Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Micha Kaufman - Co-Founder & CEO of Fiverr | How One Man Disrupted the Entire Job Market

Transcript

Micha Kaufman - Co-Founder & CEO of Fiverr | How One Man Disrupted the Entire Job Market · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  When I told the idea of Fiverr to many people, everybody told me that this was either crazy or just stupid idea.
• 0:07
  How do you take a simple idea and turn it into a global marketplace?
• 0:10
  Nietzsche Kaufman, co-founder and CEO of Fiverr knows exactly how.
• 0:15
  Who would think with companies like Fiverr?
• 0:16
  This is like a factory for incredible entrepreneurs.
• 0:19
  Sometimes you succeed and it feels like it's the end of it.
• 0:23
  The order of building a successful business that is actually doing good to you monitor against you.
• 0:29
  Since launching Fiverr in 2009, Nietzsche has grown it into a platform with millions of users
• 0:33
  across 190 countries, offering over 10 million gigs and 30 million services, but here's the real question.
• 0:40
  How did he turn the gig economy into a multi-billion dollar industry?
• 0:44
  In this episode, Nietzsche shares the journey behind Fiverr's success,
• 0:47
  the bold decisions that shaped its future and his insights into the future of world.
• 0:51
  The value of ideas is exactly as easy.
• 0:54
  If you go through in your mind the hopes that you need to go as you build the company,
• 1:00
  it would probably be done.
• 1:04
  Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary.
• 1:07
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• 1:11
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• 2:34
  Hey guys, thank you for coming on. I'm excited to do this. I'm excited to chat with you.
• 2:38
  I wanted to kick it off with this. So you said that entrepreneurs are irrational optimists.
• 2:45
  So take me back to a moment when you first had the idea of fiber. What was going on in your life
• 2:51
  at the time and what made you irrationally optimistic enough to pursue the vision despite,
• 2:59
  I mean, you can talk about the millions of challenges you've had over your career building
• 3:03
  list. You talk about the challenges of building a marketplace, but what was like the younger,
• 3:09
  irrationally optimistic, Micha? Yeah, I say that because I think there is a little navy
• 3:17
  thing that comes with starting a business because when you think about it, the value of ideas
• 3:24
  is exactly zero. You build value through the craftsmanship of building a company and evolving
• 3:35
  it and pivoting it and taking something from an idea to execution and testing it on
• 3:43
  on actual customers. And I think that you, I mean, if you go through in your mind the hopes that
• 3:53
  you need to go as you build the company, you would probably give up. And along the way,
• 4:00
  there's you're going to you're going to hear so many times the word no or the words it's never
• 4:08
  going to work or it's a stupid idea or it's a waste of time or there's not there's no real
• 4:18
  business behind it that if you think about this ahead of time and you don't put in the optimism
• 4:26
  of being able to go through this, then it's a it's a it's a it's a pretty impossible journey.
• 4:33
  And so I think that you need you have to be, you know, infinitely optimistic to think that you
• 4:40
  can pull it off. And the more daring the idea is, the more daring the vision is, the more
• 4:48
  optimistic you need to be about it, right? Like if you start like, okay, think about think about
• 4:55
  the mission of fiber. Um, it's to change how the world works together. This is like who makes up
• 5:05
  these, you know, these missions. I mean, this is like, that's huge. At least it needs
• 5:11
  dreamy self confidence to even, I mean, this is presumptuous. This is like, um, it's it's over
• 5:18
  the top large. When you think about the fact that you you think about this mission out of your
• 5:25
  bedroom or or your your little house. Um, and thinking that you can you can actually pull it
• 5:34
  through. I mean, if you're not, if you're not extremely optimistic, um, to the point of being
• 5:42
  orderline delusional, you're not going to do it, right? And in the truth is, most cases,
• 5:50
  it's not going to work. Um, but those who don't try will never, I mean, it's like, I mean, you're
• 5:57
  worried. If you, if you buy a lottery ticket, you have a very, very small percentage of,
• 6:05
  of actually winning. But if you don't buy the ticket, you have zero, right? So, so in a sense,
• 6:13
  you need to be extremely optimistic. The odds are against you, but, but you need to be fueled by
• 6:17
  this optimism. And, and, and actually, the funny thing is that throughout my career,
• 6:23
  and, you know, when I told the, the idea of fiber to, to many people, I, I never, no one
• 6:32
  has said, oh, this is a brilliant idea. Everybody told me that this was either crazy or just stupid
• 6:40
  idea, which, which just fueled me more, um, to be able to prove the things that I sense and,
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  and, and, and go through the craftsmanship that it takes to actually turn that idea into
• 6:54
  something that would start meeting customers and then from, from that point on evolve.
