← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Fiverr CEO: ‘If You’re Not Adapting to AI, F* You. You’re Done | Why "Time to Copy" is the Most Important Metric in Startups Today | Why 99% of AI Companies Today Will Die | Why Governments Will Take Control of AI with Micha Kauffman
01:06:00
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....
Loading summary
Transcript129 lines
- [00:00]
Micha Kaufmann
Why do you think it's my responsibility to make you better as professionals? Fuck you. Seriously, if you're not going to take the time to make yourself valuable, to embrace reality, you're doomed. You're doomed. I'm not going to help you. It's not my responsibility. If you don't want to do this, you're either going to be poor or a burden on society. And again, this is a part of this awakening. Wake the fuck up. Grow up.
- [00:31]
Harry Stebbings
AI is coming for your jobs.
- [00:34]
Unknown
Heck, it's coming for my job too.
- [00:36]
Harry Stebbings
This is a wake up call. Now. This post from the CEO of Fiverr spawned one of the most fascinating conversations.
- [00:42]
Unknown
We'Ve had on 20 VC about the.
- [00:44]
Harry Stebbings
Rise of AI and specifically its ability to displace jobs. So joining me in the hot seat today is Micha Kaufmann, Founder and CEO at Fiverr, the leading online marketplace for freelance services. Now they've had an insane ride in the public. The company went public with a 650 million dollar market cap.
- [01:05]
Unknown
At their peak that hit over 8 billion dollars.
- [01:09]
Harry Stebbings
Today, with a wave of AI that.
- [01:11]
Unknown
We face ahead of us, the company's.
- [01:13]
Harry Stebbings
Got a market cap of $1.2 billion on an estimated 430 million end of year revenues. This was an incredible show to do.
- [01:21]
Unknown
But before we dive into the show.
- [01:22]
Today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platform's products and tools. That's why we use Coda, the All In One collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution. The intelligence of Coda Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools including Salesforce, Jira, Asana and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster.
- [02:21]
Head over to Coda iO20VC right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's Coda C o D A IO 20 VC and get 6 months off the team plan for free Coda IO 20 VC and while Coda keeps the engine running smoothly, Shopify puts the pedal to the metal when it's time to sell.
- [02:48]
When I was 18, I dreamed about being an investor with zero contacts in the industry. And through persistence, I'm now living that dream. Maybe you're dreaming of your own business, and that's where Shopify steps in. I spend my time exploring successful businesses online. Often there's a business behind the business driving success for millions. That's Shopify. Powering 10 of US commerce, Shopify offers beautiful templates, AI tools for product images and descriptions, easy marketing campaigns and 247 support their number one checkout boosts conversions by 50%. Fewer abandoned carts, more sales Winner Turn dreams into success with Shopify go to shopify.com 20vc for your $1 per month trial today. That's shopify.com 20vc and while Shopify helps.
- [03:37]
You make the sale, Gusto makes sure team gets paid without the headache. Look, payday's awesome, but running payroll, calculating taxes and deductions, staying compliant? It's not easy. Unless of course, you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits tool built for small businesses like yours. Gusto gets your team paid while automatically filing your payroll taxes. Z Yang, CEO of video game studio Serenity Forge, said Gusto was the first step in turning their basement project into a real company. He'd help them scale globally, saving him 30 hours a month and letting him focus on building great games instead of doing boring admin. Plus, you can offer benefits like 401k, health insurance and workers comp just for listening today. You also get three months free. Go to gusto.com 20vc that's gusto.com 20vc.
- [04:32]
Micha Kaufmann
You have now arrived at your destination.
- [04:35]
Harry Stebbings
Mija, it is so good to have you on the show today. Listen, I've been looking forward to this one, so thank you so much for joining me.
- [04:41]
Micha Kaufmann
Thanks for having me Ari.
- [04:43]
Unknown
Not at all.
- [04:43]
Harry Stebbings
I've heard many good things for a long time. I had Adam at Bessemer on a while ago and he sung your praises then and so I wanted to make it happen then. And then when you did your recent activity I was like shit, we've got to make this show happen so I want to start. AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job too. This is a wake up call.
- [05:03]
Unknown
What spawned this post?
- [05:05]
Harry Stebbings
What was the reason catalyst for it then?
- [05:08]
Micha Kaufmann
This was boiling for a while, also echoing some of my team's thoughts about their futures as professionals. Some of it might be also frustration of not seeing people going through this wake up moment. I really wanted to validate a lot of what people were thinking between themselves or in small groups and be very blunt about it, but also offer some directions or at least thoughts about what you can do about it. Have this as an invitation for a discussion, which we did have after the email, and this was surprisingly large. I've asked my chief of staff to assign a room that can hold, I don't know, 50 people. I wrote an email saying, look, I'm gonna spend three hours sitting in that room with my laptop, just working. If you want to have a conversation, I'm there, just come sit beside me, let's chat. We've scheduled that time. I came to that room and there were about 250 people cramping in that room. I wasn't prepared to give a lecture. The idea was that this would be a conversation. And it turned out into what started with a brain dump on my part and then just having a conversation, which is pretty hard to do with 250 people.
- [06:31]
Harry Stebbings
Can we start on that brain dump? You're a direct dude. I'm a direct dude. My question to you is, we've seen Chegg bluntly killed as a business by AI, you know, fiver one that people say is very vulnerable. And I'm sure people talk about it in that same vulnerability. When you did the brain dump to people, what did you say in the brain dump?
- [06:49]
Micha Kaufmann
It was again, very blunt. What I told the team is this. In an ideal situation, my expectation of you, that each and every one of you, and it doesn't matter what you do, is going to replace 100% of what you do with automation. Maybe you can't get to that number, but ideally that would be the number. The obvious question is great, if I can automate 100% what I do, you don't need me. And my answer to that was, actually, it's exactly the opposite. Because if you can automate 100% of what you do, that means that now you have 100% of your time free to figure out what are the things that you can do that cannot be automated. Spend more time having nonlinear thinking. You can work with me on strategy. And I actually said that this was as, as I was writing this, it dawned on me that there's something very interesting about this process. When you, when you understand how AI augments who we are and, and how we do things is not, in a weird way, what's happening with AI is forcing us to Rediscover our humanity because it in many ways, if functions that we do. Dude, seriously, as robots can be automated, then there's no reason for a human being to do it. But what makes you, Harry, special? What makes you special? Is this the fact that you have a very advanced taste for things, Determine right from wrong? Is it the fact that you are great at ideating and thinking in a way that is unconventional? What is making you special? This forces you to actually get down to understanding your humanity again.
- [08:44]
Harry Stebbings
There's so many things I just want to unpack there. You mentioned there about finding humanity again. An inherent part of humanity is also vulnerability and fear. Running from things that can kill us. I literally just came from a board 10 minutes ago where the CEO was like, my team is not embracing AI because they're like scared that it will replace them over time gradually. How do I, as a CEO, encourage adoption without fear?
- [09:11]
Micha Kaufmann
Look, when you think about high tech, the average age is very young. I've been building companies for almost 30 years. And when I started developing my career, it was very obvious that as a professional, you need to be up to date. You need to be able to be valuable. And in order to do that, you need to constantly upgrade yourself. But I think that what happened in the past 10, maybe 15 years was this notion that your place of work has the responsibility to make you better. And my point to the team was, look, guys, this is an aberration. This is like you're getting everything wrong. And let me tell you how things really are. Whose responsibility is it to make you a better person? Whose responsibility is to make you a better spouse? Whose responsibility is to make you a better dad? And why do you think it's my responsibility to make you better as professionals? Fuck you. Seriously, if you're not gonna take the time to make yourself valuable, to embrace reality, you're doomed. You're doomed. I'm not going to help you. It's not my responsibility. But I will tell you what I will do. I will help those who want to go through that process. Meaning if you want to help yourself, I'll be there for you. That's my vow. But if not, fuck you. You're done. You're not done at Fiverr. You're done, Period. There's not going to be demand for people that cannot upgrade themselves, people that are having a bad time coping with reality and understanding what it means. I'm. I'm sorry. So this changes now. Each person should figure out what they want to do with their time.
- [11:04]
Harry Stebbings
When you were saying it's funny, I was like, no, I disagree totally. Like a husband or a wife should want the other person to be better, push them, challenge them in ways that make them grow. But to your point, it starts with you. The additional is good.
- [11:18]
Micha Kaufmann
Your spouse wants to help you become better, but you're not interested in doing that. It's not going to happen if you don't put the time. It's not going to happen. I'm putting the time to give the infrastructure for growth. I'm not your dad. I'm not responsible for you.
- [11:36]
Harry Stebbings
My subsequent question then, without sounding bleak, is, I'm very friends with Jason Lamkin from Sasta who has quite a bleak summarization on this. But he says, yeah, and no one wants to work today. Young people don't want to work like they used to. And so my question to you is, when you reflect and look, how much of society is really wanting to embrace that change versus not?
- [11:55]
Micha Kaufmann
I think that it's going to be wrong to try and understand reality through the lenses of the current present. I think that right now we're in a very fuzzy state in time where things change very, very fast. I feel that we are in a period that is very similar to the dot com, but it's now AI. It used to be pets.com, it's now pets, AI, whatever. It's the same bullshit in my feed, there's like 40 startups every day. There is no need for so many. But everybody's trying to cope with the endless amount of information that comes in. And this is very discouraging. I don't think that this is going to be the situation in the future. And so I don't think that the way people judge the present has too many implications about the future because we're in a very unstable world right now. Now the question do people want to work or not? If you don't want to work, the exit from the building is on ground floor. Bye bye. I don't think that it is my primary function to figure this question out with people. My assumption is those who want to come and engage in the activity of working either to make a living. It's usually the combination of making a living, expressing yourself, the search for meaning. We spend the majority of our awake time at work. It needs to have a meaning. If it doesn't have a meaning, then it's very miserable. Now if you don't want to do this, you're either going to be poor or a burden on society or a burden on your parents. And again, this is a part of this awakening. Wake the fuck up, grow up. If you don't want to work, don't work. I think that as human beings we're by nature a competitive creature. Why? Because we need to compete for food. We need to mate. If you translate this into modern times, you want to have the best looking girl at school, you want to have the fastest car, you want to fly. Business, not coach. These are basic stuff. They don't come out of thin air, they come out of hard work. And in my view it's more important to actually look at the meaning part of it.
- [14:22]
Harry Stebbings
You know what I love about my job, honestly is the fact that I admit to my woeful lack of experience in some respects. And you have 30 years. You there draw the analogy to the dot com when you look at today and the dot com, where do you look at today and go that's unsustainable. And the sign of bubble like times.
- [14:41]
Micha Kaufmann
I mentioned 40 new companies a day on my feed. There is no market for so many companies. And by the way it started, it actually started, I don't know, eight or ten years ago when I started talking about bubbles. When you look at markets and you look at the amount of companies that are actually competing for the same customer for the same function or need, you realize that there's just too many companies for a market that cannot entertain that amount of companies. So I think that it was boiling to a point where the market needed to have a cleanup. And sometimes cleanups happen with a lot of companies go bust and sometimes it happens through consolidation of saying oh there is whatever. There's five companies competing for a market that is very specific in cybersecurity. This is a market that can probably entertain one or two. In that sub segment, someone's going to win, which by definition is not going to leave that much for the rest. Which means that there's going to be a cleanup either through consolidation or through companies going bust. Right now what we're seeing is on steroids. I was reflecting about this a while ago, you know, when I started building my first company. You create something that is outstanding, you succeed. How fast would someone clone you? Maybe 25 years ago this would have taken a year depending on the sophistication. When we launched Fiverr 15 years ago, time to clone was between 6 and 9 months. The time to clone right now is 10 days. Whatever. Like I probably forget simpler stuff. It's nothing. The influx of just the amount of things that are being built and they don't have a differentiator they don't have the delta of what they're adding to the existing is really, really marginal. And there's another thing that is really interesting about this. I think it's hard to measure exactly, but what's interesting is think about the horizon of building something. So it used to be you had Mount Everest in front of you, and this was the mountain of building something. You had to spend tremendous amount of preparation, energy, all of it to climb the mountain. When you reach the peak, what you realize was that there is like 10 other Everest in front of you that you need to climb. What's happening right now is we've received a lift. So now you get a ride to, let's call it, 300ft from the peak. So you can take a ride. And usually when you build stuff that could be lovable, that could be whatever, you get stuck at some point and then you need to climb the rest of it with a professional or whatever, getting help. But when you reach the peak, what you understand is now it's really easy to climb. But I'm still at ground zero because who's going to know about what I've built? How would I market this? So it shortened that phase, but it didn't change the actual tough issue. My sister builds apps. Great. And this is what's happening with AI. It's so easy. Everybody's building. What's the true value? It's very small to none.
