It started at age 15, flipping Whoppers at Swedish Burger King. There, he picked up the basics of customer service—and began wondering why people chose to pay credit over debit.
Seeing no future in fast food, Siemiatkowski took jobs as a dementia caretaker, school teacher, and eventually an internet subscription telemarketer. It was the latter experience that sparked his interest in the hustle and grind culture—a mode the now-43-year-old said he connected with instantly.
But this was just the beginning of Siemiatkowski’s path toward leading a top fintech company that now boasts a $16 billion market cap.
Still restless, the duo set off to hitchhike across the world. But a crisis arose when they missed the last monthly cargo ship to Los Angeles from Sydney, leaving them stranded.
“[It] really taught us the value of resilience,” Siemiatkowski recalled to Sequoia. “We had to spend a full month in a foreign city, unsure what we would do or how we would support ourselves. We eventually found cheap hostel beds and jobs as furniture movers. We proved to ourselves that we could be resourceful. No matter how bad things looked, we proved to ourselves that we could find a way to survive.”
A potentially worse crisis arose when they made it home and realized they had missed the deadline to reenroll in business school classes.
“This left a full year entirely blank,” Siemiatkowski said. “Here I was, thin and poor after a year’s travel, no job, no school, no support whatsoever.” Living on welfare checks and food stamps, he landed a job at a factoring company, one that helps small companies cover unpaid invoices. It was this that planted the seed in 2005 for what would become Klarna’s approach to consumer payments: buy now, pay later.
Fortune reached out to Klarna for further comment.
