Erik Stenman
Chief Scientist of Klarna
Klarna AB
Erik Happi Stenman has been programming for fun since 1980, and for profit since 1989 when he started his first company.
He received his Master of Science in Computer Science in 1996 from Uppsala University. Erik was one of the driving forces behind the the High Performance Erlang project (HiPE) from the start in 1996 until he successfully defended his Ph.D dissertation against opponent Simon Peyton-Jones.
During his post-doc as a project manager in Martin Odersky’s Scala group he helped bringing the project to a successful release of Scala 1.0.
Before joining Klarna (then Kreditor) he worked at Virtutech with low-level optimizations of Virtutech Simics.
Klarna makes the world buyable through its flagship service “Klarna Online”, a system providing creative payment solutions to Internet shops. Erik's joined Klarna in 2005 as Head of Development, which at that time meant dealing with everything from personally installing servers and firewalls to design and implement new business features. As the company grew Erik's role expanded into that of CTO with a permanent position in the the C-level executive group. In 2010 he shifted his focus back to the technical side and is currently working as Chief Scientist (or Chief Erlang Wizard) spreading the word about Erlang and scalable development both inside and outside Klarna.
Erik's blog
Erik Stenman is Giving the Following Talks
Erlang Scales - Do You?
The Swedish payment solution provider Klarna has grown from three founders to over 600 employees in seven years. The customer base has grown from zero to 14.000 connected e-stores and almost ten million end users.
To grow at this rate, currently one new employee every second day, brings tremendous demands on scalability.
Obviously the technical solution has to scale with the increased user load, but the process and the people in the organisation need to scale as well.
This talk will draw on the experiences from Klarna's journey so far with a focus on scaling people and processes, but it will also touch on some technical challenges and choices.
Erik will share some anecdotes from a business in rapid growth and sprinkle the presentation with tips of dos and don'ts when scaling your development and operation.
Talk objectives: Give some practical advice on how to scale from a start-up to a large company. Give some examples of things to avoid when trying to scale. Make it clear that technology (especially Erlang) is important when scaling, but that people and processes are even more important.
Target audience: Anyone interesting in growing their company rapidly, especially those who already have discovered that Erlang is a good base for a scalable technical solution.