- [18:12]
Harry Stebbings
Well, that was my question to you, which was on the time to clone, does that not just reduce the importance of time to clone? Because respectfully, I would say that Fiverr's value is built in. Its brand is in distribution channels, is in the trust that it has with the supply side. It's not the front end of the website or the payment system of the website. It's all of the externalities or other products that make it an enterprise, valuable company.
- [18:35]
Micha Kaufmann
You're right. But here's the. But when the company was nine months old, there were already like 30 clones. Years after, there were thousands of clones. And we were having a debate between ourselves what to do with it. And we had two camps. There was one camp that said, let's fuck em all. Okay? Let's go after everyone. Let's fight it. It's unfair. People should not be just copying our labor and our concepts and all of our hard work. In my camp, the way I was looking at it, I said, look, the advantage that we have is double one. We're first for the market and it is speed. We're running really really fast. And when you think about the analogy of running, when you run, your head can point to only one direction. It's either in front of you or you look behind yourself. Try running by looking back. I'm telling you you are going to slow down, you lose your balance, you're afraid to hit a wall or pole, so you need to look back straight and you need to run as fast as you can. The second advantage is they don't know what we know because we're ahead of the game. We're the ones who are innovating. We're the ones who are actually figuring out how to solve the very, very fundamental tough questions and challenges. As you said, there's the front end and there is the magic that happens behind the scenes. But. What's the but? The but is we had nine months of head start, which were the nine months where we started seeding the brains and creating something powerful and creating a movement and a community around it. If the time to clone is 10 seconds, you don't have that time to develop it. You leave more to luck. Look, luck has a tremendous portion in success, I'll be the first to admit, but the portion of luck varies. And if you don't have the head start, then you need to be super, super lucky. All the stars need to align for you. And I think it just makes things very hard. And what I see a lot of entrepreneurs doing these days is they're just building off of stuff and they're trying to introduce a marginal advancement on what was already built because their imagination is not large enough.
- [21:05]
Harry Stebbings
Does defensibility not shift in terms of where it accrues in the system? And I don't mean that sound like a VC with a load of bullshit words, but if you think about time to clone being where defensibility was before, now time to clone is almost nil. So there's no defensibility there. But it's in the mid spectrum where you're at 1 to 10 million in ARR, where you're getting great data from high quality customers, enterprise or consumer. The way you collect it, cleanse it, utilize that data, maybe defensibility has just shifted different parts of the spectrum.
- [21:35]
Micha Kaufmann
You're absolutely true. And I think that this is where again, as I was saying, that AI forces us to discover our humanity. These are the things that are going to generate the most interesting startups. That level of thinking, it's that level of building. I'm not just building for the sake of building, I'm taking the time to understand their real needs. Their real challenges and trying to build off of that instead of saying, oh, people like this, so let's make X1 or the next version of something again.
- [22:12]
Harry Stebbings
Another reason I love this show is because I just get to ask advice from much smarter people like you. I'm an investor for a Living. There's 20 companies in every single category that I invest in. I just invested in an LLM optimization engine. How do you advise me as an investor then to navigate and operate a new world where Every category has 20, not 2 to 3 like it was 10 years ago?
- [22:33]
Micha Kaufmann
This goes down to a more fundamental view of what's happening with technology right now. Technology by itself doesn't give advantage to anyone when it's 100% democratized. And here's the tricky part. The go to market of OpenAI in what was it, November20,20,22 was as democratized as possible because they gave it for free. You can't be freer than free. And so what happened with that is everybody felt smarter. Oh, I can write incredible stuff. I can, you know, do research much faster. Yes, but so does everybody else. Meaning, yes, it's super powerful, but then it doesn't give you advantage because it's giving the same advantage to everyone, which makes get back to ground zero. It is elevating the standard, but it is just picking up everyone to the starting line. And so as you think about how to apply this to a VC thinking, it goes back to the oldest way of making judgments, which is look at the people that are running the company. Because you make decisions based on people, technology will evolve, ideas will change, companies will pivot. But who are the people that are running the show? Are they a hundred percent opportunistic or are they missionaries? They're not going to rest until they get it. Are they adoptable? Do they have these things and invest in people? I mean, at the end, I mean, I've invested in tens of companies. It's the best people that get it. I wrote off companies of saying, okay, this is money lost for sure. And these were the most successful companies I've invested in. They had the best people, period.
- [24:26]
Harry Stebbings
Which company did you write off that was the most successful?
- [24:29]
Micha Kaufmann
This would be brutal.
- [24:31]
Harry Stebbings
They were successful, so they'd be thrilled.
- [24:33]
Micha Kaufmann
No, yeah, but it's a public company and I don't know if telling the story would do well. This was seed stage, tough market, tough nut to crack. The company had internal things between the founders, all the tough stuff. And I said, there's so many reasons why this company needs to die. But it didn't. I mean people. One of the investors of Etsy talked about them in the same way. He said, you know why I invested in Etsy? I said, no, why? He said, because this company should have died at least seven times and it didn't. And this, this to me speaks for the strength of the company and the strength of the team behind it. And so this was the same story with this company. I mean this. At some point I also lost a little bit of connection with the company, which is fine. And then I realized that they were going public and I was like, what the fuck? Seriously. And I think that this is probably the best investment I've ever, ever made. The multiples were in the 50. Crazy, crazy story. It's all about the people, dude.
