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Sebastian Siemiatkowski

@klarnaseb

Aug 19 • 9 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X

Sorry Jira, Bitbucket and Atlassian you are going out...

I really like the founders of Atlassian, good guys, so want to be mindful here but the software, not so much.

After being able to leave Salesforce and a number of SaaS, let me share:

Confluence and Jira is a software almost as ingrained as Salesforce or an Oracle database. In a bank like Klarna even compliance relies on it to track our new product approval process.

I believe all these SaaS originally were founded with some principles...

This is how you do great ticket and agile process.
This is how you do great sales.

But over the years they try to please every enterprise customer in the world. And they end up becoming just a glorified database. A massively complex software layer with process on process.

They require an ever growing of specialists, consultants making money to make "adoptions" tailor the software, and who's main income source is to continue charge for "improvements". The same consultants are the main sales people of the SaaS companies creating a negative loop

Meantime work in a company is intra-connected. Tickets are connected to code. Code to features. Features to marketing and sales. Clients provide feedback. Discussions are in slack and over multiple channels. Plus add a plethora of reporting tools and sheets, slides and docs...

For any human to make sense of that is complex.

And AI agents are really like a new hired trainee, at the start they know nothing of our company of Klarna and all the above process and systems.

We realized 1 million context window is not enough to explain all facets of Klarna

Every new thread of AI is the same employee starting from scratch again. First day at the job.

AI can do tons if we standardize, if we consolidate our data if we remove the complexity. Actually it makes us humans more productive as well, and our jobs much more fun.

Finally when your data is in order, when you have broken it out from your SaaS parties own data models, workflows etc and all is consolidated.

This week we get a demo of a vibe coded frontend that is more beautiful and easy to use than any ticket management system I have seen

And it is adjusted to our ways of work. It is software with an opinion. It understands our culture and way of working. And we can do Kanban boards. But it was vibe coded internally in 2 weeks. BECAUSE the data is there, the foundations are there.

Bye bye Jira

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More from @klarnaseb

Sebastian Siemiatkowski

@klarnaseb

Jun 11

Klarna gets attention for efficiency gains—we shrank from ~5500 to ~3000 people in two years. But I have always highlighted AI is only part of that story.

Here is how we got away from analysis/paralysis and into customer obsession and centricity:

A year ago, ~500 out of 3500 Klarna employees did analytics—dashboards, conversion rates, KPIs. We used tons of tools: Amplitude, ClickSense, Google Dashboards, Datadog, FullStory, etc. It was a lot.

And yet, to often, we could find obvious issues in our product...

Inspired by Toyota's Gemba sessions, we gathered some 20 such teams to show us their daily jobs—real actual work, not polished reports. Quickly saw: too much repetition, too many dashboards, too few real insights. We just shipped some directional insight to someone else.

Read 14 tweets

Sebastian Siemiatkowski

@klarnaseb

Apr 24

I believe retail and e-commerce is up for some true disruption due to AI. After 20 years in e-commerce, I´ve met them all:

Zappos, Stripe, Shein, Zara, Amazon, Sephora, Nike, Zalando, Asos. 1000s of hours

Here is how AI assistants will change the game:

The writing is on the wall. Perplexity launched shopping in December. Amazon is allowing you to shop on other websites. OpenAi continuously uses shopping examples in their promotion videos for ChatGPT

techedt.com/amazon-introdu…

At the core e-commerce and retail can be divided in 3 core components:

1. Product and brand
2. Curation and discovery
3. Infrastructure

You used to visit your local department store, where someone had curated some product and brands for you and solved the infrastructure part.

Read 16 tweets

Sebastian Siemiatkowski

@klarnaseb

Apr 10

Today marks 20 years since Klarna processed its first transaction!!!

To celebrate I am sharing a secret private email sent to my co-founders a late night in cold Feb 2006.

Proud to have predicted the financial crisis 2008 But most importantly don’t miss the surprising end!!!

––––– Forwarded message ———
From:Sebastian
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 at 23:44
Subject: Thoughts on expansion
To: victor , Niklas

Hey guys,

I’m sitting here alone working and just felt like writing you a bit about what I’d like to do with Kreditor (Klarna)

For me, the most important thing is having fun and getting to work creatively—exactly like we’ve done so far. Money isn’t as important because I think that if we keep being as creative as we’ve been and keep working hard, money will come—and way more than we could ever dream of.

Read 12 tweets

Sebastian Siemiatkowski

@klarnaseb

Mar 4

Yes, we did shut down Salesforce a year ago, as we have many SaaS providers—an internal estimate is about 1,200 SaaS shut down.

Not the end of Salesforce; might be the opposite.

Here is what actually happened and how/why we originally intended to NOT share it publicly:

At Klarna, we decided early to explore the potential of AI/LLMs, being open to testing all things that seemed to be trending.

We encouraged all employees to do it allowed them to pursue ideas organically rather than following "management direction" on what they should be build

In the early days of ChatGPT, we heard a lot: "this tool allows you to feed all your PDFs, all your data sources to a LLM!" However, the old universal truth of data scientists still holds true, even in AI: "shit in, shit out."

Read 19 tweets

Sebastian Siemiatkowski

@klarnaseb

Feb 8

Ok. I give up. Klarna and me will embrace crypto! More to come

Yes I know! This post will get a huge sigh and 2 views 😂

But it still feels historic. Last large fintech in the world to embrace it. Someone had to be last. And that’s a milestone as well of some sort… 🥳

Btw all crypto fans. Tell me what we should do with it? We have 85 m users worldwide. 100 bn of volume. Over 0.5 m merchants. About 30% of volume is debit not credit. Over 1 million cards.

I have some ideas but keen to hear more!

Wow
Will fill my todo list for some while…
Promise to follow up with all the ideas and suggestions!
Feel free to follow me and I will keep you in the loop
Actually it was 3 great entrepreneurs introduced to me by @andrew__reed that made me see the light

Read 5 tweets

Sebastian Siemiatkowski

@klarnaseb

Nov 13, 2024

:

🚨 AI is reshaping industries faster than ever, and eCommerce is next in line 🚨

🧵 Here’s how the rise of AI agents could redefine online shopping—and why brands need to rethink their strategies NOW. 👇

1/ Chegg, an educational services company, saw its stock plummet nearly 99%—all because AI tools like ChatGPT offer similar services faster and cheaper.

gizmodo.com/chegg-is-on-it…

2/ This is just the beginning. AI agents that can navigate the internet, complete tasks, and make purchases are on the horizon, thanks to OpenAI, Claude, Microsoft, and others. And they’re arriving soon.