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Fiverr Goes All-In on AI: Empowering Creators, Not Replacing Them, with Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of international freelancing marketplace Fiverr.

He’s recently launched an interesting new suite of AI products called Fiverr Go, staked out one of the most notable values-based positions for how his company intends to use AI to empower human creators, and published what began as an internal company memo meant to wake team members up to the unpleasant truth that AI is coming for your jobs, adding also, heck, it’s coming for my job too.

As fast-improving AI capabilities and even faster-falling prices enable startups to disrupt all sorts of markets everywhere all at once, Fiverr Go stands out as an attempt not to maximize the value-to-price ratio for customers, but to empower the freelancers that have powered the Fiverr marketplace over the last 15 years.

Today, that means providing freelancers, who interestingly, Micha notes are very often eager early adopters of AI tools, and actually in some ways much better prepared for the AI era than most salaried employees, with custom AI assistants that can help them engage and serve more customers more efficiently, and also personalized image generation and text-to-speech models that are meant to ensure that the platform’s many graphic designers and voiceover artists maintain control over and can continue to monetize their own distinctive styles and sounds.

For a sense of just how different Fiverr’s positioning is from most of what we hear in the AI space today, listen to a bit of the keynote presentation where Micha announced Fiverr Go.

If everything you create, the moment you create has zero value because AI sucks it and churns out generative stuff based on you, without giving you credit, without giving you the opportunity to gain from it, then my fear is that people’s motivation to create is going to drop to zero, because there’s no value. So why would we create? I think that a future that doesn’t motivate people to create could be a very, very dark future.

What the Fiverr team has built is truly remarkable. Very few teams in the world can build this. But this doesn’t mean we think it’s perfect. It will be perfect when you say so. And our commitment is to continue trying until we get it right.

We always thought of Fiverr as a movement. And every movement needs a reason to exist. So we know that you’re going to love them because we’re not going to rest until you do.

The idea of the creation model is not to replace you. It’s not taking your voice. It’s not taking your art. It’s not taking your content. It is providing samples for customers to make them feel more confident to make a deal with you. It’s a conversion tool. You guys are going to make more money, not necessarily by working harder, but smarter.

Now, this is obviously an attempt to position Fiverr for success in the AI age. But as you’ll hear in this conversation, it does run much deeper than that.

Micha is trying to find a way to continue to motivate individual humans to contribute to the collective project of knowledge and culture building that have advanced to the human condition so spectacularly over the last 500 years. That motivation and sense of contribution, if I understand him correctly, he sees as an intrinsic good that can’t fully be substituted for with AI-provided abundance.

Obviously, it remains to be seen how well this human-creator-centric model will fare in the broader marketplace. But I really do admire the fact that their approach is motivated by an aspirational sense of how the AI future ideally should be, and not simply by a values-free economic analysis of what is supposedly inevitable.

He’s humble enough to admit that he doesn’t know if the current approach will work, but as all leaders must in the AI era, he promises to keep iterating as fast as possible in pursuit of an AI-human hybrid model that’s both successful and sustainable.

At a minimum, Micha and team have done something many might have thought impossible. They’ve launched a suite of AI products that freelance creators don’t hate. And with some luck, their example might inspire other platform owners to attempt to defy market pressures and concretize their own dreams for a positive AI future.

As always, if you’re finding value in the show, we’d appreciate it if you’d share it with friends or write a review. And please don’t hesitate to reach out with your feedback.

I expect major disruption and intensifying competition, not just in the freelance labor market, but in many parts of the economy and even at the level of international relations.

My goal is to help people understand AI on its own terms from as many different perspectives as possible, so we can avoid the dystopian scenarios of human disempowerment and instead, with AI’s help, live the lives we’ve always dreamed of. Part of the way I’m doing that is by speaking at more AI events. Coming up, I’ll be at Imagine AI Live in Las Vegas, May 28th through 30th, the ADAPTA Summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil, August 12th and 13th, and the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, September 23rd through 25th. If you’ll be at any of those events, if you’re interested in AI strategy, automation, or application development consulting for your organization, or if you’ve just got suggestions for how the cognitive revolution can be a more positive force in the AI discourse, you are always welcome to reach us via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network.

For now, I hope you enjoy this conversation about the future of work and the challenge of building an AI platform on a foundation of core human values, with Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of Fiverr. At a minimum, Micha and team have done something many might have thought impossible. They’ve launched a suite of AI products that freelance creators don’t hate. And with some luck, their example might inspire other platform owners to attempt to defy market pressures and concretize their own dreams for a positive AI future.

Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of Fiverr. Welcome to the Cognitive Revolution. Thanks for having me, Nathan. This is going to be, I think, a very interesting conversation. You have, I think, for 15 years, right, been building and leading this marketplace of international kind of bite-sized work projects. And, I mean, you can, of course, elaborate and tell us more about all the stuff that goes on in the marketplace. But you find yourself in a very interesting position where, of course, you know, AI is coming for, and I say this too, coming for all of us on some timescale. And so I thought maybe it would be a great place to start.

You just put out a memo to the company that sort of said, okay, hey, guys, this is the wake-up call. If you’ve been waiting for one, here it is. So I’d love to hear kind of your perspective for starters on this wake-up call moment that maybe everybody should be tuning into as AI gets more and more powerful.

Look, you know, one of the things that I’ve wrote in my email is that what’s going on with AI is really the fact that it’s transforming the way all of us work. But it’s also redefining the, maybe the new norm or the new ground zero from which we need to operate. And what I wrote in the email is, what I said is that we need to understand that things that were considered easy tasks will no longer exist. And what was considered hard tasks will be the new easy. And what was considered to be impossible tasks are going to be the new hard.

And therefore, I think that this is creating a new standard where if you’re entry level at something or if you’re mediocre or even if you’re average, you have an issue right now. You have an issue. And I think that this is a wake-up call for all of us. I said that, you know, AI is coming for all of us. It’s coming for me. It’s coming for my job.

And I think that this forces all of us to adopt this AI-first mentality where we force ourselves to learn new technologies, figure out how we can improve our performance. And I think on that sense, what I said is that my expectation for myself and from others is that we’re going to do more. So we’re going to increase our output per unit of time and our quality as well.

And those who are not going to be able to do it are going to find themselves out of the industry. It’s not, I’m not threatening anyone. I’m not trying to scare people that maybe they’re not going to have a job at Fiverr. I’m not trying to scare our freelancers, which this letter applies to them as well, to say you guys are going to be out of a job on our platform. It’s saying you guys are going to be out of jobs in the industry, which is very worrying.

And yesterday, I mean, Shopify, I mean, we didn’t, I didn’t do this, but they’re talking about layoffs of 10%. I think it’s going to be a snowball. I think in many ways what we’re seeing right now, and I may be right, I may be wrong, this is just me. But I think that this is the equivalent of the dot-com back in 2000. I mean, it used to be pets.com, it’s now pets.ai. It’s bullshit over bullshit of endless amount of trivial things that are going to be done with AI.