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  How did, how did you, because I'm, I'm going back to when, when fiber wasn't, was, like,
• 7:06
  barely like a thought in your mind, there wasn't like a benchmark or a comparable at that time.
• 7:12
  I don't, I don't think really anything significant. So, and you had, you had tried to build
• 7:18
  things in the past before, before, before fiber as well. So how did this concept, how do you,
• 7:24
  I get the, I get the, what, what did you call the irrational optimism, a little bit of delusion.
• 7:30
  Yes, yes to all of that. But how do you have that much faith in this concept in, in like the
• 7:37
  five dollar gig or the five dollar job? What was the data point in the universe that you pulled from?
• 7:46
  I, I think that difference. I mean, at least two things. One was fiber is my worth company.
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  And so I've, I've done my,
• 7:58
  in English, my, my share of mistakes, um, which I think all of them were just tuition.
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  We're just preparing me to do things based on all the learnings that I've had from previous
• 8:11
  company. So I felt more ready, more focused. I, I knew what I was doing much better.
• 8:19
  But I also created a framework of how to, how to think about ideas, how to, um, come up with ideas
• 8:28
  that I felt were worth my, my time. I was at, at the time I was 38. I felt that, you know,
• 8:36
  my next thing should be meaningful. Meaningful doesn't just amount to money. It's not just saying,
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  oh, I, it should be a company that generates north of a hundred million dollars. Uh, which,
• 8:49
  by the way, I thought about this number. And, you know, years afterwards, you had made, made me
• 8:55
  laugh. But, uh, speaking about optimism, I was, I wasn't optimistic enough when I was thinking
• 9:01
  about this. But, but in any case, it's not just about money. It's about, it's about the footprint.
• 9:05
  It's about, um, what do you want to put your time in? And, you know, I, I tell this to,
• 9:11
  to people that join Fiverr, I share some of my experiences as being an entrepreneur. And I'm,
• 9:16
  what I'm telling them is the odds of building a meaningful business, the successful business,
• 9:23
  are very small, uh, they're against you. But the odds of building a successful business,
• 9:29
  that is actually doing good to humanity. It is creating opportunities for people,
• 9:35
  for millions of people around the world, that is making the world a little bit smaller,
• 9:40
  that is giving opportunities for people, people from rural areas. Um, not just developing countries,
• 9:46
  but for guys from Boise, Idaho, um, and, and, and bring them customers from Tokyo or,
• 9:53
  or Sydney or, or New York or wherever. So I think the opportunity of doing something meaningful
• 10:00
  was, was, was, was incredible. And it was, for me, it was highly motivating. But, but I think
• 10:07
  that having a framework of how to think about the ideas that might scale again, the odds are
• 10:13
  against you. But my scale, um, was, was something very important for me. And I'm, I'm happy to go
• 10:20
  through, I'm, I'm, I'm very much a personal framework. But I, yeah, I think that that would be,
• 10:27
  I know, I was going to say, I'd love to learn that framework. I think that'd be very interesting
• 10:31
  just to understand like how you think, because again, you did have businesses before this. So this
• 10:36
  framework, something that's been built, not just off the back of Fiverr, but your entire life and
• 10:41
  career up to the point when you started to build this. True. I mean, this was, let's, let's
• 10:48
  go back in time. This was 2009. So slightly different times from now. Um, and, and this framework
• 10:57
  was, was a truly simplistic, which is the beauty of strong frameworks. They're, they're always super
• 11:02
  simple. And when, when, when you will hear the framework, you're going to realize that it applies
• 11:08
  for so many of the businesses that succeeded in, in the, in the beginning of, of the 2010, right?
• 11:17
  So, so the framework was, was, was, was pretty simple. The idea was, I, I wanted to look
• 11:23
  for a market that is already established and has a potential of, of continuing to grow. So
• 11:31
  meaning, I don't, I don't want to necessarily invent a category that I need to pay the price
• 11:38
  of educating a market and, and, and proving that it actually exists, but actually looking into
• 11:43
  an existing market, where there's tremendous amount of inefficiency and friction that you can
• 11:53
  potentially solve with software. That was pretty much it. Now, when you say it's, it's super simple.
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  And you might think, okay, great. So, I mean, you, you can think about the million things.
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  Go ahead, think about them. If you, if you go back, um, and, and you think about
• 12:14
  these years, think about, um, the fact that, um, Uber, as used the same firmwork, without
• 12:24
  even maybe knowing, for transportation, right? Uh, axes existed, right, sharing to some extent,
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  the needs to go from point A to point B existed, but there's, there was so much friction
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  of calling a dispatcher, looking for a taxi, and then not knowing what, when it's going to get to
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  you, and then, uh, not knowing the, you know, which, which, you know, route it's going to take,
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  and how much it's going to cost. And then having to use your wallet to, to pay for it, so much of it,
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  with just smart software, you could remove all of this in law and beyond. You made the right
• 13:05
  sharing so much larger. Think about the same idea, um, you know, think about Airbnb,
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  think about what they've done for hospitality. Um, you know, um, again, the opportunity
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  existed, the market existed, everything was there, but there was so much friction. It was so hard
• 13:28
  to find, to pay all of it. Smart software, you can do it. So, so in, and, and by the way,
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  if you apply the same principles, you see the same principles applied to, um, FinTech,
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  in short tech, you know, I mean, these were banking, these were existing businesses,
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  with tremendous amount of friction, that would, with the right smart software, you can actually
• 13:55
  eliminate. And if you can do it, you, you could actually take the market, which, which to me was,
• 14:00
  was this, the magic of having this very simplistic framework. So when I was looking at,
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  at different markets, one of them was with labor. One of them was, was this idea of, of,
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  you know, the matching between the, you know, talent and, and those who need access to that talent.
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  And, and I, I saw exactly this. I saw the, I saw how hard it was to find talented people
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  and, and, and communicate with them and, and, and, and agree on pricing and, and just figuring out,
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  um, you know, a system of understanding how good they were to what they were saying that they're
• 14:44
  doing. Um, nothing was standardized. Everything was, so, so the, the, it was like, it was almost as,
• 14:52
  as bad as dating, right? It's like, you know, it was, it was really, really, which is, which is what
• 14:57
  tender and hinge and bumble and they all did the same thing. Yeah. So, so this is the beauty of,
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  of this framework. You know, you can, you can literally apply it to any, and, and what's interesting,
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  if you think about this, in many ways, the same framework applied to e-commerce.
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  So in eBay and Amazon started, um, the infrastructure for commerce was there, but it was,
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  it had friction. You had to get into your car and drive to the shopping mall that took time
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  and find the shopping cart and pay for parking and whatever. And they didn't have anything,
• 15:37
  everything on, on their inventory and, and the list goes on and, and the opening hours were
• 15:42
  limited and whatever. So you think about this and you say, okay, wow, this, this is, it's an
• 15:47
  incredible opportunity to apply software where, you know, and this is how they started. I mean,
• 15:53
  Amazon took it so much further than not. I was actually going to ask just on that thought.
• 15:58
  It's very interesting because eBay and Amazon applied your framework, but Amazon won.
• 16:05
  And I'm curious why Amazon won applying your framework when eBay did win, but then they got
• 16:12
  disrupted to a degree. So why would they? Yes. Yeah, I think I have a, I have an answer for that.
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  And I think that, um, the two companies have had very, very different approaches to it.
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  So one took a very, um, like a very pure, um, two-sided market base approach,
• 16:38
  where it started from this community idea. eBay, more than anything else, was a community,
• 16:46
  and when they stopped being a community, this is where they started declining. This is my take,
• 16:53
  now I've been, I've been studying market bases for 15 years because I'm, I'm building one,
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  and it's an incredibly complex machine. And eBay was, was, was an inspiration at the time,
• 17:05
  because they were doing something very similar to what we were doing. Amazon for many, many years
• 17:13
  the merchant of record. So what they understood was that in order to make e-commerce habitual,
• 17:25
  you had to solve logistical problems. And it's very, very tough to do it when you don't own any
• 17:34
  of the sides of the market, like eBay, right? You, it's very hard to impose all filament standards
• 17:43
  when your supply side are just random individuals. In Amazon's case, they were either the merchant
• 17:52
  of record to begin with. And when they started opening up to merchants to third party merchants,
• 17:58
  what they realized that the only way to actually enforce very high standards or fulfillment,
• 18:06
  which we now know under the name of prime, then they need to go through the prime system,
• 18:12
  which means that they need to ship their inventory to Amazon warehouses from which Amazon can do
• 18:18
  the fulfillment, which ensures that the fulfillment is going to be top notch. So, so essentially what
• 18:24
  they realized that in that space, in order to remove probably the most the largest
• 18:34
  friction point, they had to control fulfillment and make it as short as it is. And by the way,
• 18:41
  it's not that different than than what Netflix has done many, many years ago to blowpaster.
• 18:51
  You know, when you think about it, because when Amazon came,
• 18:56
  and I know it sounds really weird, young people these days, but when e-commerce started,
• 19:02
  you had to persuade people to shop online. People didn't want to. I know it's strange,
• 19:08
  but people really resisted it. And when you think about it, and this is why I mentioned
• 19:14
  blockbuster in Netflix, because you had, when you go to the shopping mall, you don't think about
• 19:21
  the time that you waste and the, you know, the, the, you know, the car gas and whatever.
• 19:27
  You think about the instant gratification. You think about, oh, intermediates are like
• 19:31
  holding into a scene. I'll patch it. I'll smell it. I'll wear it. Whatever.
• 19:37
  And so what you do is, by definition, you come, you come out with a product with an offering
• 19:45
  that is inferior. You say, oh, instead of going to blockbusters,
• 19:50
  spending 20 minutes getting your movie, you're going to order it by mail, get it in two days.
• 19:56
  That's two days versus 20 minutes. In the way Netflix has solved it is, they went, they used
• 20:05
  this idea, this handicap is an advantage by saying, you know what, there's no late fee.
• 20:12
  And by the way, you can take three movies and you can keep them as long as you want and whatever.
• 20:18
  And so if you have multiple movies at home, your waiting time is zero. It's not even 20 minutes,
• 20:25
  because you have your next movie. Oh, it's amazing. And so, and there's, and these are the things
• 20:32
  that people hated about blockbusters, the late fees and all of this. Amazon has done very
• 20:40
  similar to what they said is, you know, we're going to make it super convenient. It's going to be
• 20:46
  super fast. And it's free, free shipping. And it's 48 hours at the beginning. And now it's 24 hours.
• 20:53
  It's free replacement. And it's whatever. And no questions asked. And there's infinite inventory.
• 20:59
  And it's going to be the cheapest. And it's okay. Great. Done. Done deal. And you, and you persuade
• 21:04
  people to cross the line and you make that into an habitual service. You can only do that in
• 21:12
  e-commerce if you control fulfillment in Amazon, more than anything else is a fulfillment company.
• 21:19
  And they've mastered it. Like it's, I still cannot believe that they can do what they're doing.
• 21:26
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• 22:10
  No, and, and so technically, you know, when you look at what five is done and I guess five,
• 22:16
  do you consider five or a first mover? Yes, yes, because I'll tell you the question that I have
• 22:22
  first, then let me know. So the question is really as somebody who's, I would have thought five
• 22:29
  or the first mover, but I'm not in the space and I don't know the history obviously as well as you.