- [25:43]
Harry Stebbings
I always say seed is about three things. Founder being directionally correct. In other words, you don't make pillows or beds and three is the deal. Okay, I'm not going to do 50 on 250 for a seed. If the three go ma, you made the analogy to the dot com. Do you think we will have a AI bubble burst in the next few years or do you think the exponential advancement in the core technology means that we will sustain excitement and financing in.
- [26:08]
Micha Kaufmann
Terms of the amount of companies that are going to be around? Absolutely. Like 999 companies out of 1000 maybe is going to be around for a year, maybe two. It's going to be ruthless. And I've already explained why. I think there's just too many companies that are not introducing interesting advancements. It's just opportunistic by the way, there's nothing wrong with being opportunistic, but the market can sustain it. I think that the market is going to start sorting itself out. So you're going to see, much like we've seen before, you're going to see, I mean I was speaking about the.com, the.com also gave birth to Amazon, right? So it's like there are companies that have true value and the patience to actually build that and staying true to your, you know, core reason to exist. It's going to be the same here. The market is going to arrange itself. There's going to be very, very large players that are going to be foundational players. Some I think we know who they are or have a good chance of being these companies. I mean the Googles of the world, you know, the anthropics, the OpenAI's, which I don't know what the play is going to be exactly, but it might be reduced to the equivalent of paying for CPU cycles. It's just going to be GPU cycles. It doesn't matter. But it's a cloud play, and then there's going to be the other applicational layers on top of it. But again, I don't think that we can judge from where we are right now, because it's just changing too fast for the market to get a chance to organize itself. I think it's gonna go through a cleanup process, and that cleanup is gonna be triggered by investors, because at some point they'll say, you know, fuck it, I'm out. I'll let it sort out, and then I'll figure out. So that's going to dry up. If you're an AI company right now, you have two fundamental problems. One is getting noticed, getting customers, and then it's retaining them. In both, the overwhelming majority fail rightfully. So there's no space for so many companies, and there is so much space for people to actually pay for something. We're in the infancy of that market. There's, I think, two main things that are missing. One is regulation, and the other is expensive tech. And what I mean by the second is the type of technology that is not free or 20 bucks or 200 bucks, technology that is freaking expensive so that very few can actually allow themselves to have it. So that's going to create differentiators between players. And so those who are already large or at least have the backing to actually invest in it, are going to have it, and those who don't, won't. And that's fine before these two transformations, regulation and expensive, expensive tech. And this is going to be another force in arranging and sorting out the market.
- [29:14]
Harry Stebbings
I was on, on a call with a massive bank this morning, and they were like, harry, there's no way that we can use notion, let alone use AI tools. Dude, enterprise adoption is so far, but compliance.
- [29:26]
Micha Kaufmann
Why? Why? What was the reason?
- [29:29]
Harry Stebbings
Compliance. That you cannot, for data and privacy, recall calls and then take summarized notes? Not a chance. I mean, they laughed me out of the room. Misha.
- [29:36]
Micha Kaufmann
Look, fine, they shouldn't use it. Which is. Which is going to be another reason why banks are going to be going to be left behind. Whatever. But look, it needs to be sorted out. So if compliance is the issue, compliance is going to sort itself out. Some of it is going to be, like, hosted on location, some of it, whatever. There's solutions for that. Do banks use any cloud services? I guess they do. Is cloud safe? Here and there. Do you have companies on the cloud? With compliance. Yes, you do. So you can use them. Nothing is 100% safe. I don't think that these are the interesting problems, to be honest.
- [30:14]
Harry Stebbings
What do you think are the most interesting problems then?
- [30:16]
Micha Kaufmann
I think that questions like, are we okay with the fact that truth is dead? We can't even tell what's real and what's not. Are we okay by not being able to differentiate between things that are human and things that are not? You know, when are we being manipulated and not? But there's even a much, much greater and much more interesting question, which is how do we consider ourselves as human beings in our place in the world? My view is. I'll give you my view. My view is that humans, you and I, are the center of the universe. Everything evolves around us acting from an assumption that we are in the center. Are we okay with losing that center? What's happening right now is going there. It is going there because if we continue to develop technology in a way that eventually is going to be unsupervised because it develops itself and we feed it because it's based on us, but it doesn't care about us because, you know, AI now is eating the world. It is learning from everything everyone ever created. It's mixing it, churning new results without even saying, you know, I've just generated a nice podcast based on what I've learned from Harry. No, fuck Harry, right? It's just generating stuff. My actual concern is that if this will go on over time, then what's going to be our motivation to continue creating and sharing stuff? If it has zero value? Human beings, we need feedback. So we want to see how the things that we create impact others. This is why we share. This is why you have open source code, right? Because people can use what you, what you've done, but they can build off of it. If it has no value, why would we create?
- [32:16]
Harry Stebbings
And if we stop, why would it have no value? If you look at AI generated content today, it has not quite the same value, but it has a similar value. A lot of short form videos today is actually.
- [32:27]
Micha Kaufmann
No, but that wasn't the question. The question is, what is the value for those who created the actual content on which AI is being trained? If when AI generates something because it learned from me, I don't get any credit for it, I don't get compensated for it. You know that copyright is dead. It is dead. It's a notion from 1710, dead overnight. There is no copyright. It's done, it's dead.
- [32:53]
Harry Stebbings
I'm so sorry. Can you help me understand why copyright is dead? And when so much of content and media is predicated on a. Just help me understand. I'm really naive.