You know, 999 companies out of 1,000 are not going to be here that are doing AI because they’re doing things that are going to be interchangeable by other things that are going to be even cheaper, even faster, even whatever. And the reality is that you need less entry-level people, and you need more people that know how to increase their capacity and know how to work with technology to do more because the bar is just higher. And I think that this, much like the 2000, this could be a snowball effect where you see companies are starting to lay off people. And those people don’t have places to go because everybody’s firing people, because everybody’s trying to figure out how to upgrade their game with technology. I’m not happy about this. It’s just I’m calling things for what they are. And I may be wrong on this being the equivalent of the dot-com, but I don’t think I’m wrong on the expectations that we have from ourselves to be able to use these new superpowers, super tools to achieve more.

And that’s why I thought that this was really important to share with the team, because I believe in radical candor, because radical candor comes from care. You tell people the truth because you care about them, because you want to give them the opportunity to figure out, to first understand reality and then figure out what to do with it. And I’ve also included some high-level tips of how people should think about this. But I think that the overarching idea is really to take this AI-first approach of, if you’re still working like it’s 2024, you’re doing something wrong. Because it’s no longer the case.

And it’s evolving at a head-spinning speed. And those who are going to be, someone asked me if I think technology or AI specifically will replace people. They’ve asked me this about employees. They have asked me this about freelancers. And I said, I don’t think it will, but I do think that freelancers who are going to master AI are going to replace those who don’t. Essentially, those who are going to be masters in their skills are going to replace those who are entry-level or just getting dragged behind.

So I think it’s really going to be interesting to unpack this at kind of three levels. You obviously are leaving a public company. You have very high context, high emphasis on judgment. Your role is about, correct me if I’m wrong, typically described as making a few big decisions right. And that’s really what matters most. Maybe also, setting a tone and culture at the company.

Then you’ve got a whole full-time team that is building the platform. And these would be, by any measure, considered to be really good jobs. In the U.S. for the last 10 years plus, it’s been sort of the ticket to the American dream: learn to code, get a job at a tech company. That’ll be stable, high income. You won’t have anything to worry about. It’ll be great. That’s going to be under a bit of threat.

And then, of course, you have the actual freelance marketplace itself where, presumably, the threat is most immediate, if only because I wouldn’t necessarily say that freelance jobs are less skilled. But they’re definitely lower context, in terms of how much information they really have about the client and the situation. There’s sort of a low context bottleneck that is sort of assumed in these freelance kind of relatively short engagement marketplaces.

Should we work from the marketplace up or should we work from your position down? What do you think is the more interesting trajectory? I don’t know. You choose. My take on this is, when I started Fiverr 15 years ago, freelancing was something that people mostly did in between jobs. It wasn’t a full career. And I think that this has changed in the past 15 years. Now it’s a career, it’s a lifestyle, it’s a very legitimate choice. Some of the most talented people I know decide that this is what they want to do.

The context is an interesting question. But what we’ve seen from our platform is that a lot of the relationships that get nurtured over time on the platform remain sometimes over years. I think that the context is less of an issue. In many ways, freelancers are not more exposed to the risk of being displaced by technology. Sometimes, they’re actually ahead of the curve because they don’t have anyone to teach them anything. They don’t have the safety net of an organization that does career development.

Instead, they have a hunger to teach themselves and learn everything as it goes out. They know all the best software. They know all the best tools. They know all the best practices, all the best techniques. In many ways, one of the benefits that I think our customers are getting when they work with freelancers is exactly this: you’re getting the most up-to-date, the latest version of a profession. So I wouldn’t say that their exposure is higher. Plus, they’ve gained the discipline and the know-how of how to be very agile, adaptive, and how to reinvent themselves very quickly. If you think about full-timers, again, they have this safety net. They have the supporting environment. And in many ways, I think that if they do get displaced, for them, getting up from the ground and building themselves is going to be even mentally harder than freelancers who are used to gaining the next customer, doing the next project, learning the next trick.

So I’m not sure if the exposure thing is different, but I think it finds them in different situations, in different environments. And in many ways, I think freelancers are actually quicker to adapt. In the case of AI, I mean, I’ve seen freelancers adapting to AI much faster than our team, which is just a proof point of what I’ve just said. So in that sense, I think they’re a little bit more self-educated. They have slightly better control over their time so they can decide to set aside time to learn new things to keep themselves competitive.

Anyway, we can take this from any direction you want. I think that’s a really good context and makes sense, though I hadn’t intuited it myself. But just the fact that freelancers are responsible for outputs and are getting paid for outputs puts them in a mindset where any tool that comes along, any edge that they can get, any way that they can serve more customers in the same amount of time is going to have a very direct impact on their personal bottom lines. Whereas, obviously, in full-time jobs, that link is often a lot more indirect at best.

So that does make a lot of sense to me. Let’s maybe then do the marketplace level first and then go to your executive level, what you’re doing, and then how you’re trying to translate that into the full-time team at Fiverr. Maybe just for starters, could you kind of characterize the marketplace? I mean, there’s a ton of categories, and I browsed around a bunch. But if you sort of weight it toward where is the most activity in the marketplace? Who are the buyers? Who are the sellers? What are the most common kinds of jobs being done?

So, historically, when I started the company, there were very few categories. I think we launched it with about six, which is now closer to 800 different categories. The overwhelming majority are digital services. We don’t do physical services, and most of them are creative. So, anything from coding to design to music and audio to beta-related services to AI-related services to marketing services. Really, it’s a whole world of services; we’ve created this SKU system that allows us to create this basically infinite catalog of different services.

When we started, we began from micro services for micro businesses. This was the beginning of tiny services, things that are really bite-sized. Over the years, we’ve been growing both the supply chain and the types and complexities of projects that we tackle. With that, we’ve also expanded the types of customers that we had. So we started from micro businesses, went through small and medium-sized businesses, all the way to enterprise businesses. We probably entertain 80% to 90% of Fortune 500 companies as customers.

At the beginning, Fiverr was primarily a marketplace. Right now, it’s more than a marketplace. It’s a platform where the marketplace is still a substantial portion of our business, but there are also other business tools that create this whole platform. In cases where we run very complex types of projects for our customers, the marketplace is not necessarily the obvious choice. Sometimes it’s more about orchestrating multi-disciplinary projects through different types of sellers or talent, and sometimes it involves agencies.

You can find simple and very cost-effective types of services all the way up to million-dollar transactions that could last six months, sometimes a year, and span across quarters, being managed much more on an enterprise level. I think that is exactly what I wanted to do, which means I didn’t want to move Fiverr as a platform from one audience to another. I wanted to extend it from entry-level all the way to the most sophisticated types of needs and the cutting-edge talent.

Obviously, all of it is connected with price, with time, with quality, with all of this. But this is exactly the type of skills and technologies that we’ve built as a platform over 15 years.

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So how have you seen AI impacting the activity on the platform? I mean, you could imagine that, as we’ve kind of already alluded to, existing service providers can do more with less. You can imagine that new people might show up and try to arbitrage the situation, even if they personally don’t know how to do graphic design or don’t know how to do voiceover.

Or they could show up and try to provide it with an AI and maybe not even tell anybody. You can imagine that the mix of types of jobs that are flowing through might change because people are perhaps, and we’ve had this, by the way. I have a company called Waymark, which does video creation for small business. We used to offer a voiceover add-on service before we had any text-to-speech that was good enough that it would work.

And now, of course, we have the AI text-to-speech built in. And we have definitely seen a very substantial shift. It was always a minority of people that would opt-in to the paid voiceover service, but the volume of that service has dropped tremendously, as people have just kind of found that, in many cases, the AI is good enough for their need. And it’s also instant, has a lot of advantages. It’s included for free.

So you can imagine that the mix of services might be shifting, or you can imagine all of the above and more. What have you observed in terms of AI impact on the platform so far? You know, it’s kind of like asking a captain at mid-sea how he is experiencing the storm. I mean, it’s ongoing.

And I think that what we’re seeing right now, it’s going to be very hard to make deterministic judgment statements on the current state of things because it’s rapidly evolving. I think that we’re kind of in the eye of the storm, and it’s going to take time to figure out where this is going to start stabilizing.

We’re also pre-regulation, so it’s basically the wild, wild west right now. We can talk about this because a lot of it is crazy just because it’s breaking constructs of 500 years. There are obviously dynamics that we’re seeing, which, by the way, is not new for us.

As I’ve told you, we started the company in 2010, launched with six categories. We now have close to 800. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t have hundreds of them go away, but many, many new hundreds of ones are appearing. The dynamics of a marketplace that is horizontal, which, by the way, is the reason why we can sustain a very successful business, is because we can shift between different categories very, very fast. And what’s interesting is we always, as human beings, not necessarily as a company, but as human beings, we always fail to predict what’s going to be the future jobs that are going to be around. Not even in five years, in six months, in a year. It was impossible for me to see the explosion around crypto and NFT, right? NFT burst into our lives. It lasted a year. But this was a crazy year. Everybody was all around this. And then it went away. And that’s fine.

I read a research in The Economist that was done in 2018, which stated that in 2018, and this was pre-modern Gen AI LLMs, that 60% of jobs that exist in 2018 didn’t exist 50 years ago. 60%. It’s mind-blowing. I mean, think about the jobs that sustain over generations. But now it’s going to be even shorter cycles. The only thing that changes is the velocity of change. But as long as we, as a market base, can respond very quickly and the talent in the market can respond very quickly, then this is just ordinary course of business. It’s not shocking. It’s just the way things are.

People talk about the risk of work being displaced and living in a world without jobs and all of whatever. I appreciate where this is coming from, and maybe it’s right. Who knows? I’m not trying to predict. I don’t think I’m presumptuous enough to make a statement that I think is half right. But the reality, if we look historically, is that every wave of transformation that came from technology eventually created more jobs than it displaced. There’s a lot of research about this. Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe someone else is wrong. Whatever. I don’t know. I’m a captain in mid-sea, and it’s stormy. It’s hard to see.

But if you apply common sense and you apply history, and I’m not saying it’s the same. I’m not saying it’s the same as the Industrial Revolution or the Automation Revolution where people had the fear of humans being displaced. Essentially, it created more jobs than it displaced. AI is a little bit different in the sense that it is not just producing stuff. It’s actually self-generating. It’s generating on its own without being prompted to do. If it’s not doing this enough right now, it’s going to do a lot more of this in the future.

So it’s slightly different than previous transformations. My assumption is whatever technology will go to the place of humans to continue feeding that technology, refining it, developing it, adopting it, applying it, whatever it is, is going to be such where we just don’t imagine what those jobs are going to be. But here’s the news: they’re going to be on Fiverr. That’s for sure. They’re going to be on Fiverr probably first. Because that’s the machine that we’ve created where we can, if there’s a new job that was invented a minute ago, you will find it on Fiverr. That’s kind of how we allow our community to stay relevant.

Do you have any, I mean, one that I can’t resist floating is the AI scout. That’s sometimes what I describe myself as, which is just, in a fast-moving environment, what is the right tool for the job? What is AI even capable of right now? What’s still out of reach? What’s the best example of somebody who solved a similar problem? To me, that feels like a job that more and more organizations are going to need. I kind of do that on an ad hoc freelance basis myself. These days, it feels like more companies will bring it in-house, but a lot will probably also need just kind of point solution expertise to scout out a particular problem set.

Do you see any of that? And what other new AI jobs are you starting to see flicker onto the platform? Yeah. Look, I think scouting is one, but you can always claim that you can create an agent to scout for stuff. So, what I do think is that, at least in our space, I think that the future belongs to the hackers. To me, that is like, I think that those who are going to be the most resource-proof people. And you know, one, when you see one, it’s very easy. Because, one, they’re naturally born as scouters, which means that they always know what’s the latest and greatest.

Two, it’s not just that, but they took the latest and greatest to its boundaries and then broke it. They know how to mesh things. They know how to connect different things and make them work together. They always find the use cases that the actual developers of the tech didn’t think of. I think that the future belongs to these guys. I have many of them, many of these people on the team. These guys are not scared. They’re not even concerned. This email wasn’t for them. They’re there already. And so, I think in any area, having this hardcore hacker mentality is going to be in very high demand. These are going to be the people that you pay for, and you pay generously.

I don’t know. As technology develops, not everybody is a scouter. Not everybody is familiar. Not everybody is a prompt engineer, or at least a good one. It takes time. You need to familiarize yourself with different tools and master them. I think that there’s a lot of opportunities for people that are like that to provide this service to others.

So, we’re seeing some of that on our platform. We’re seeing all kinds of things related to modeling, training, fine-tuning, and building specific Gen.AI applications for customers. We’re doing all kinds of funky stuff with mobile because it has AI chips on it. You can potentially… I think, and maybe we’re going way off, but AI is being commoditized as we speak. It started from free. You can’t get cheaper than free.

Essentially, what you’re doing is, because of scale, it’s a race to the bottom. It’s micro-sense for GPU cycles, whatever. That’s a very basic technology. But there are incredible applications that you can actually build on top of it, which is going to be the golden era of AI. I don’t know where we are right there; we’re not there, for sure. I told you it’s like the dot AI bubble. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but eventually, there’s going to be a moment. I’m interested in finding out where the next killer app is going to happen.

