Episode Details

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Micha Kaufman, co-founder and CEO of Fiverr, joins us to explain why anyone who has worked in their profession for more than five years is now “a dinosaur.”

He has spent 17 years building Fiverr into a global marketplace connecting millions of freelancers with businesses, and took it public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019. His internal memo warning staff about AI went viral a year ago, and he says the employees who embraced it are now doing two to three times more than before.

Micha also shares why AI has flipped the 80/20 split between human and software work, why an AI that knows everybody “just makes everybody more average,” and why human judgment and accountability will be the biggest moat any professional can have.

In our in-depth episode, we discuss:

* The asteroid analogy behind Micha’s viral AI memo, and what changed inside Fiverr in the 12 months after he sent it

* Why the 20% of work AI can’t do is “infinitely important,” and the risk of outsourcing judgment to machines

* Why most AI-generated code is built on poor-quality open source, and what that means for developers whose job was 60–70% copy-pasting

* Why Micha wants to stop calling freelancers “freelancers,” and why he believes getting better is each person’s own responsibility

* How Micha runs a public company through a period of uncertainty by encouraging impatience, and whether half of Fiverr’s clients could soon be AI agents

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Timestamps

(00:00) Meet Micha Kaufman (02:17) Is the 9-to-5 dead?(05:20) The viral AI memo(05:50) The dinosaur and the asteroid(12:25) Using AI vs really using AI(14:33) The one thing AI lacks: accountability(18:55) Has AI made us lazy?(19:33) How AI flipped the 80/20 of work(21:02) Why AI is a nightmare for designers(23:23) What happens to freelancers doing basic work?(27:32) Why "freelancer" is the wrong word(28:38) Whose job is it to get better?(

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