- [33:01]
Micha Kaufmann
So, look, if you look at the arc of advancement of humanity, Homo sapiens have been around for what, like 300,000 years? It was pretty linear for a long while. What changed the pace of advancement of humanity was the printing press, because it allowed for the distribution of knowledge, which made more people knowledgeable, which inspired them to create stuff, and then through press, distribute it so that more people can enjoy it. Very close, maybe 100 years, maybe less. After the Gutenberg, there was the 1710 act in the UK that was the act for the Advancement of Learning or something, which was the basis of copyright, which said, to motivate people to create and share, we want to give them protection. One is their right for their creation to bear their name, to commercialize this if they want. So one is a moral right, another is a commercial right. And this is how we advance. Because people wanted to both create stuff but share it because they got the recognition and because it created connection. Because you knew who wrote this piece. So you can get in touch with them and maybe it nurtures new ideas and maybe there's forks and maybe it inspires other people to do stuff. This was on steroids over a course of 500 years with, you know, modern media, with the Internet and with AI. So now the distribution of information is incredible. But what happened with AI is it jumped over the hoop of, you know, attributing anything to anyone it is based on. Which is why I say that essentially copyright is dead and everybody calls it fair use. I'm fine, whatever. Like, I'm not a regulator. My fear is that if people produce stuff, they publish it. It gets eaten and churned out without any recognition, without any connection to what they've done. Their motivation to create and share is going to start slowing down and then decreasing because you lose the benefits of actually creating and getting the recognition and maybe commercializing this. To me, it's troubling. I don't know if this would be the case, but I'm raising a flag. I'm not raising the flag. As the CEO of Fiverr, I don't. Whatever. My place on this planet is finite. It's like, but I have kids. There's future. Everything that happened in the past 500 years made our quality of life much higher. I don't want this to slow down. And I don't. We should be the center right now. Harry, I have news for you. You are working for AI, and so do I, because we're producing content, and that content is going to be eaten by a machine and used to produce new stuff. It sounds good. I don't know, maybe, fine. But I think that we lose our place in the center when we start working for something else.
- [36:08]
Harry Stebbings
You're very vocal in a very refreshing way, in a very unguarded way. Do you feel the pressure to be vocal on AI, given your role? I think a lot of public CEOs feel the pressure to have an AI strategy. Do you feel the pressure to have an AI opinion?
- [36:23]
Micha Kaufmann
No, I wouldn't use the word pressure. I have a responsibility. It's not the same thing. One is external and the other is internal. The garbage of once great companies that are now no longer with us is overflowing. And a lot of the reasons why these companies are not around is because they they couldn't sustain transformational waves. Compare this to surfing. You have to start rowing to get a wave then. And then you can ride that wave. It used to be for seven, eight years, and then you need to prepare yourself to catch the next wave so that you can ride it today. Those waves are much shorter in distance between their attack waves. But it is the responsibility of a leader of a company to ensure that you're able to actually be opportunistic about each one of these transformational waves. And in some ways, they force you to invent your act two and act three of a company. Most companies don't manage to go. Even the successful ones do not manage to go through the phase one of the company, even if they're a big company already.
- [37:34]
Harry Stebbings
What are your biggest questions on whether you'll be able to transition to the next wave and stand on the board to ride the next wave?
- [37:41]
Micha Kaufmann
Look, I was asked in another conversation, how is it like to be a CEO right now? And I said, you know, it's like you asking a captain of a ship in the middle of a storm, how is it to be a captain? And the answer is, it's wet, it's dark, and you can't see, you know, a mile ahead.
- [38:02]
Harry Stebbings
Does it feel like that when you compare 15 years of fiber? How does today feel in context to the.
- [38:09]
Micha Kaufmann
My dad was a. Was a very senior executive at the semiconductor business. The beauty about that business for many, many years was that it had Moore's Law. Unless it breaks, you can extrapolate and say, I know exactly what's going to happen in 10 years to the power of computing and the size of chips, period. We can Reminisce about those times and miss them. So right now the cadence is super fast. People that ask me, oh, what do you think? What do you think the business is going to look like in five years? I start laughing. It's like it's a laughable question. You can have grand general ideas, but people that ask you to describe it are just out of touch with what we're seeing.
- [38:51]
Harry Stebbings
Let's just push on that. Why is that a laughable question? I think it's perfectly legitimate to try and stretch someone's thinking. Sergey Brin was asked the other day, what will search in the Internet look like in 2030? And he said, quite understandably, I don't know. We're taking every year as it comes.
- [39:07]
Unknown
But I don't think it's a bad.
- [39:09]
Harry Stebbings
Question to try and stretch your.
- [39:10]
Micha Kaufmann
No, no, no, no. I think it's a fair question and I think it's a fair question that we should ask ourselves constantly. But also understanding right now. And I told you, we're in this, what I refer to as like this intermediate phase of technology. Things are not, are not sorted out. The signal to noise is impossible. Then there is the question of will it get regulated? How would that change stuff? Will countries, governments actually take hold of it? If you think about this, what AI companies is doing right now, like the foundational companies, it's like privatizing the Manhattan Project. Okay? Imagine that they do build the atomic bomb and now they're sitting and saying, you know, I don't know, maybe we'll do it nonprofit. Or maybe they say, oh, we'll license the atomic bomb to. Do you see a government allowing this? Seriously? Think about that for a second. If you get to AI that cures the worst disease in the world, which actually is worth a lot of money, do you see government leaving this in private hands? If this could create the ultimate weapon, this could be the, whatever, the ultimate solution for infinite food and energy. Dude, no way. So we're pre. All of this. So to try and extrapolate five years.
- [40:41]
Unknown
From now, Seriously, but do you not.
- [40:43]
Harry Stebbings
Think we're just seeing the commoditization of all model knowledge and advancement? When you look at Deep SEEK and the 12 different open source models in China, China versus the US is kind of a moot point at this stage because the. Do you not agree?
- [40:56]
Micha Kaufmann
No, I don't think so. And again, we're pre expensive AI, we're pre AGI, we're pre super intelligence. We're probably not that far, but we're not there yet. So I think that right now companies are allowed to play. At some point it's going to cross a line where governments are going to say I'm not comfortable with that level of power, not in my hands.
- [41:24]
Harry Stebbings
What happens then? They become nationalized?