• 22:33
  But the question really is, how do you build a company that is that is undistruptible? And
• 22:40
  I mean, you're going to say it's impossible to make it undistruptible. But you as a founder, CEO,
• 22:45
  you built a massive company. How do you not become an eBay? I know you're not going to become a
• 22:50
  blockbuster because again, blockbuster was like an analog to a digital solution. But then eBay
• 22:57
  was disrupted by Amazon because they took a different perspective. So as a founder, what do you do to
• 23:02
  future proof? Yeah. No, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a great question. And um, there's no easy
• 23:10
  answer to it. Uh, with this idea of reinventing yourself, you know, some of the things that we're
• 23:17
  doing, as we're thinking about this, you know, when, when you start a company, you do the,
• 23:22
  I mean, everybody probably your listeners of, of red, um, you know, crossing the cousin, you know,
• 23:28
  these, I did this idea of going through a J curve where in, in the bottom, you know,
• 23:36
  end of the J's, what's, what's being fueled by VCs and, or investors, private investors.
• 23:43
  And then at some point, hopefully you grow in companies, what happens is, as, as years go by,
• 23:52
  you need to, if you don't disrupt, disrupt your own model, someone else will. And so you,
• 23:58
  you need to keep this, um, you know, um, very fresh approach where you challenge everything you do.
• 24:07
  Um, and, and you keep questioning your strategy. And you keep thinking about the next
• 24:14
  ways of innovation because nothing, nothing is static. Everything moves. There's ways of transformation.
• 24:22
  Some of them are cultural. Some of them have to do with generations. And in our case,
• 24:29
  2010 millennials got into the workforce. Then Gen Zers, it's, it's changing the fabric of the,
• 24:37
  of the workforce. Um, technology have changed. The, the App Store has become super popular in
• 24:45
  that created this massive opportunity cloud computing. Um, then now recently you have AI. So,
• 24:52
  so there's, there's multiple things that change constantly. You need to continue challenging
• 24:57
  yourself. And, and one of the things that are really hard is an existing company that you
• 25:04
  need to do additional Jacobs, but now you are the VC. And every bone in your body, every,
• 25:14
  you know, every aspect, every person around you tells you, don't do it because, because it's
• 25:21
  going to come at the expense of your profitability, at the expense of your growth, at the expense of
• 25:27
  being able to laser focus on just one thing. But you need to do it. You need to reinvent yourself.
• 25:33
  You need to do the next wave of transformation. Because if you, if you failed to do it,
• 25:38
  you end up like many companies that we know, like Lockberry and Hold back and whatever. I mean,
• 25:43
  the, unfortunately, the corporate, you know, uh, uh, you know, uh, Trashbien is full of incredible
• 25:53
  extensive and big names that you know, blockbuster was a six billion dollar revenue a year company.
• 26:02
  This is that you can't stop the company that size. Remember, yeah, well, it's greatest times.
• 26:09
  I mean, these, it seemed to be impossible to destroy. But there's very few companies that are
• 26:16
  actually able to survive. And when you think about it on a, on a, on a personal level,
• 26:22
  there's very few
• 26:24
  management, founders, managers that are able to go through this entire thing. I have, you know,
• 26:32
  as a, as a, as a founder CEO, I have a, like, I have a ritual, a yearly ritual where I,
• 26:40
  I take a couple of days to actually do an introspect and ask myself, am I the right person to
• 26:47
  continue leading this company next year? And I think that this is like, and we do the same
• 26:52
  for the way we're structured and organized. And we keep challenging this because if you don't,
• 26:58
  then you, you, you, you become, you become complacent. And, and this is where, this is where
• 27:05
  companies start falling. And I, you know, and I, you know, if you, if you, if you listen to the Netflix
• 27:13
  story called by Netflix, you know, that blockbuster was really, really close to being able to
• 27:24
  beat Netflix at its own game because they had the advantage of doing physical distribution
• 27:33
  and doing online or via mail distribution. And then the move to digital was, was not such a big deal,
• 27:40
  right? But, but because of management changes, they, they lost it.
• 27:45
  Then they lost an acquisition opportunity to with, uh,
• 27:50
  correct for it. I don't remember what was 15 or 50 million. I was like,
• 27:55
  I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was crazy. But, but again, the corporate history is full of
• 28:00
  these stories. And it's, it's, it's tough not to become one of them. You know, it,
• 28:07
  you need to be very aware that you can be, you can, I mean, if, if you become complacent,
• 28:12
  if you, if you don't disrupt your own business, someone else will, because you just proven that
• 28:19
  it's a great business, which makes you, you know, which may target, yeah, when you look back at,
• 28:26
  like I, I want people because people know what five are is. We can talk about, we can talk about
• 28:30
  the future of work all day, but I think it's also important to understand sort of what you've
• 28:34
  experienced in your journey and your come up. Um, if you look back, because you, you, this is not
• 28:39
  your first rodeo that you've done other companies, uh, talked to me about even before Fiverr,
• 28:45
  biggest failure or biggest lesson that you've, you've experienced over your career, like a
• 28:51
  shit hitting the fan moment that at the time felt like, you know, this is not going so well.