If you think about social as an example, take Facebook, then Meta, or Instagram. Consider how the high bandwidth of cellular plus iOS has enabled this entire ecosystem. If you take the cumulative worth of apps on the App Store, they are worth a lot more than Apple itself. That’s the power of the tech; Apple is the underlying tech or the iOS plus cellular network. But essentially, what’s interesting is what’s going to be built on top of it. We’re pre the WhatsApps, Instagrams, and Ubers that were built on top of that tech.

Right now, we’re in an exploratory mode. I think a lot of our customers are in that mode, and they need people to help them with a big variety of things. Plus, they do need to continue buying what we call the ordinary services, like graphic design, writing, marketing, and whatever it is. Again, the reason is something I’ve been trying to explain to people: AI is incredible, no doubt. It’s giving all of us superpowers. But all of us.

So, it’s basically ground zero. We don’t have an advantage. Nathan, you don’t have an advantage over me or someone else just because you use AI. Everyone uses AI. So, you can design yourself? So can I. But what would make your design or mine stand out? What is the competitive advantage? I think that people go to other people in many ways for that.

Actually, I can give you a framework for why people go to others for things. It’s very simplistic, but I think it speaks to what we’re seeing with AI. There are probably three reasons why people go to other people for something. By the way, this is true today and was true 15 years ago when we started the company, even with AI and everything that happened along the way.

The first reason is the arbitrage of time. Can I do something on my own? Sure. Do I need to learn how to do it? Maybe. Do I need to take time to perfect it? Yes. I don’t know, maybe it’s three hours, maybe it’s three days. There’s a guy that knows how to give me this in two hours, and it costs $200. What’s my time worth if I spend two days? It’s a lot more. That’s a good arbitrage. Do it for me. That’s plain and simple. It’s easy.

The second reason is that maybe I can’t do something. There’s one thing for certain: I don’t know how to be a master at doing that task. I need a competitive edge. I need to be able to produce something that is better than others so I can compete. You want the prettiest girl in school, the fanciest car, or to fly business. You need an edge. You need to compete. It’s a competitive landscape. I’m not inventing anything; this is human behavior. You go to someone who has better taste, who has better command over the fanciest and best tools. You do it because they’ve gained a tremendous amount of experience in things that you’re not experiencing. So, this is number two. So, arbitrage of time and then competitive edge. Number three is complexity. It’s just… Maybe I can’t. Probably I can. Probably I can’t. But it’s freaking complex. Okay? It needs orchestration. It’s multidisciplinary. It’s… It’s too many things. And maybe it connects to number one. It’s not worth my time. Maybe it connects to number two. I’m not good enough at it. But it’s complex. It’s like… It’s a… And this is why you go to someone who’s actually going to take this out of your hands and just give it to you.

These things haven’t changed. Maybe the content of what’s considered to be complex or easy. Maybe the type of specializing that you need to… But it’s the same thing. It’s the same thing. And these fundamentals haven’t changed. Maybe, as I’ve said, the categories of content have changed. Maybe the definition of what was easy or what was hard is now easy or whatever. But these are the motivations. And those stayed constant, in my view. And what AI has done is just elevated the starting point where no one, none of us, has an advantage.

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Yeah, I sometimes describe AI as a great leveling of a lot of different playing fields. One video I would honestly recommend people go and watch is your announcement of the Fiverr Go platform. I thought it was a really interesting positioning where you’re introducing a bunch of new AI tools to the marketplace, but also very much centering the existing community that you have and saying, like, we want this to work for you. If it’s not working for you, it’s not going to be working for us either.

So you’ve described kind of the buyer’s motivations for why people want to delegate and hire work done by other people. Tell us about your strategy for bringing AI to bear in service of the community that you have, as opposed to what so many others are trying to do, which is create an alternative to working with humans. So, I mean, to explain my motivation or why we have done it in the first place, I need to get a little bit philosophical. I don’t know if you have the patience.

Yeah, we’ve got time. Okay, so here’s my take and why I think it’s important to have an informed way of thinking about technology and how you use it and the implications that your decisions are going to have, not just in the immediate term, but also slightly longer term. So what’s interesting is if you think, and look, I’m thinking, obviously, I’m the CEO of a public company, which is very much tied into technological trends and developments. And you talk about exposure or people who would work to different differences, but I’m also a human being. I’m also a dad. I’m also a creator.

And as I was thinking about what’s really interesting in how AI burst into our lives, even though we’re, as a company, we’re using AI for like 10 years, it wasn’t called AI. It was called machine learning. It was called algorithms, whatever. But what’s interesting is this. If you think about the advancements that we’ve made as a species, right? Homo sapiens have been around for 300,000 years. But if you look at the arc of advancement, it started accelerating about 500 years ago. That’s it. Out of 300,000 years. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t advance as a species before that, but it was very gradual and pretty linear. And 500 years ago, it started becoming exponential.

What was triggering this was the revolution of the printing press, the Gutenberg. What was it? About 470 years ago or approximately that. And what this allowed is really more widespread access to knowledge, which made people more intelligent. But it also inspired people to think about things that they didn’t even imagine they didn’t know existed. And this really accelerated how we progressed as human beings.

I think the latest manifestations of that is the actual internet. If you look at the motivation to share as a way of progress, look at open code, open source code. It feels almost altruistic, but it’s not. People get recognized for it. They get opportunities because of it. Their work is being continued, and it evolves over time, which I think is really incredible. And this is how we’ve progressed. This is how we came up with AI eventually. Because of this arc, this exponential arc of advancement.

But here’s the thing. This is because people are motivated to create and share. The British actually understood that very early on after the invention of the printed press. They decided to put the Copyright Act in 1710. The idea was, and this was called the Act for the Encouragement of Learning, that you wanted to motivate people to create and share by actually telling them, okay, great. If you created something, your name is going to be bared. The creation is going to bear your name forever, for eternity.

People know that you’re special, and you can actually see how you impact others. You can also commercialize it and decide what to do. What’s really interesting in what happened with the way AI was designed in past years is that it just eats up everything. Everyone ever created is just getting eaten by AI. It’s getting regenerated and churned out. But there is no reward. There is no recognition. AI doesn’t tell you anything. Who made this? It doesn’t give you any compensation.

I’m thinking, all right. Well, okay, that’s great. It’s a buffet. It’s all you can eat. It’s amazing. Who cares? You talk to creators, and they say, I kind of care, you know. Will I be motivated to continue sharing my creation? If this has zero value, the moment I just publish something and it has no value, it’s getting eaten. This made me concerned. At least I don’t want to have a blind spot on the longer-term implications of AI, the way it’s designed right now.

So what we’ve done with Fiverr Go and the keynote that you’ve mentioned is really to talk about this and say we need to decide. There is a burning question here, which some might say is philosophical. But in my view, there’s one question. I’ve alluded to it in the keynote. There is one important question. And that question is, who’s in the center?

