Micha Kaufman is the Founder and CEO of Fiverr, the leading online marketplace for freelance services. Fiverr has had an insane ride in the public markets, in 2019 the company went public with a $650M market cap, at their peak that hit over $8BN. Today, facing a wave of AI, the company has a market cap of $1.121BN on an estimated $430M EOY revenues. Prior to co-founding Fiverr, Micha successfully founded and led several startups over the last 30 years.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
00:00 – "Fuck you. It's not my job to make you better." Micha's viral internal email that sparked a company-wide awakening
05:00 – The real reason Micha thinks Fiverr is vulnerable to AI
07:00 – "Replace 100% of your job with AI": Micha's challenge to every employee
11:00 – The brutal truth about entitlement in the modern workforce
13:00 – Wake the f*** up: Micha on the crisis of work ethic and ambition
15:00 – "Too many startups, zero value": Why AI is the new dot-com bubble
17:00 – The time-to-clone has collapsed: Why your startup can be copied in 10 days
21:00 – Why distribution, not code, is the moat that matters now
23:00 – The new game of investing: Why backing "missionaries" is all that counts
25:00 – The seed investment Micha wrote off… that became his biggest win
38:00 – "Being a CEO today is like captaining a ship in a storm"
39:00 – Will governments take control of AI? The Manhattan Project analogy
42:00 – The rise of AI superpowers—and the brutal decline of everyone else
46:00 – The single-person unicorn: Is it real? Micha says yes
47:00 – Why Micha's hiring more engineers—not fewer
48:00 – Marketing is being disrupted faster than engineering. Here's how
54:00 – What cost Micha wants to cut—but can't
56:00 – Why Micha would tell his kid: "Don't go to university"
57:00 – The business Fiverr could have built before OnlyFans—and why they didn't
59:00 – How Micha decides every year whether he should still be CEO
01:00:00 – The ultimate metric: When meaning matters more than happiness