‘You Come at The King, You Best Not Miss’

Mentally, I’ve been in Sweden this week, though the quote that best sums up our recent reporting hails from the gritty Baltimore streets of “The Wire”: “You Come at The King, You Best Not Miss.”

Myself and my colleagues Maria and Cory have been grappling with a strange and rare attempted board coup at Klarna, the Stockholm-based “buy now, pay later” company. Rarely are such disputes made public, and it’s certainly strange that Sequoia Capital’s chief, Roelof Botha, and the broader partnership would support trying to oust their former boss, Michael Moritz, from a coveted board position. 

As it turns out, Moritz and Matthew Miller, the Sequoia partner who led the failed effort to remove Moritz as Klarna’s board chair, do not get along. Specifically, the pair didn’t see eye-to-eye on efforts to change the company’s shareholder agreements related to Klarna’s highly anticipated initial public offering, expected next year, we reported in our latest story.