My view, and maybe some people have a different view, is that humans are the center of the universe, and everything else serves us. I mean, we should preserve our environment, but we’re the center. As long as we are, everything else should serve us. And I think that the way AI is designed right now, I’m not sure that this is the case. AI is still not a being, okay? But over time, it will have its own thoughts, ideas, and it’s going to teach itself. It’s going to be like an entity.

Does this entity revolve around us? Or do we revolve around that new entity? If we do, then we’re not the center of the universe. It is the center of the universe. By the way, right now, the way AI is designed, we are the product. It’s not AI as the product because it’s free. What we’re doing is training it. We’re contributing stuff to make it better. Do we gain in the process? Yeah, you ask a question, and you get an answer really quickly. Who gains more? Who’s becoming better? You or it?

In my view, at least let’s think about this and figure out if there are other ways of actually doing this. What we’ve offered with Go is just a different approach of saying, you know what? We think we love the technology. We think it’s incredible. But we want to give also experiment with giving this technology to our creators and saying, instead of giving away your creation to train this infinite model, train your own model. It’s going to be Nathan’s model for creation. And it’s going to have your, its corpus is going to be your world of creation. It’s going to be your body of work. And it’s going to be very, very true to your unique signature and style.

And what’s interesting about this is, for customers, it gives them a very predictable outcome. And for creators, it’s your model. You do with it as you please. You get the reward. Because basically, the model is doing regeneration, but it’s regeneration just based on you. I mean, even Michelangelo had nine or ten people working in his workshop. It doesn’t make his creations less Michelangelo.

So essentially, this is how we experimented with it. Instead of being a threat, it becomes your tool to do more, to extend your capacity. It turns one person into a production house, but also gives instant gratification for the customers. The other portion is really to design this super powerful personal assistant, which is not just assisting you by interacting with customers and answering the same questions over and over again, but it’s also a business partner.

It allows you to do all kinds of things that you had to manually do, like research on the platform to figure out how to reposition yourself or fine-tune your services, your offerings. By the way, this is going completely crazy. The performance that we’re seeing on the personal assistant on Fiverr Go is just mind-blowing. This is beyond expectations for such an early product. But as I’ve said in the keynote, this is just an early version of a take on how you can design AI. I don’t know if it’s the right, I’ll know it’s the right one when our community is going to say it is amazing. And we’ll get there. It’s an iterative process.

At least I think it’s a call out to other AI thinkers and designers of maybe we can do it. Maybe we can have a different take on AI. Right now, I think it puts a lot of creative people in a situation where they’re confused. They don’t know what’s going on, and they’re discouraged from creating and sharing. I don’t want to go back to living in a world where people are not sharing freely because they feel that it’s devaluing them.

Yeah, I think, first of all, I applaud you for getting philosophical. I think more business leaders should be getting philosophical. For that matter, more business leaders should be more candid with their teams about just how big of a deal they perceive this whole thing to be. I think a lot of that is sort of happening at the executive or board level, but then it’s sort of, is it really time to tell the team? We don’t want to scare them, and we don’t necessarily feel like we have the right inspirational message yet.

Personally, society needs more leaders to just get out there and take some shots at various strategies. As you said, is this the final form? Maybe, maybe not. But I think we’re all well served when people try something because burying our heads in the sand and denialism is not going to work for all that much longer.

No, I agree. When you think about conception, there is the way we interact with devices, with different form factors, with technology, with the Internet is changing. Look, two years ago, up until two years ago for 20 years, the Internet was Google. That was it. This was the starting point. What do you do? You open a browser, and it’s Google, and it’s like the search bar. This is how you do it.

Right now, if you do a keyword search and get links, what is that? It feels like 1990. Who wants to get links and click on stuff? It feels outdated, right? There’s much more of LLM form, which, by the way, I think is going to last for a while, but it’s going to be replaced by different forms of interacting. Is texting with AI the best way? I don’t know, maybe not.

This also begs the question, are the things we know to have existed forever going to stay the way they are? I don’t know, will we continue going on Amazon and doing a search and seeing a billion results? Is this going to be the experience? Going in a very ordinary catalog? I don’t know the answer, but I’m betting it’s going to be slightly different, if not very different. And so I think that all of us as companies need to challenge the status quo or the conceptions and iterate and be very, very quick, have very high velocity of testing.

And there’s not yet any best practice, formulas, or blueprints that work. But that’s also the fun in being an entrepreneur right now. It’s a playground. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

So this gets me to, you’ve mentioned I’m doing this for 15 years. It doesn’t get old. It feels like day one. It is a playground. And I think that there’s obviously threats and concerns, but the upside of this, oh my God. It’s incredible.

Could you give a little insight into how you picked the initial product suite for Fiverr Go? You’ve got the assistants, which, as you said, kind of serve as the customer service agent or business partner for the freelancers. You’ve got the models that they can train, which I’ve seen applies to visual art, presumably taking a foundation model and fine-tuning it or some sort of Laura technique on the individual creator’s previous output.

And then a similar thing for voiceover and music as well. How did you sort of go out and say, okay, there’s an infinite universe of things we could try to bring to the marketplace? Which ones actually make the most sense? What was that sort of framework to ultimately reach that launch bundle?

So the personal assistant was pretty obvious. And it’s not just customer service or customer care. It’s your salesperson, and it allows our creators to actually spend less time doing the things that they like the least, such as responding to initial messages and collecting information about the customer. It’s not that they don’t love their customers, but this is just the intake. This is the filtering, and in answering, I mean, it’s the same questions all over again regarding their skills, their availability, and how to price things.

So it’s much more than just attending to customers in a very simplistic way, and it’s super powerful. The assistant knows when the freelancer is actually online. Sometimes the assistant would decide on its own to ping the freelancer, saying, “Nathan, there’s a really interesting customer, and I think you should join us.” It will ping you to join the conversation. Sometimes it’s just allowing you to sleep and get that recharge, which is really important.

It frees up more of your time to actually create, which is what you’re passionate about. This is like a conversion machine. It converts much better than the sellers themselves. By the way, it’s trained just on you—your offerings, your profile, your entire history, sometimes tens of thousands of conversations with customers, your orders, everything. It knows everything about you. And it’s instant. It’s always up, awake, and available.

What we found is that by humanizing the assistant, we eliminated the initial propensity for people to dislike talking to bots. If you create a bot, they’ll hate it. So we humanized it. We’ve made, I think, really smart advancements in the tech behind this, which people love. Sometimes they get confused because we don’t disguise the fact that it’s an AI assistant. Sometimes they’re like, “Are you really AI?” They ask the question because they’re not sure. It feels like a human being and has the characteristics to respond to all kinds of inquiries. It’s really interesting.

This was obvious. Then we had the creation models, and we said, okay, great. We’ve found around 60 different categories of services that we can apply AI to, generative AI to. By the way, there isn’t AI for everything right now. Maybe over time, there will be more, and people talk about the idea of agentic AI and ultimately AGI. I’m happy to discuss my views on this, but it won’t be very different from what you’ve heard before.

