fire Round: Favourite CEO, Marriage Advice, Carvana in 10 Years

7 Huhti 1h 6min

20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deel and more. In Todays Show with Nabeel Hyatt We Discuss: 1. The Rules of Investing: What have been Nabeel's biggest lessons on price sensitivity? When did he not pay up and with the benefit of hindsight, wish he had of paid up? How important is ownership to Nabeel and Spark? How does Nabeel think about reserve investing and doubling down? Why does Nabeel not engage in secondary markets? How does Nabeel think about when is the right time to sell? Why does Nabeel think the majority of market sizing is total BS? 2. The Venture Landscape: Run by Principles and Broken: Why does Nabeel believe this generation of AI investing will require a different mindset to the one that made VCs successful over the last decade? Why does Nabeel believe that venture is currently run by principals and associates? Why is that such a problem? Why does Nabeel believe that the majority of venture firms today are dead but do not know it yet? What does Nabeel believe happens to the mega multi-stage firms who have raised billions and billions? 3. How to Win the VC Game in a World of AI: Infrastructure, models, apps: where does Nabeel believe the most value will accrue in the next decade of AI investing? What does Nabeel mean when he says there are three categories of AI apps today? Where does Nabeel believe the most valuable will be built? Does Nabeel believe Deepseek hurt or helped the future for Anthropic? How could Anthropic be a $100BN company from this point? What does no one see about the next 10 years of AI that everyone should see?

4 Huhti 1h 15min

20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Ishan Mukherjee is the Co-Founder/CEO of Rox, a Sequoia-backed AI-powered sales productivity platform. Before Rox, he was the Chief Growth Officer at New Relic where he scaled the self-serve business from $0-$100M in ARR. Prior to New Relic, Ishan founded Pixie Labs (acq by New Relic). Before that he led product at Siri Knowledge Graph at Apple, Lattice Data (acquired by Apple), Premise Data, and Amazon Robotics. Ishan was also an early engineer in Kiva (acquired by Amazon) where he joined after graduating from MIT. In Today's Episode We Discuss: 04:50 Biggest Lessons Scaling New Relic's PLG to $100M in ARR 05:59 How to Do PLG and Enterprise at the Same Time 07:00 How to do Content in a PLG World 08:50 Performance Marketing or Organic Content: What Works for PLG 10:27 Why You Should Stop Marketing at Events 11:47 Why SEM is a Cartel 14:15 Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS 17:17 How AI Changes the World of Enterprise Sales: Commit-Based vs. Usage-Based 20:49 How to do Sales Compensation Plans 24:44 How to Ramp New Sales Reps 25:03 The Impact of AI on Sales Research 29:18 How to do Deep Customer Research in an AI World 35:56 Changing Spending Patterns in SaaS 41:41 Retention and Churn in Enterprise AI 43:31 The Future of Sales Teams with AI 44:45 Hiring and Scaling Sales Teams 54:28 Quickfire

4 Huhti 1h 9min

Kaikki yhdessä sovelluksessa

Kuuntele kaikki suosikkipodcastisi ja -äänikirjasi yhdessä paikassa.

Sinulle valikoitua sisältöä

Podme-sovelluksessa kokoat suosikkisi helposti omaan kirjastoosi. Saat meiltä myös kuuntelusuosituksia!

Jatka kuuntelua koska tahansa

Voit jatkaa siitä mihin jäit, myös offline-tilassa.

Premium

9,99 €/kk

Kaikki premium-podcastit
Ei mainoksia
Ei sitoutumista, peruuta koska tahansa

Aloita 14 päivän kokeilu

Premium

13,99 €/kk

Kaikki premium-podcastit
Ei mainoksia
Ei sitoutumista, peruuta koska tahansa
Yksi lisäkäyttäjä

Kokeile 14 päivää maksutta

Suosittua kategoriassa Liike-elämä ja talous

Tarinat ja äänet, joita rakastat kuunnella

Kuuntele kaikki suosikkipodcastisi ja -äänikirjasi

Lue lisää