• 28:59
  Yeah. Oh, man, I don't, I wouldn't know where to start. They're, I mean, they're,
• 29:05
  they're, there's, uh, yeah, I've, I've, I've done my share of podcasts. I should have had a pre-preready
• 29:15
  answer for this. Um, but the reality is that there's, it's just the, what happens between companies
• 29:24
  as you evolve as a, as a entrepreneur is that just your misrate is getting a little bit lower,
• 29:32
  meaning, um, if, if to begin with, then you're on experience 80% of what you do is wrong.
• 29:40
  Then by the time you're an excellent entrepreneur, you're probably doing 70%.
• 29:46
  You know, error. You're not gonna, I mean, I think, I think what's changing in many ways is just,
• 29:54
  it's just, um, the size of the cycle of recovering from a, from a failure or, or a mistake.
• 30:02
  And, you know, having, having a system to quickly learn, overcome, not dwell on it and just move on
• 30:11
  and just, and just, um, take anything you've done wrong is a great lesson and promise yourself
• 30:18
  that you're not gonna make it again because if you do, you're just stupid. Um,
• 30:24
  and, and by the way, this is something that I've, that I've applied to the company as well. Like,
• 30:28
  there's, it's the same principle. I mean, it's okay to make mistakes, mistakes, as long as you
• 30:34
  make them in good faith, not, not by negligence. As long as it's not the same mistake again.
• 30:42
  Like if you do it, you probably shouldn't be here, um, because you don't care enough.
• 30:48
  But if you made a mistake, even sometimes it's causing mistakes, but you've done it with, with
• 30:53
  passion and, like, not, not out of negligence. And, and you were, you're on top of it and you,
• 31:00
  you found it and you fixed it. That's a great lesson. If you can spread it, if you can share it
• 31:04
  with the rest of the team. So I've done mistakes in, in how I picked co-founders. I've done mistakes in,
• 31:12
  um, in hiring people or not being very good at hiring people. I've done mistakes in, in running
• 31:19
  boards, um, and investors. Um, there's, uh, I, I, I wasn't aggressive enough. I, I, I didn't realize
• 31:30
  that I was, that I was not good enough at doing marketing or sales myself and not bringing the right
• 31:35
  people, uh, fast enough. There, there's, I mean, there's such, I mean, in, in your, when, when you
• 31:43
  grow up as an entrepreneur, there's so many mistakes that you do. It's just, I, it's very hard to
• 31:48
  pick one. But, but there, and if, if you think about shit shows, in, in, I mean, Fiverr started as
• 31:55
  shit show, well, when you think about it, and, and funny enough, it was, it was not because it was,
• 32:00
  it was not going well. It was because it was going extremely well. So when, so, so sometimes,
• 32:09
  sometimes you, you succeed and it, it feels like it's the end of it. Um, because, because, when
• 32:18
  you succeed too fast, so many things start falling apart. Um, and again, I'm happy, happy to talk
• 32:25
  into anecdotal, you know, stories. You know, most of what we do, we're, we're a very iterative
• 32:32
  company, we're, we're religiously testing stuff. So by definition, most of the things that you
• 32:39
  test will fail, like you, you, you fail the mentality of failure of like getting comfortable failing
• 32:47
  is something that you, you have to, to be super rooted in your, in your company's DNA.
