Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The layoffs at Klarna

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 339 posts

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#31

Post by RandomLensman »

Areading314 wrote: post #3

Klarna generated $1.42 billion revenue in 2021, a 32 percent year-on-year increase. A majority of Klarna’s income comes from interchange, processing and merchant fees. As Klarna has expanded its BNPL offering, its losses have increased. It reported a net loss of $730 million in 2021, a 337 percent increase on its 2020 loss. I would say its surprising that this company is still in business at all with numbers like thi…

From the outside, I find it difficult to judge as management might have been focused on top line growth (given investors preferences in recent years). A (possibly) changed focus could now mean a very different profit profile will develop.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#32

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chrsig wrote: post #14

> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…

> experiences that untreated ADHD blessed me with was routinely failing classes. That repeated exposure to undeniable failure

Huh. Never thought of this. In a balanced culture, this offers no advantage. But in one still recovering from the self esteem days, when even games were encouraged not to produce any losers, I see how that awareness is competitive.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#33

Post by alecbz »

chrsig wrote: post #14

> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…

Stripe had a few “official” principles that I really liked along these lines: “We haven’t won yet”, “macro-optimism but micro-pessimism”.

They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#34

Post by jedberg »

Wow, that sounds so poorly handled. Not figuring out a way to tell everyone affected at (nearly) the same time is probably the worst sin.

Best layoff I ever went through was when my boss came to our team and said, "look, don't tell anyone, but we have a layoff coming in a few days. I have to let one of the three of you go. Do you want me to decide or do you want to decide amongst yourselves?". She knew we were good friends outside of work and would probably make a better choice than her.

I ended up volunteering because one other guy had just bought a house and had a baby and the other guy had debts to pay off and I didn't. Ended up working with both those guys again. One of them ended up leaving and getting a new job, then he pulled me in after 1.5 years of unemployment, and then we pulled the last guy in after he eventually got let go.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#35

Post by brycewray »

ivraatiems wrote: post #30
brycewray wrote: post #2

Re item “The pay cut of 2020 which became permanent”: the Day Job I had in 2008 used that year’s onset of the Great Recession to stop annual raises and *never* brought them back — at least, not while I was still there, which was until early 2015.

Wow, what kept you there so long?

No other opportunities to speak of; inertia; I was in my mid-50s at the time (59 by the time the final cut came for me) and didn't think a massive recession was a good time to look. Take your pick. :-)

[Plus, I really liked the company. Had been there longer than in any other job, and it was where I wanted to be when retirement came. Wasn't to be, however.]

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#36

Post by cosmodisk »

logifail wrote: post #7
Areading314 wrote: post #3

Klarna generated $1.42 billion revenue in 2021, a 32 percent year-on-year increase. A majority of Klarna’s income comes from interchange, processing and merchant fees. As Klarna has expanded its BNPL offering, its losses have increased. It reported a net loss of $730 million in 2021, a 337 percent increase on its 2020 loss. I would say its surprising that this company is still in business at all with numbers like thi…

> As Klarna has expanded its BNPL offering, its losses have increased. It reported a net loss of $730 million in 2021, a 337 percent increase on its 2020 loss Yet the tone from the acticle is that employees appeared to think the company was successful?

The company I used to work for got acquired by a listed company. At the same time, I was doing finance module at the university. One assignment was to analyse a company's financial reports and come up with a conclusion. So I analysed the company I worked for and the outcome was that I need to get out. At the same time the company was sending communication as it's about to discover time travel and unicorn milk.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#37

Post by dcminter »

greenwithenvy wrote: post #16

There's a reason why recruiters at Spotify jokingly referred to Klarna as "our relocation agency". Klarna would relocate folks to Stockholm who'd then leave within 6 months to a year once they realised the shitshow they signed up for. This was in 2015. They didn't value people back then or care to treat folks with the tiniest amount of decency. Seems not much has changed.

There was a corresponding joke at Klarna that Spotify was part of the natural promotion path.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#38

Post by BonoboIO »

smashah wrote: post #18

I tried to get a big-ticket item using Klarna. Had the money in the bank, just thought I'd give it a go. It failed multiple times without any sort of meaningful error message. Apparently each of those failed attempts hit my credit score. I told them to close my account multiple times through multiple channels (chat/email/etc.) and reverse any damage done to my credit score. Till this day I get monthly balance/stateme…

Hit them hard with a GDPR request, forward it to your local privacy organization.

In Europe this is popcorn time.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#39

Post by mrweasel »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #10
Areading314 wrote: post #3

Klarna generated $1.42 billion revenue in 2021, a 32 percent year-on-year increase. A majority of Klarna’s income comes from interchange, processing and merchant fees. As Klarna has expanded its BNPL offering, its losses have increased. It reported a net loss of $730 million in 2021, a 337 percent increase on its 2020 loss. I would say its surprising that this company is still in business at all with numbers like thi…

That's insane -what's the magic event people believe will turn those losses around?

It's kinda fascinating really. We had a client that had only ever lost money. Their idea was pretty good, they had what I'd call a working prototype and paying customers. Our CEO happened to know one of the investors, and chatted with him about the investment and the numbers we did on a whiteboard. Even if they grew their business with 10 times the number of customers, and each customer ramped up their usage 10 times it would take 10 - 12 years to make back the money that had already been spend. That was assuming no new investments and zero cost in those 10 to 12 years. The idea that this may not have been the best investment in history was more or less brushed, as the stock price would surely rise.

VC funding is weird.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#40

Post by ImPleadThe5th »

I heard some horror stories from some managers that have since left.

They were not told that there would be any layoffs, and when their employees came and asked them what it was all about there was no support from the top so they had to just tell everyone "I don't know". What an awful position to put people in.

Post reply on HN