Vladimir Pajkovski

Whatever your skill set, when you start a company you will need to hire external support for things you don’t know how to do. When you do that, its *really* important to check you all have the same idea about what you agreed to. 🚀When we started Klarna, we were three kids in our 20s at university together. We had an idea and we’d agreed to focus 100% on it for 6 months to see if it would be a success. 😧Then we realised we couldn't code. So we're like, how are we going to solve that? Are we going to raise money, try to pay some engineers? What are we going to do? 😇We were in an incubator and they invited some business angels and we had to pitch. After that, a woman approached us and she's like, this is awesome. 💫And she told us look I have these engineers and they're like the best engineers. This was amazing because she had actually done one of the few really successful exits during the dot com era where they had sold a company for 150 million pounds so she had money from that. And she had the engineering team from that. 👴So she connected us with those guys and they were much more senior than us - they were in their 40s. And there, unfortunately, a misunderstanding arose. 😁Our understanding was that these four engineers were going to join us full time and work with us and continue developing the company with us. 😬Their understanding was, they were gonna give us some source code and a system that works. And then they're off and doing something else. 🚀🚀🚀So we brought the engineers on board and they started coding, and they were excellent. They were amazing engineers. They started coding the system in December. In April, four months later, we launched with the first customer so it's four months and they put together a lot of the fundamentals that actually still today are part of what Klarna offers as a service. So that was awesome but then after that, they were like, Good luck, guys! See you later! 😱And we were like, No, that's not what we agreed! Then we looked into the contract and we had given them 30% of the company just for the technology and they just left us. 🤬So that became quite a tough conflict, obviously. It was kind of funny actually, because at one point of time one person said, “Well, Sebastian, you have to calm down this topic. You know Klarna is never going to be the size of a company where it's going to need four great engineers like this.” 😶So what ended up happening is, to some degree, I think just because they didn't understand the potential of what they had built together with us, they sold their share much too early when the company was worth maybe $10million. Which was not awful in a sense, because to me, it seems a bit fair. #founderstories