> Klarna’s “Super App” was an area getting lots of investment in 2021. This investment was a step away from the core offering of the handling of payments. The vision of this app was to create an experience where people could do all their shopping within a Klarna super-app.

However, this super app never launched as planned. Internally, confusion arose when it emerged the super app would use scraped data from customers who were already partners of Klarna. The super app efforts are still progressing slower than originally planned, and some employees think the company is spending too much on this area for too little return.

Trying to come up with something out of nothing it seems

I might be just an ignorant user in Europe, but this super-app thing could scare me out of Klarna and let me find an alternative, I got uncomfortable with the app when they required unnecessary data for a payment.

Apparently every "payment" app/startup is valued as if it will somehow magically replace Amazon instantly.

I don't understand it myself, but that's what happens.

But can you keep thousands of people busy on such a project?

A technique I learned from possibly the worst project/product manager ever was to have loads of meetings. And over schedule them. And show up late. It makes everything so slow, and you have to have more people so that somehow, in between meetings a line of code could be written.

Lots of experimental things that had nothing to do with its core business such as Blockchain currency. Klarna massively expanded in the last 3 years. In 2019 there were about 3200.

The problem with a secret sauce is the market needs more than sauce.

So even if they could proactively leverage their synergies using mobile apps or whatever their secret sauce was, activities like, I donno, collections maybe, still scales up linear with size like legacy companies.

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.

> What were the people doing?

Right? If they are even somewhat productive, there should be enormous output created by them.

This is the death spiral all large organisations go into, they hire more people so that they can do more things, but then they spend increasing amounts of time in meetings or trying to work out how some other team’s system works, so productivity goes down, so more people are hired to counteract that.