Fiverr CEO: 'If You're Not Adapting to AI, F* You. You're Done

This was boiling for a while, also echoing some of my team’s thoughts about their futures as 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 were thinking between themselves or in, you know, 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. And then 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 going to 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 two fifty 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 two fifty people.

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 a 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 a 100% of 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 a 100% of what you do, that means that now you have a 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 I was writing this, it dawned on me that there’s something very interesting about this process when understand how AI augments who we are and how we do things is not in a weird way.

What’s happening with AI is forcing us to rediscover our humanity. Because 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 is this the fact that you have a very advanced taste for things determined 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.

Look, when you think about high-tech, the average age is very young. I’ve been building companies for almost thirty 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 ten, maybe fifteen 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 that 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.

If your spouse wants to help you become better, but you’re not interested in doing that, it’s not gonna happen. If you don’t put the time, it’s not gonna happen. I’m putting the time to give the infrastructure for growth. I’m not your dad. I’m not responsible for you.

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.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.

Don’t think that this is going to be the situation in the future. And so, 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.

I mention 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 when a lot of companies go bust, and sometimes it happens through consolidation of saying, oh, there’s 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, 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 twenty five years ago, this would have taken a year, depending on the sophistication. When we launched Fiverr fifteen years ago, time to clone was between six and nine months. The time to clone right now is ten days, whatever. Like, probably for simpler stuff, it’s nothing. The influx of just the 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 Everests 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, 300 feet 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 gonna 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 ops. Great. And this is what’s happening with AI. It’s so easy. Everybody’s building. What’s the true value? It’s

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 them 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 a pole. So you need to look 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’s the magic that happens behind the scenes. But what’s the bot? The bot is we had nine months of head start, which were the nine months where we started seeding the brand and creating something powerful and creating a movement and a community around it. If the time to clone is ten 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.

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 start 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 the real needs, the real challenges, and trying to build off of that instead of saying, oh, people like this, so let’s make x dot one or the next version of something.

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, November 2022 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 everyone 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 100% 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.

This would be Produ.

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 not 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 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. Mean, 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, 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.

In terms of the amount of companies that are going to be around, absolutely. Like, 99 companies out of a thousand maybe is going to be around for a year, maybe two. It’s to 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 thinking about the .com. The .com also gave birth to Amazon. Right? So it’s like there are companies that have true value and the patients who actually build that and staying true to your core reason to exist. It’s going 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, the Anthropic, OpenAI, 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 gonna be GPU cycles. It doesn’t matter, but it’s a cloud play. And then there’s gonna 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 going to go through a cleanup process, and that cleanup is gonna be triggered by investors because at some point they’ll say, Fuck it. I’m out. I’ll let it sort out, and then I’ll figure out. So that’s gonna 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 or $200, technology that is freaking expensive so that very few can actually allow themselves to 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 tech. And this is going to be another force in arranging and sorting out the market.

Why? Why? What was the reason?

Look, fine. They shouldn’t use it, which going to be another reason why banks are 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 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.

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 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 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 in a way that eventually is gonna 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 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?

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.

So, look, if you look at the arc of advancement of humanity, you know, homo sapiens have been around for, what, like, three hundred thousand 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 a hundred 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 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 there’s it inspires other people to do stuff. This was on steroids over a course of five hundred 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 like, whatever. My place on this planet is is finite. It’s like, but I have kids. There’s future. Everything that happened in the past five hundred 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 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 we lose our place in the center when we start, you know, working for something else.

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 the attack waves, but it is the responsibility of a leader of a company to ensure that you’re able to to actually be opportunistic about each one of these transformational waves. In some ways, they force you to invent your October 2 and October 3 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.

Look, I was asked in another conversation, how is it like to be a CEO right now? And I said, you know, it’s 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.

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 gonna happen in ten 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 gonna look like in five years?

I start laughing. It’s a 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.

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 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 non nonprofit, or maybe they’ll 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 governments 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

No. I don’t think so. And, we’re pre expensive AI. We’re pre AGI. We’re pre superintelligence. 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.

I don’t know. I mean, 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.

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?

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 it’s a great choice.

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.

Probably more. Why more? Technology levels the playing field because everybody has it. It’s square one all over. Great. Now you can squeeze three x out of each person. So does the next company. Great. How do you do more? How do you move faster? You know, in a 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.

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 the team, this meeting with 200 people, 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, the or the the 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 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 is really how do we double or triple the output per unit of time and the same for quality per unit of delivery?

But we by doing so, we 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’ll always need brilliant people. Will you need many, many more of them? I don’t know. But you ask me, is your team gonna be is your engineering team gonna be larger? Yes.

The second one is easy. It’s an easy yes. The first one is probably an easy no.

a good question. I think everybody talks about customer support as an example.

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. 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 holes, or you want to fork it and build something off of it.

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, that’s a whole different thing. There is no AI at the level that we have in programming in marketing. So we 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 what 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, you know, 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. There 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.

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, at 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.

I don’t think so. I don’t use AI to write, which is very important for me.

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 the 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 let’s When

I think most of them are just making the healthy assumption that we’re closer to it than 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 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 or 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, 50 people that you know are gonna 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 or 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.

And

If I could cost marketing, I would always do it. Because the 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.

The way modern AI burst into our life was driven by a not 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 how OpenAI changed their strategy.

Yeah. AI is is being a very fundamental technology engine. I would probably rather have open than closed.

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 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.

Dude, heavy questions. One of the strategic opportunities was to create OnlyFans many, many years before OnlyFans. We decided not to do it.

If you look at the size of OnlyFans, you understand why this could be a strategic opportunity. From a point of our values 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 started seeing that in the system, and we decided this was not a direction that we’re going to go down.

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. I’m going through this process. It’s you know, measuring my energy, my contribution, my interest, my curiosity, the result

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 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 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 do it. It’s time to move on and find someone who’s who’s, who’s going to do justice with with with your baby in your creation. Exercise, but I think it’s worth doing at least once a year.

I think it’s about it’s about meaning. When when you look for meaning, when you pursue meaning, you are going to mixture of misery and happiness by definition. But I think it’s I think that that this is not. 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 gonna 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.

My future generations 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 So that’s one of the values that I instill in 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 gonna be judgmental. It means that you you’re not gonna 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 in, you know, radical candor, these type of things, it’s it’s encompassing. And my contribution, like, 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 the business, you build the company, you build the product, you build you build a community, you build a movement. Yeah. Sort of a builder, an artist.

You thought about every question so hard.

Thank you very much for having me. This was really fun and and and thought provoking.