We focus on the areas where we think AI can deliver results that are going to be at least 90% accurate or true to the actual creator. If the AI tech that we’ve created and manipulated does not produce a 90% score of accuracy to your specific signature, it’s not going to be there. And so, we started rolling out those different categories where we had sufficient confidence that we’re not, because we don’t want the gen AI to misrepresent the creator. That would be terrible. And it’s not perfect. Since we launched Go, the way I’m approaching this is that Go is an app. So, we issue app updates. Every day we launch new versions of it. We add capabilities. We fix bugs. We make it simpler to use. We make it quicker. We make it cheaper. We get all of it so that, over time, it’s going to be able to do more stuff. We’re going to add more capabilities into it. But this was the strategy.

Plus, all these categories that you’ve mentioned we have, which also includes complex text as well, like business planning and stuff. These are all large-sized categories. Graphic design is, if you think about it, one of our biggest categories because it’s one of the biggest categories out there in the world. The same goes with music and music productions and voiceover in particular. These are big categories. This is where we’ve also seen AI doing some really nice progress. But we wanted to take it even a step further.

How do you think about upgrading these things over time for people? I understand that you have a sort of commitment to, as the freelancer on Fiverr, you shouldn’t have to worry about all the technical details of this, right? This is one of the big value adds that you want to provide—making it simple for freelancers to take advantage of this stuff. One thing I have observed, though, in some other contexts, is that sometimes a model upgrade comes along, and people have very different feelings about it.

This famously happened with the app Replica, which is a special case because it’s like your AI friend. When they upgraded the model, it got smarter, but people were like, “This is not my friend anymore.” I sort of wonder, as you create these bespoke, highly individualized models that people have deemed represent them well enough that they’re willing to have it be the first taste of their creation that a potential customer might see. Do you have a concern, or is there a process for how the foundation model gets swapped out? Will everybody need to opt in to the next version? How do you think about that?

For most people, it’ll be an upgrade, but for some, it’ll feel off somehow. Look, you’re touching on a big vulnerability of AI in general and those who design it. That is intercompatibility between different versions or models. We need to make sure that you have the latest and greatest tech, but in a way that would not do you harm. It’s on us to put the right processes in place to make sure that if we do change the underlying tech, bear in mind that it’s never like the pure tech. We’re always building technologies on top of it, which means that we’re somewhat less exposed to differences in models.

Generally speaking, it’s an issue. If you think about the difference between Chat GPT-3 and 4, it’s interesting because one of the issues was that GPT-3 was insubordinate. You would tell it to do stuff, and it would just laugh in your face. It would do the opposite. Then came version 4, which was really compliant. But there are nuances in that. The other issue that is very big is giving models boundaries, like, “This is what you do, but these are the things that you will never do.” It doesn’t matter what they tell you; no, you don’t do it.

If you’ve played enough with LLMs, you know that it’s embarrassingly easy to break them. To get them to do stuff that they’re specifically designed not to do. I think this is another area of complexity where you need to ensure they produce good quality stuff and stay true to their basic function, but that they don’t go outside of that function. For us, it was really important because, take graphic design as an example. Let’s say you’re a graphic designer, and in your service, you’ve said explicitly that you’re not going to do anything that is not safe for the office or whatever. You’re not going to do political stuff.

AI is AI, but you can’t have AI be non-compliant with its creator. When you have potentially millions of creators that have AI, you need to make it compliant with each one. So there’s quite a few challenges when you think about AI. And obviously, every time a model upgrades or updates, you need to run checks again and you need to do the same stress testing all over again. I think, with time, the creators of these base models are going to be a little bit more thoughtful on how to figure out what not to break from version to version. Yeah, we can hope for that.

Although the amount of alchemy that is going into the models today suggests that they might have a couple of breakthroughs needed before they’re going to have a real command of that sort of nuance. Right now, they are, in many cases, discovering what the new model can do right along with the rest of us. True. And it goes back to what I’ve said earlier. We’re training it right now. Obviously, human beings are so creative that they’re coming up with all kinds of new use cases, but also new hacks and new vulnerabilities.

At least the good news is that it really informs the model creators on how to do a better model. But it also creates a very powerful tool where, again, we’re the product. If you’re getting it for free, you’re the product, period. So that’s a reality right now. In the long term, let’s posit for the sake of analysis that the models are going to continue to get better. I assume no argument there.

Let’s imagine that they do get to a point where we’re starting to see some of these thresholds being hit right now with GPT-4.0 image creation. You’ve got the ability to do sort of a high fidelity, but still, like, pretty holistic change to an image that you put in. With things like Sesame voice AI that was recently debuted, these are starting to get very, very lifelike. If we imagine a world in which the AIs really are performing at the same level as the humans, it’s no longer the case that this is an on-ramp, or it no longer has to be the case that the only way to get the real top-notch service is to go to the human, but actually, you could just get the same quality from an AI.

Do you think that there is enough solidarity or willingness to pay for these personal models that people will continue to do it in volume because they want to see a human compensated on the other end of that? Or do you think that there needs to be some other solution, which could be regulation or otherwise, put in place to preserve this sort of centrality of the human creator? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not – I don’t even think about this from a solidarity standpoint.

Look, when YouTube became what it is because it had illegal downloads of TV series and movies, sharing videos on YouTube back then was not as easy as it is right now because there wasn’t broadband at large. And so, people mostly consumed. Over time, they got sued, made peace with the publishers, and turned it into an incredible business. It’s amazing. We used to steal music. We used to download stuff, Napster, before Napster, FTPs, like whatever. We had our way of doing that, but eventually you have Spotify and you have Apple Music.

I think when it makes sense and you have a very easy way of consuming creation that gives you the type of pleasure or even higher than you had to do when you didn’t do this legitimately, then you pay for it. I mean, people pay for Spotify. They pay for YouTube Premium. They do whatever. I don’t know if it’s going to be the same case. I’m not a regulator. I don’t know where this is going to go. I’m not sure that the way we’ve done the personalized models is the right answer. I don’t pretend to know.

We’re already making changes to our own model as a result of the learnings that we’ve had since launch, two months ago. The way we use it. Learnings that you would highlight? Well, I don’t want to spill the beans too much. But, yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot in the way people interact with creation on their own. You understand the limitations of it. You understand how people perceive this. Do they perceive this as, oh, I want to generate something myself and buy it versus, oh, I want to play with it?

But then give me an opportunity to talk to a human being. Seriously. I enjoy playing with child GPT and ask it to create an image. But seriously, this is my business. I want to do something that I need advice on. I need professional advice. I need a good eye. I need a good hand too. So we’ve learned a lot around this. So I don’t know if this is, if having these personalized models is going to be the thing and it’s going to be forever and it’s going to be the answer, the cure for cancer in this space. But we’ll keep iterating and coming up with ideas. I think that at some point the regulator is going to catch up. I don’t know if they’re always behind. But they’re going to catch up at some point and I think they’re going to do some regulation of stuff because everything is outdated.

So now copyright law is probably being disregarded. But at some point they’ll just need to update it and figure out if, because I think that, again, as I’ve said before, humanity has a vested interest in its continued progress and advancement. If you demotivate people from creating, if you close people up instead of opening them up, if you make them create less and just be all of us stupid consumers that are not contributing anything, then, I mean, talking about the future has become really hard because the rate of change is just overwhelming.

People ask you where do you think you’re going to be 10 years from now? I was like, are you crazy? What do you mean? What do you mean 10 years? Who the fuck knows? Seriously, can you extrapolate what’s going to happen in two years from now? Dude, I think people who have very high confidence in what the future is going to be are charlatans. Because there are too many opportunities for different futures, depending on all kinds of things.

In this reality, which is why I’ve laid out the three reasons, in my view, why people go to other people, it’s about going back to first principles, back to fundamental truths of how we behave as human beings. Why do we enjoy working together? Why do we trust many times a person more than a machine, even though sometimes a machine is better than a person at conducting tasks? Eventually, machines churn out stuff that we need to consume.

We need to have the judgment of whether this is good for us, for human beings, or not. A machine doesn’t understand, it doesn’t know, it doesn’t care. It doesn’t even understand that it’s an image. It’s just zeros and ones. It’s patterns, it’s algorithms. It doesn’t know, which is incredible, that it can produce such amazing things without actually understanding. But who knows? I mean, it’s not going to be boring, that’s for sure.

For what it’s worth, I’ll take a little bit the other side of the AI understanding debate and say, I think there is some meaningful understanding going on inside certainly the latest systems. But that might be a topic for another day. Well, it’s just better algorithms. I mean, it’s not chemistry. It’s not seeing itself in a human eye. Essentially, what’s interesting is that the way AI continues to progress is that we train it more.

We give it more information, we provide it with more training assets, we give it more data sets. Essentially, without it, it’s just regenerating based on what it knows. If it creates new ideas, who knows what these new ideas would be? Even if they’re good or bad, do they make sense? You can have computers compute forever, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to produce good stuff. So, I don’t know.

It is going to change our lives. It’s going to make us spend our time in a different way. But I think that overall, this is a good thing. Do you have a framework for, because I’m struck by, on one hand, and I think it is definitely the right big picture question to be thinking about: How do we keep humans in an environment that’s suitable for their flourishing?

How do we not take away and sort of pave the paradise of artistic creation and put up the parking lot of AI doing it all at hyper scale, super cheaply, but sort of taking away something that too many people feel is a really important source of meaning? On the other hand, there’s the customer service, top of funnel type stuff, right? Where it’s like, yeah, most people would rather delegate that to an AI if they can.

Is there any framework that you could muster for what things ought to be protected and what things should be the special space for humans versus the things that we won’t be sorry to have delegated? Look, I don’t, again, I’m not taking, I’m not putting the heart of a regulator and thinking, oh, what should we protect? In my view, you’ve mentioned a few different types of tasks. Any task that a human being should not do because it’s repetitive and a computer can do better, we should stop doing.

I mean, accountants used to calculate on paper 20 years ago, just 20 years ago, 25. Pencil and paper. They would do balance sheets. And then Lotus Notes and Excel, and now we have these funky, sophisticated models and whatever. Should they continue calculating? No, they shouldn’t. Stop doing it. You’re not better, and you’re not faster. I think the same goes with any other task.

I think that it’s not about protecting. I told you, I don’t think that you need to enforce a protection on anything. I think that the creativity of human beings is going to remain the creativity of human beings. You don’t need to protect it. You’re going to be very creative, which means that if you have a smarter person, they have better taste than you, they’re more knowledgeable in a space, they’re more creative in a space, then you’ll go to them.

If their only advantage is how they operate stuff and you can operate the same stuff, you don’t need people for that. And that’s fine. You don’t need to protect it. I think that this is going to arrange itself naturally. You don’t need to do an unnatural intervention in this. Very simple tasks that don’t require a lot of skill are going to be gone.

But I think that in some cases, it will be interesting to consider that there is a chance that in a few years from now, if you think about the largest brands in the world, they would not necessarily want to produce stuff with AI because everybody has it. They would like the more handcrafted things that involve the most creative, smartest, unique people that you can afford.

I remember when they said that Coca-Cola did their first ad with AI. It’s like Coca-Cola doing an ad with AI, which is wow. And you go read the behind the scenes of the ad, and it’s like 500 people. Sure, I was involved, but there are like three of the best agencies in the world, you know, and they have their compliance teams and legal teams and whatever. I think orchestrating the most unique things that will be mind-blowing will always require this.

You don’t need to protect it; it’s going to happen by itself. It’s like people that do special art on Etsy. It’s going to be the bespoke things that maybe we consumers don’t need to understand why you should pay for it because, you know, it’s a birthday invitation for my kid. Whatever. I’m not saying you need to take the best in-class person, but if it’s mission critical and I want to be better, I don’t think you need to protect it.

The same goes with the types of jobs. I don’t know, maybe if you give your task of customer support to algorithms, to AI, you need to supervise it. You need to continue refining it. Some people hate this. You need to let them actually speak to a human being and vent their frustrations. You need to figure out how to integrate this better with your specific tech stuff, your product, and whatever it is.

Again, it goes back to this: it’s going to be just new types of jobs that require human beings rather than just machines. Machines should do what machines are good at, period. That’s it. Maybe two more questions if you have time.

How about on just creating liquidity in the marketplace? This is one area where I think AI could be beneficial. I just heard a definition of an efficient market the other day, which is that in an efficient market, all positive sum transactions that could happen do, in fact, happen. In reality, obviously, discovery costs, search costs, matching costs, negotiation costs are all huge impediments to actually seeing that happen.

What is your outlook for just greasing the wheels of the marketplace by doing potentially orders of magnitude more AI matchmaking? Do you think that that can, in fact, scale the marketplace to previously unimaginable scale? What’s your kind of outlook for AI facilitated commerce broadly? That’s an easy one. The answer is yes. It’s just, I mean, it’s a simple yes. I think I’ve kind of alluded to it previously when I said that the experiences of how we consume stuff, how we find things, how we convert, how we get comfortable, how we create trust, and how we make a decision are going to change.

And we’re doing deep and extensive use of AI in the matchmaking. It’s like I’m not going to go into details here for obvious reasons, but we’re doing deep stuff with it and we’re seeing the change. I think that this is just going to become better and better over time. So definitely, I mean, improving liquidity up absolutely yes, without a doubt.