- [41:27]
Micha Kaufmann
I don't know. I mean some functions of AI might be prohibited and kept only for governmental branches. I don't know. I don't know. I'm thinking about these questions. I don't have answers because this is like these are equations with too many variables.
- [41:46]
Harry Stebbings
How do you feel about value dispersion being concentrated? And what I mean by that is it feels like today's environment is more and more about the 0.0001% anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, TSMC, Google, Facebook, Microsoft Shop, the multi $10 trillion companies, and then everything else kind of languishing in no man's land in a way where that value chasm has never been greater. Do you worry about that?
- [42:13]
Micha Kaufmann
Is it really different than the aws, Azure and like how many cloud providers are probably plenty. How many take 80% of the market? Two and a half. Whatever. That level of concentration exists for many, many, many years. Well, how is this different?
- [42:33]
Harry Stebbings
Do you like being public?
- [42:35]
Micha Kaufmann
Sure, why not? I do. There's many reasons why, you know, I would advocate to being a public company, but there is time for that. If you're under the illusion that you can actually control the market or influence your share, don't do it. It's a bad idea. For those who are long thinkers and understand that this is a long game, it's a great choice.
- [43:00]
Harry Stebbings
Help me understand that. Because the feedback that I get is that the market relies on predictability and values predictability almost more than anything. Which means that your ability to invest in very long term projects which do not have concrete upside guaranteed and are timeline variable are less available to you. And so if you have a long term mindset, surely it would disincentivize you.
- [43:22]
Micha Kaufmann
If your capital structure is very solid, if you generate free cash flow, you're your own engine. If you have very solid execution, which means that you have high trust and confidence from the market and you decide to make bold moves, you can raise more money and that shouldn't be that hard.
- [43:44]
Harry Stebbings
Will you have more or less engineers in five years time, do you think?
- [43:47]
Micha Kaufmann
Think probably more. Why more technology levels the playing field because everybody has it. It's square one all over. Great. Now you can squeeze 3x out of each person, so does the next company. Great. How do you do more? How do you Move faster. You know, in. In a market of a lot of uncertainty, one of the biggest strength of a company is speed. It's just your ability to just move super, super fast.
- [44:19]
Harry Stebbings
When is more worse than better unit economics and what I mean by that is HubSpot said recently that actually they're producing so much code they can't put it into production and there's too many features to release and it's just too much. When is more actually worse than trimming and having better unit econ?
- [44:37]
Micha Kaufmann
The fact that you can generate more doesn't actually mean that you can just generate more. Which is why when I talk with my team about the concept of moving fast, I never use the term speed. I always use the term velocity. Speed is just the speed of movement. Velocity is speed plus direction. So speed is not enough. You need energy in a certain direction. If you're unable to push the code that you generate, it means that you didn't solve your infrastructure to be able to do this. So it means that your priority is incorrect because you don't solve the things that the bottlenecks that are actually keeping you from moving fast. So take the same energy and instead of building infinite amount of things, try to figure out how can I entertain that many ideas. So solve your infrastructure first, then start building like crazy. Plus you're probably building stupid things. Stop doing that as well. Going back to this conversation that I had with with the team, this meeting with 200 people to 250 people in a cramped room, One of the things that I told them is as I'm thinking about velocity, I'm thinking of how do we read interpretation of it or the result of it is just reducing the cost of failure. Because essentially all companies, the majority of what they do, fail. The reason why you don't know this, or maybe some people are not aware, is because they don't talk about their failures. Because there's nothing to talk. It failed. If you take a company the size of Amazon, I'm guessing they have 5,000 tests running concurrently because they have enough traffic to entertain that the vast majority, maybe at some point of time all 5,000 failed, who cares? But if building something to took 10 engineers three months and you failed, that's unpleasant. If it took one person three days and it failed, great. So we reduced the cost of failure so that we can test more things, we can have more progress. The way I was thinking about this is really how do we double or triple the output per unit of time and the same for quality per unit of delivery. But by Doing so, we just reduce the cost of error. Now if you do this and everybody else is doing this, you're in the starting line and so you need to have those differentiators. And look, the profession of being a developer is going to change dramatically. But you always need brilliant people. Will you need many, many more of them? I don't know. But you asked me, is your team going to be, is your engineering team going to be larger? Yes.
- [47:25]
Harry Stebbings
Does AI help normal 1x developers become 10x developers, or does it help 10x developers become super, super superhuman developers?
- [47:35]
Micha Kaufmann
The second one is easy. It's an easy yes. The first one is probably an easy no.
- [47:40]
Harry Stebbings
What function? If engineering actually becomes more a part of our org, what function do we have today will we not have in five years?
- [47:48]
Micha Kaufmann
It's a good question. I think everybody talks about customer support. As an example, which function has been.
- [47:54]
Harry Stebbings
Most impacted in Fiverr by AI customer support?
- [47:58]
Micha Kaufmann
No, the area that is going through the most fundamental disruption is actually marketing. If you think about coding and you think about how developers are actually using AI, it's really interesting. But when you look at the fundamental function of all the types of copiloting, what a lot of them are doing is actually what developers hated doing, which is copy pasting from open source, looking for a library, then reading the repo notes and then you know, figuring out if you want to use it as is, or you want to go through it and look for security alls, or you want to fork it and build something off of it. Like it's like doing research on Google, following blue links, you know, copy pasting stuff from different websites and putting a document. Who likes to do this? It's robotic. I think in marketing it's a whole different thing. There is no AI at the level that we have in programming in marketing. So you need to figure out how to use AI without actually screwing up or giving it too much freedom. Because essentially right now we're still marketing to human beings. And so whatever is being produced will be consumed by a human eye or ears. And therefore there is a much deeper sense of understanding human behavior when you do marketing. And I think that this is where marketeers get tempted to use synthetic technologies to automate their work, but it's not ripe yet. They're not necessarily automating the right functions. This is a less charted territory in AI at this point it feels like there's no need to write copy, there's no need to manage social, they don't need to write, you know, to create ads. Like everything could be Automated. And I think that what we've seen over the past year or so is that there's like an awakening out of this illusion that this could be fully automated.
