The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Fiverr CEO: ‘If You’re Not Adapting to AI, F* You. You’re Done | Why "Time to Copy" is the Most Important Metric in Startups Today | Why 99% of AI Companies Today Will Die | Why Governments Will Take Control of AI with Micha Kauffman
09 Jun 2025
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
No persons identified in this episode.
This episode hasn't been transcribed yet
Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.
Popular episodes get transcribed faster
Other episodes from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Transcribed and ready to explore now
20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
17 Oct 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital
04 Apr 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
28 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: The Insane Story of Glovo: Selling 30% of the Company for €100K | The McDonalds Deal That Saved Them | Running out of Money Three Times | Burning $1M Per Day | Being Acquired for $2.2BN with Oscar Pierre, Founder @ Glovo
26 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | NVIDIA vs AMD: Who Wins and Why | The Future of Inference vs Training | The Economics of Compute & Why To Win You Must Have Product, Data & Compute with Steeve Morin @ ZML
24 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
20 Feb 2025
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch