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The layoffs at Klarna

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Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#41

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…

Uber

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#42
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…

> The self congratulatory back-patting (even if it's just "everything is fine, we're doing great") is treating success like an achievement. Success requires vigilance. Excellence is not an achievement, it's an activity.

I used to wonder why friends of mine would get gifts for things like graduating elementary school or even high school. I asked my father for something because I was graduating highschool on the honour roll, and he told me completely stoned faced "i am not going to reward you for things that you are just simply expected to do". That sticks with me 20 years later and I apply that to everything I do in life, especially work.

If you aren't succeeding, you are failing - and I was expected and taught to succeed by default.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#43

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?

Monopolizing it's market? It looked they were nearly there for payment processing in swedish online shopping.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#45
I mean the warning signs of the overvaluation and hype around Klarna was there ever since a private early investor unloaded their shares on to retail via an online investment [0] [1] platform at $45B, last year December. [2]

Those 6,000+ retail investors who FOMOed and bought in are now down more than 80% of their investment due to the down-rounds, with the private early investor escaping and banking $8 million. So it is no surprise that the layoffs had to happen especially with the recent rate hikes which are accelerating the costs at Klarna.

[0] https://www.crowdcube.com/cubex/klarna

[1] https://milled.com/navia/klarna-pitch-is-launching-tomorrow-...

[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/online-investment-platfor...

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#46

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?

Most point to Amazon as the example of it will turn around once they start to dominate their space

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#47
> Garden leave is when an employer requests that an employee, upon submitting their notice, need not return to the office. This is a type of absence where an employee is asked not to work during their notice period, in anticipation of their departure, while still being kept on the payroll.

https://www.personio.com/hr-lexicon/garden-leave-uk/

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#48
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

At least in tech there are people who have had decade+ long careers where it was very feasible to never work for a company that actually made more money than it spent. I've been at multiple startups that had VCs pressure leadership not to make profit because that would hurt growth of some other KPI of interest (users, revenue etc). In the last few year many of these people have seen these companies go public, and the…

Agreed, and the opposite is true: I started at a small public company which had stopped growing and become profitable. It was targeted for a hostile takeover by PE who thought it could grow more.

To their credit it did, and (to the extent your willing to believe unaudited financials) again became profitable.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#49
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…

>We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning.

Hilarious since Klarna has one of the worst customer service experiences I have ever witnessed.

Their real monetization strategy seems to be to get your mobile information. It is not necessary to micro-finance through them, just to do anything at all after that!

They actually have a website, which you might think would be an alternative way to manage your account, however it also requires your verified mobile device (not a phone number) to access.

Now, they never tell you any of this and none of the people that work there seem to know that this is policy and are shocked that you can't do things like check your balance, pay off your balance, basically anything you might want to do.

Re: The layoffs at Klarna

#50
post #22

I’m surprised to read that Klarna had 7500 employees. It seems to be a lot for an online payment company offering consumer loans. What were the people doing?

I understand them being somewhat big with customer support and all the debt collection they are likely involved with. But still 7500 is a lot.

My understanding was that, at least in Scandinavia, their debt collection was a separate company. I may have gotten that wrong, but we had a few customers who paid us using Klarna. When Klarna didn't get their money after some period of time they'd normally let some 3rd. party handle debt collection. In some cases they just reverse the charges and leave us to eat the lose arguing that: The customer claim to have never received the item, or straight up let us know that they weren't about to lose money on this transaction, reverse the charge on us, the retailer, and leave debt collection to us.
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