- [50:02]
Harry Stebbings
As someone who spends a huge amount of time in social and in viral content, the truth is you're absolutely right. For your Virgin NatWest, Chase Bank Social media manager, you're fucked. You're fucked already. We're thrilled to announce the launch of our new product, see you later gone. But if you're a master of social and viral social posts and it includes nuance contacts from current events media like very trending gifts particular today, not yesterday or tomorrow today, the way it's structured, it is a fucking art form where I can't even hire people today and pay them a million dollars. Yeah, literally I would pay a million dollars for someone to do social like me.
- [50:43]
Micha Kaufmann
So I think that in marketing the entry level juniors have been replaced the fastest, definitely faster than developers. Because still, if you use AI, you still @ some point need to open the code and understand what the heck is written there. And if you cannot do this, then you don't have a job. But even relatively young developers can do this. It's not the same with marketeers. I think that this is the area where the most amount of disruption.
- [51:16]
Harry Stebbings
Final one, before we do a quick fire, just in terms of your leadership style, have you changed anything in the way that you communicate the tone with which you communicate the style, have you changed your leadership approach in a world of AI?
- [51:29]
Micha Kaufmann
I don't think so. I don't use AI to write, which is very important for me.
- [51:35]
Harry Stebbings
Yamini from HubSpot said that she writes some of her public update. She writes her public update with AI.
- [51:41]
Micha Kaufmann
I've been talking to other public companies, you know, friends from other companies and we were saying, you know, we need to, we should build our own investor relations AI so that we don't need to do these calls every time, we don't need to answer the questions, we don't need to write the letter to letters to shareholders, all of that. It's anyway, it's. Most of it is read by machines for algo trading or whatever it is and they analyze the tone, whatever. So let's feed them with their own.
- [52:15]
Harry Stebbings
When you have those CEO groups and conversations behind the scenes, is the consensus that AI is further along than people think and we are moving towards more unemployment quicker, or is it that it is further away than we think and not as close as people assume?
- [52:29]
Micha Kaufmann
I think most of them are just making the healthy assumption that we're closer to it than further from it. Because if it's further away, then great, let's chill. But if you assume that this is closer, then you at least think about the necessary or you think about the implications, which I think is the healthier thing to do. I haven't seen companies go through massive layoffs. I think companies that had fat in them started doing that, which is what I wrote in my email as well. I said, look, before we figure out that we need more people, let's just make sure that we're extracting the most out of ourselves, out of our existing team. This was true five years ago, which is why, you know, if you run a lean company, not too lean, so you can actually be very, you can be aggressive, but lean enough so that there's, if, if you say, oh fuck, like I, I need to cut costs, there's like 50 people that you know are going to be the first. If you know this, you, you, you should say goodbye. But the message was let's figure out how do we, how do we maximize our capacity before we actually think about bringing more people. And if, if we think about bringing more people. These people need to be AI natives in whatever they do. I don't care if you're, whatever, if you, you're joining the legal department or the finance or customer support, you need to be very well versed in this new world because again, I'm not, I'm not gonna teach you.
- [54:04]
Harry Stebbings
And what cost would you most like to cut today? But for whatever reason you can't, shareholder pressure, whatever it is, if I could.
- [54:13]
Micha Kaufmann
Cost marketing, I would always do it because the only way you can actually do it is because you can grow without it. If your organic component in growth is crazy strong, then you have a good case of going even deeper into your marketing and saying, do I need the incremental additional customer that I'm actually paying money for or not? But this is not because of pressure. This is just because we're not in that situation.
- [54:43]
Harry Stebbings
Dude, I want to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. What one belief about AI have you changed your mind on?
- [54:51]
Micha Kaufmann
The way modern AI burst into our life was driven by a non for profit organization which made me think that this could be a global endeavor that I think would probably give more power to more people and not more power to less people. And obviously with the reality, I've obviously changed my mind. Seeing how OpenAI change their strategy in.
- [55:20]
Harry Stebbings
Terms of being in favor of them or against them. Obviously Elon wants open, Sam wants closed. You were open and now you're closed.
- [55:27]
Micha Kaufmann
AI is being a very fundamental technology engine I would probably rather have open than closed.
- [55:37]
Harry Stebbings
Tell me, you've got a child who's entering the workforce, they've just graduated from university. What advice do you give them?
- [55:44]
Micha Kaufmann
I would rather give them an advice before they go to the university. And that would be, don't go. Because I think it's a waste of time in most cases. If you're up for finding chicks and getting drunk, that's fine. If you need someone to tell you to wake up and get to a class and someone to scare you with an exam, because if not, you're not going to learn, then this is a good institute to do it. In 90 plus cases of modern professions you can study on your own and you can do it in a fraction of the time. And by the way, if you don't like reading, great. We have video for that. Oh, you don't like video? There's voice for that. And if there isn't, then ask AI to produce something for you. Whatever it's like, in my view, it's just a waste of time.
- [56:36]
Harry Stebbings
What strategic opportunity did you not take with Fiverr that you wish you had taken?
- [56:42]
Micha Kaufmann
Dude, heavy questions. One of the strategic opportunities was to create OnlyFans. Many, many years before OnlyFans, we decided not to do it.
- [56:52]
Harry Stebbings
Sorry, how does that come as a strategic opportunity and why did you decide not to do it?
- [56:59]
Micha Kaufmann
If you look at the size of OnlyFans, you understand why this could be a strategic opportunity. From a point of our values as founders, we decided that this was not a direction that we wanted to venture into. The reason why I'm saying that we could have done it is because this was actually bubbling within the first versions of Fiverr organically. We didn't have a category for that, obviously, but we started noticing that this was happening behind the scenes. There were like code words that people spread on social and said, oh, go to Fiverr, do a search for X. And what it actually means is what you think it means. And so we, we started seeing that in the system and we, We. We decided this was not a direction that we're gonna go down.
- [57:49]
Harry Stebbings
Is five your last company?
