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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

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Jun 9, 2025

Micha Kauffman, Founder and CEO of Fiverr, shares insights from his three-decade journey in the startup world. He emphasizes the urgent need for companies to adapt to AI or face extinction. Kauffman provocatively challenges employees to embrace AI, claiming that 99% of current AI startups will fail. He also discusses the alarming speed at which ideas can be cloned and the shifting importance of distribution over code. Lastly, he warns about potential government regulation of AI, likening it to the Manhattan Project.

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ADVICE

Automate to Free Creativity

Automate 100% of your job to free up time for creative, strategic thinking.
Use AI to rediscover your uniquely human skills and add irreplaceable value.

ADVICE

Own Your Growth Now

Take responsibility for your own professional growth instead of relying on your workplace.
Embrace change or risk becoming irrelevant and unemployable in the new AI-driven economy.

INSIGHT

Dot AI Bubble Parallels

The current labor and startup environment is unstable and reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, now in an AI era.
Many companies and individuals are struggling to adapt, but this won’t define the future entirely.

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Micha Kaufman is the Founder and CEO of Fiverr, the leading online marketplace for freelance services. Fiverr has had an insane ride in the public markets, in 2019 the company went public with a $650M market cap, at their peak that hit over $8BN. Today, facing a wave of AI, the company has a market cap of $1.121BN on an estimated $430M EOY revenues. Prior to co-founding Fiverr, Micha successfully founded and led several startups over the last 30 years.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

00:00 – “Fuck you. It’s not my job to make you better.” Micha’s viral internal email that sparked a company-wide awakening

05:00 – The real reason Micha thinks Fiverr is vulnerable to AI

07:00 – “Replace 100% of your job with AI”: Micha’s challenge to every employee

11:00 – The brutal truth about entitlement in the modern workforce

13:00 – Wake the f*** up: Micha on the crisis of work ethic and ambition

15:00 – “Too many startups, zero value”: Why AI is the new dot-com bubble

17:00 – The time-to-clone has collapsed: Why your startup can be copied in 10 days

21:00 – Why distribution, not code, is the moat that matters now

23:00 – The new game of investing: Why backing “missionaries” is all that counts

25:00 – The seed investment Micha wrote off… that became his biggest win

38:00 – “Being a CEO today is like captaining a ship in a storm”

39:00 – Will governments take control of AI? The Manhattan Project analogy

42:00 – The rise of AI superpowers—and the brutal decline of everyone else

46:00 – The single-person unicorn: Is it real? Micha says yes

47:00 – Why Micha’s hiring more engineers—not fewer

48:00 – Marketing is being disrupted faster than engineering. Here’s how

54:00 – What cost Micha wants to cut—but can’t

56:00 – Why Micha would tell his kid: “Don’t go to university”

57:00 – The business Fiverr could have built before OnlyFans—and why they didn’t

59:00 – How Micha decides every year whether he should still be CEO

01:00:00 – The ultimate metric: When meaning matters more than happiness