Okay, then that makes a lot of sense to me. I’m, if anything, just kind of feel like I should be seeing more of that in the world than I do see. You’ll see Amazon doing experimentations that are bolder, bigger; you’re going to see other platforms doing the same. I think it’s just a matter of time. We’re in the very early innings of it.

Okay. So then maybe going back full circle to kind of where we started in terms of AI coming for all of us, coming for you at some point and the sort of wake-up call that you gave to your team. I guess I’d be interested to hear just like what your leadership experience has been like in recent months.

What has been effective for you? To what degree are you leading by example? To what degree are you putting mandates in place? Are you making this part of performance reviews? What’s your overall response? Are people excited for it? Are some resistant? Speaking about the full-time team at Fiverr, what’s the dynamic when it comes to making or perhaps not quite eagerly making fullest use of what AI can do for people?

So when I sent this, I sent this more than maybe 36 hours ago and the reception of it was very good for some that are just ahead of the curve. It was just stating the office for some; it was just a validation of their fears; for some, it was a complete wake-up call. Probably very few, because we’ve been obsessing about the usage of technology, but overall, I don’t think anyone thinks that I’m bullshitting. It’s like people understand this, but I think it invigorates people to have conversations around this.

In that day, almost two days from it, I’ve had so many conversations. I’ve said, “My door is open, just take time, come, let’s sit down. Let’s have a conversation.” I’ve had so many people from different teams coming and saying, “We want to share some of the stuff that we’re doing, blah, blah, blah, whatever. How should we measure ourselves? What do you think is a good KPI for it? What do you think is a good measurement?”

And it is scary for people, rightfully so, by the way. I think this is just what it is. It’s a wake-up call that we need to do it. When the first version of ChatGPT came out and when they started talking about APIs and stuff, I went back to coding. I wanted to play with it myself. I used to be a hacker in the pre-HTTP times of the internet. It was the pre-web. I’ve been hacking for most of my life. I love it. I wrote some of the code for the initial version of Fiverr and all the way to version two. I love playing with it.

For me, it wasn’t really just about setting a personal example. I wanted to understand how powerful it is and how easy it is to actually do stuff. In some cases, I would have an argument with the team and say, “You know, we should…” We were talking about something, and they would say, “Okay, great. So you should probably see it ready in like three weeks.” I said, “What do you mean? Three hours? Why?”

I went back home, installed stuff on my computer, and just came the morning after. I said, “I put a stopwatch on myself. I gave myself three hours. This is what I could generate.” And I suck. I’m rusty. I don’t think I’m a cutting-edge developer. I was always like a mediocre one because I never did the 10,000 hours.

But if I can pull this in three hours, not three weeks—no way. So there is some setting of an example, but it’s also really understanding. Much like you don’t create companies by taking an MBA course, you need to be in the trenches. You need to be an operator to understand the actual. It’s the same with this. I think that this is a good time for a wake-up call because there’s going to be changes in the industry. I think it’s going to affect a lot of people, and it’s the time to wake up. I think we’re doing ourselves a favor by doing this.

But look, I think we have a very aligned organization. It’s not that there are people resisting or scared; they’re scared for themselves. I mean, it’s not just their job at Fiverr. It’s their job, period. We have an incredible team. I think the vast majority are going to do this full transformation, and it’s going to be incredible because it will allow us to push five times faster or five times the amount of things that we’re pushing. I’m seeing how the pace is picking up, and I’m always optimizing for velocity.

This excites me more than anything else. Is it impacting your hiring plans? Are you still hiring junior developers and junior marketers? These were sort of high-volume roles across the technology industry. My sense is that the volume is already dropping. In some cases, at least, people are looking at whether a junior developer or junior marketer allows them to move faster or if they slow us down in the AI age. What’s your outlook on the fate of those just starting out in their careers in today’s world?

Interestingly enough, the question of being a seasoned professional or a junior may be less of an issue because the juniors are often the best hackers. They’re making the most effort to stand out. If they pursued education, they received the most up-to-date education, which includes machine learning and AI—things people did not learn three or five years ago. It’s less about that in my view and more about how proficient you are with the new tech.

It doesn’t matter. We might be hiring for a legal position in our legal team, and if you’re not versed in how to work in 2024, then you’re out. You may be brilliant, but you’re not going to get the job because we can’t afford to train anyone. This is also my perspective. You don’t need to be trained; it’s all available online. Just take a course, figure it out. There is no manual, and I don’t need to feed you. No one owes you anything; learn on your own. There is no barrier to learning independently.

If you’re unfamiliar with the latest technology and its capabilities, then you’re not going to pass. This has materially changed in the past two years. There has never been a better time to learn, but never been a worse time for people who want to follow a very predictable path and trust it will take them where they want to go.

I agree that the senior versus junior distinction may be less important than the mindset you bring to day-to-day challenges. Are you personally obsessed with finding a better way to do things at any stage of your career? I do worry at the same time. I don’t know what universities you’re hiring from, but I talk to people coming out of a lot of rank-and-file American universities, even out of computer science programs.

To this day, in many cases, they’re prohibited from using AI. These students are restricted. It’s not open-minded enough; it’s dogmatic and conservative. Would you advise people not to attend an undergrad program in today’s world? What are the alternatives?

If you care about the socializing aspect, absolutely, yes. It’s good for networking. There is this alumni mafia, which is great. But if you want to get ahead fast and start earlier, you can. If you know you can become obsessively curious and deep dive into subjects, you can certainly do that now. I don’t know; maybe in a few years, things will change as new professions emerge. They’re going to be very complex. There’s going to be, you’ll need crazy scientists and whatever. And it needs some more formal training and education.

Right now, no, it’s so much out there that you can just peek. You don’t need to even pay for anything. It’s amazing.

Yeah, it is a strange world, but I would agree that in many cases, internet hustlers that are selling courses on how to use Cursor or how to use ChatGPT, whatever it may be. And I agree, you probably don’t have to pay for anything, but those folks that are often selling that stuff at pretty affordable prices are in many cases outperforming universities in terms of how actually job-ready you’re going to be coming out of those experiences.

So it is a strange new reality, to say the least. It is. Well, I really appreciate how generous you’ve been with your time and it’s been a great conversation. Is there anything else that you would want to leave people with? Any advice for other company leaders, job seekers, freelancers, you name it.

Yeah, no, I think we’ve had a very extensive discussion around all of these topics. Maybe the one message I want to leave you with is my optimism. I’m not pessimistic about the future. I don’t think it’s doomsday. I don’t think we’re on our way to a dystopic future. I’m very optimistic and I’m having fun. This is seriously intellectually challenging and which makes it so much fun.

Yeah, appreciate you having me. It was fun to talk. Thank you. Likewise. I appreciate you doing it. Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of Fiverr. Thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution.

Thank you, Nate. It is both energizing and enlightening to hear why people listen and learn what they value about the show. So please don’t hesitate to reach out via email at tcr at turpentine.co or you can DM me on the social media platform of your choice.