- [57:50]
Micha Kaufmann
I don't know right now? Yes. I have this exercise that I do every year where I take a day or two or three aside. I'm doing an accounting of how I feel about the next year. And I'm asking myself, am I the right person to continue leading this company? And it has a Process. Like, I'm going through this process. It's like, it's, you know, measuring my energy, my contribution, my interest, my curiosity. The result.
- [58:19]
Harry Stebbings
Do you not so identify with your company that it is a part of you? Like, I would have a very hard intellectual wrestle if I realized that I wasn't. But dude, I started this when I was 17, I'm now 28. To not be 20 VC would be very difficult for me.
- [58:33]
Micha Kaufmann
But. But maybe, yes, but at the same time, if your contribution to the success of the company is not maximized, I don't know if, like, I know I have. I have a rule. If I wake up five days in a row saying, oh, fuck no, then I'm done. Now I'm done and it never happened. You can have a day, maybe you can have two. Like, if you have them in a row, that's a bad sign. And sometimes, I mean, if you're not. Sometimes you fall out of love, sometimes you lose your energy, sometimes you. Life calls you to attend to other things. And if that's the case, yes, it's. Maybe you consider this to be your baby. But dude, it's time to move on and find someone who's gonna do justice with your baby and your creation. It is a hard exercise, but I think it's worth doing at least once a year.
- [59:28]
Harry Stebbings
When are you happiest and is life about happiness? I know it sounds weird, but Nick on the show said to me, I don't think life is life from Revolut. I don't think life's about happiness. I think it's about success and winning and that often leads to happiness. When are you happy and is it about that?
- [59:44]
Micha Kaufmann
I think it's about. It's about meaning. When you look for meaning, when you pursue meaning, you are going to have a mixture of misery and happiness by definition. But I think that this is that. And as long as you're in your element, as long as you feel that you have deep meaning to what you do, then by definition your core is going to be very happy. Your life might have, you know, swings because we don't control everything in our lives and, you know, the surrounding, our family, health, all of that. But I think that generally speaking, I think meaning defines this for me more than. Than the word happiness.
- [60:26]
Harry Stebbings
Final one. When you think about how you most want to be remembered, I know it sounds weird, but I think about it a lot with grandchildren, actually. Like, what are my future generations say? How do you want to be remembered?
- [60:37]
Micha Kaufmann
My future generation is probably. I think I'm A part of a legacy. There's a lot of things that have passed to me from my parents and grandparents that are at the very core of what defines me and how. What defines me as a human being, but what defines me as a. As a husband, what defines me as a. As a dad. And a lot of it has to do. And we've touched on some of these things, is about, like being a good citizen of this world. This idea that it's always better to be a giver than a taker, but in general, it's. I mean, you can't just take. I hate takers, so maybe they'll remember me as a giver. The world doesn't owe you anything. So that's one of the values that I instill my kids. And the other is home is a. Is a safe place. It doesn't matter what happened in your life. I don't know, you killed someone by mistake. Come home. We'll solve it together. There's like, this is. Which doesn't mean that. That you're not going to be judgmental. It means that you, you're not going to be judgmental to a point where you break them because your motivation is to help them. And I think this, this also, it's also penetrating my management style. If you think about this and, you know, radical candor, these types of things, it's. It's encompassing and my contribution. I'm probably an artist. That's what I do. I think I just express my art in the things I built. And sometimes you build a business, you build a company, you build a product, you build a community, you build a movement. So a builder, an artist.
- [62:08]
Harry Stebbings
Dude, I'm sure this show has taken some turns that you didn't expect.
- [62:14]
Micha Kaufmann
You thought about every question so hard.
- [62:17]
Harry Stebbings
Yeah. You know what? It was because of the review cycle in my head. Post a bad question analysis. Thank you so much for being so open. This has been fantastic.
- [62:26]
Micha Kaufmann
Thank you very much for having me. This was really fun and thought provoking.
- [62:32]
Unknown
God, I love Mija's honesty there.
- [62:34]
Harry Stebbings
That was such a fun show to do. If you want to watch the full episode, you can find it on YouTube.
- [62:37]
Unknown
By searching for 20VC.
- [62:39]
Harry Stebbings
I would love to hear your thoughts there.
- [62:41]
Unknown
But before we leave you today, I.
- [62:43]
Love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity and their turnkey AI AI solution the intelligence of Coda Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools, including Salesforce, Jira, AS Some and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster.
- [63:41]
Head over to Coda iO20VC right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's Codacoda iO20VC and get six months off the team plan for free. Coda iO20VC and while Coda keeps the engine running smoothly, Shopify puts the pedal to the metal when it's time to.
- [64:07]
Sell When I was 18, I dreamed about being an investor with zero contacts in the industry, and through persistence, I'm now living that dream. Maybe you're dreaming of your own business, and that's where Shopify steps in. I spend my time exploring successful businesses online. Often there's a business behind the business driving success for millions. That's Shopify. Powering selling 10% of US commerce, Shopify offers beautiful templates, AI tools for product images and descriptions, easy marketing campaigns and 247 support their number one checkout boosts conversions by 50%. Fewer abandoned carts, more sales. Winner Turn dreams into success with Shopify go to shopify.com 20vc for your $1 per month trial today. That's shopify.com 20vc.
- [64:55]
And while Shopify helps you make the sale, Gusto makes sure your team gets paid without the headache. Look, payday's awesome, but running payroll, calculating taxes and deductions, staying compliant? It's not easy. Unless, of course, you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits tool built for small businesses like yours. Gusto gets your team paid while automatically filing your payroll taxes. Zhi Yang, CEO of video game studio Serenity Forge, said Gusto was the first step in turning their basement project into a real company. It helped them scale globally, saving him 30 hours a month and letting him focus on building great games instead of doing boring admin. Plus, you can offer benefits like 401k health insurance and workers comp just for listening today. You'll also get three months free. Go to gusto.com 20vc that's gusto.com 20vc.
- [65:52]
Harry Stebbings
As always, I so appreciate all the support. And stay tuned for an incredible episode.
- [65:56]
Unknown
With Jason, Rory and me coming on Thursday.