Klarna Founder: From $0 to $46 Billion: Sebastian Siemiatkowski

**Sebastian Siemiatkowski** (0:00)
He had a discussion with me, we were sleeping in the street, dead scared, like, be careful with who you're listening to. Have they really contributed to success? Have they really built success? Or have they simply been in a company that was successful? Afterwards, I've heard from journalists that like a ton of emails were coming from banks because they simply, you know, they're threatened by our existence. And so the kind of articles and the writing about us shifted from they're here to screw customers over, to do bad things. And that was tough.
I went home, I had dinner with my wife, and we talked about it, and I was like, no, this time around I should probably help him. I decided, and I tried to call him, and he didn't answer. And I emailed, he didn't answer. And morning, my mother called and said he was dead.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:49)
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, he's the CEO and founder of Europe's most highly valued FinTech privately held company. His company is worth $45 billion. Sebastian isn't a guy that comes from a stable household or a silver spoon. It's very much the opposite. The stories you're going to hear about his home life, his family, his father, might just bring you to tears because that's the effect they had on me. He came from incredibly humble beginnings. He's built a company in an industry where he was not qualified, where he didn't have technical expertise, where he couldn't code, that has completely revolutionized an industry. He is humble. He is honest. He's willing to tell you the truth. That's why it's such a pleasure to sit here with him today and uncover what it takes and who it took to build such a revolutionary pioneering business. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is The Diary Of A CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Sebastian, one of the things that I've come to learn from speaking to a wide array of guests on this podcast, from sports athletes to really successful CEOs, is how often our childhood and our early years shape our adult foundations. And whenever I meet someone like you that's achieved really remarkable things in whatever discipline they're in, my first question always becomes, what was it that made them remarkably unique in their early years? What was the experience, the colge in that shaped them into who they are today?

**Sebastian Siemiatkowski** (2:34)
Right. It's kind of funny you ask that because like I don't necessarily feel that I was remarkably unique in my early days. A friend of mine, their son turned out to be blind, but he has perfect pitch, and he's now eight years old and he's sitting and playing the piano and singing. And that is to me a rebarkeble. And I was thinking about that, I was like, that was me when I was a kid. Look, I mean, my parents were from Poland. They moved to Sweden about a year before I was born. I was born in the northern part of Sweden. They were basically immigrants because they didn't see a future in the communist Poland, which was the case at that point in time.
They came to Sweden, but obviously, as it was back then, it was very hard to integrate into Swedish society. English wasn't as profound as it is today, and there was a lot of language barriers. At that point in time, it was also like a lot of, I would say, skepticism about people with Polish name and Polish backgrounds was hard to get a job. If you had a foreign sounding name, there was a lot of these biases. My parents struggled quite a lot to integrate. My mother was an early retiree.
And my father kind of jumped from job to job, was unemployed for a quite long period of time, drove a cab for multiple years, did a lot of different things, right? And so I think that like, I do think that there's something to the fact that as an immigrant kid, with parents that still like intellectually had academical backgrounds and you know, had studied at universities and stuff like that, and never basically were able to live up fully to their potential. I do think that that kind of creates some kind of like, you feel like that's unfair and then you're going to like try to fix that somehow. And I was growing up among Swedish friends who just had better economical standards than we had. And I was obviously longing for what they had. You know, I remember that with my mom, like there were weeks when, you know, we were eating pancakes every day and I thought that was great. But now I realized it was because there was nothing left. That was the only thing we had, like flour and milk and so forth. So like, so I think that like, I do think that that kind of setting, and there's obviously some research that suggests that in Silicon Valley, more than 50% of the companies are, you know, started by immigrant backgrounds. I do think that that kind of setting of, you know, having a lot of the intellectual capacity and all these things and then the kind of prerequisites potentially to do something different. And at the same time, this kind of drive of like you kind of almost feel like it's unfair. Life isn't necessarily fair, but like you feel like this is not fair. We should have like been able to have something different than this. And maybe also to some degree, I don't know to what degree that's on an emotional level, I don't think on a rational level, but on an emotional level, also like your parents really sacrificed their lives. Like I think it's hard for people that are not immigrants to understand the consequences of not having the friends from school, not having the understanding of how society works, which school is better, which is worse, how do you interact with government, how does the system works, all these things like that total lack of understanding of a specific society, that it means to shifts like my parents did in their late 20s, early 30s, and how difficult that means for your own ability to kind of do something with your life. I think that's something that's underestimated. So you have the kind of emotional thing that you feel that they did a massive sacrifice in some regards for your behalf, right?