• 32:53
  Where do you think, where do you think for you? I guess I, I always try and understand
• 32:58
  why some entrepreneurs, well, any entrepreneur successful has this like mental, this, this, these
• 33:06
  mental calluses that allow them to get through these periods of, of tough times and, and failures,
• 33:14
  and, and take the lesson and move on. Is it something that you were brought up with? Is it
• 33:19
  something that you learned from your parents, they're just from doing it so much? Because I think
• 33:25
  I've had so many conversations with entrepreneurs and there's a guy that runs a publicly traded
• 33:29
  holding company and it was very interesting. He's like, listen, Scott, like every single day,
• 33:33
  something that happens to me, a lawsuit, an employee, a death threat, like whatever it is,
• 33:39
  like any, every single day, whatever happens to me is something that would just completely,
• 33:44
  like completely fuck up a young entrepreneur and scare them from ever doing this again. And I
• 33:48
  guess I just wonder what this strategy is when you're first building and then you get your first
• 33:53
  lawsuit, for example, like how do you go into that and not let it destroy you?
• 34:00
  I don't know if there's a, if there's an exact system for it, then I am sure that there is
• 34:06
  something that has to do with your personality or, you know, your risk profile. Yeah, you know,
• 34:15
  and, and you're willing to, you're willing to take risk and they're, you're willing to face the
• 34:22
  consequences sometimes, which, which comes with it. In my case, I think, probably some of it
• 34:32
  is how I was raised up into my background. It's, you know, what I've done in my life prior to
• 34:38
  becoming an entrepreneur. Some of it was the fact that I knew that on, on a very personal level,
• 34:47
  I had a safety net because I had a very supportive wife as an example and very supportive
• 34:54
  parents, like people that I can lean on if like they're going to catch me and they're not,
• 35:02
  I mean, if things like having a supportive spouse is, is, is, I think, in many times overlooked,
• 35:12
  um, because this is your environment, you're good at full apart. You're going to, you're going to
• 35:16
  have a really, really bad day. Um, things are going to be sometimes you get devastating news. It's
• 35:23
  like, and if, if you don't have a supportive environment, um, then it's even tougher because it
• 35:29
  creates, it's, it just, it holds the, you know, well, you can't get out of your own head. I,
• 35:34
  I experience the exact same, like every time something bad happens, like she's the first one
• 35:38
  to tell me, Scott, it's like, chill, it's not that bad. It's not the end of the world,
• 35:41
  but you get in your own head about a lot of this shit and you need somebody to pull you out.
• 35:46
  True. And it's not just, it's not the end of the world. It's just knowing that she's okay,
• 35:51
  that she's not freaking out that a bit. She's not going to say, oh, dude, like you need to,
• 35:56
  like, you need to get out of it out of there. So, so having a support system, I think,
• 36:03
  it's really important, but, but, um, it also comes with experience, meaning you, you, you,
• 36:10
  you understand over time that skies are not falling. The things that you thought were devastating
• 36:16
  are probably small blips. Um, they're small dots on a, on a very long timeline. Um,
• 36:25
  and in most cases, um, the mistakes that you do or the bad things that happen to you are not
• 36:32
  irreversible and are usually not terminal. So if you, if you know this and if you take that
• 36:41
  approach and you say, okay, okay, great. I, it's, it's, it's about bump. Um, but, but we need to,
• 36:49
  we need to go through this and recover. Um, then it's, it's, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy
• 36:57
  because I mean, you, you, you make reality. And by the way, when, when you do it in a team,
• 37:03
  the team follows because when, you know, it's, it's a little thing. So it's even, you know,
• 37:08
  when, when the company was super small, um, I started being very self-fulweir to my facial
• 37:17
  expressions when I was coming to the office in the morning. If you look very worried,
• 37:23
  then this is going to be a bad day for the team. Period. Because they look, I mean,
• 37:28
  they look at you. They're trying to read into like, why is it pissed? Like, what's going on?
• 37:35
  Do we get another no from an investor to like, um, does he, does he know something we don't,
• 37:41
  which is really bad news? Um, and if you smile, I mean, the day is just like everything goes.
• 37:48
  And so you, so, so leading by example, but it's also an example of how you take bad news.
• 37:54
  How do you take the small disasters? How do you cope with them? And when, when, when you're composed,
• 38:01
  when, when, when you're chill about it, then the rest of the team understands that this is not,
• 38:07
  I mean, we're nothing will destroy us. We're like, and it, it, it creates this, you know,
• 38:15
  this group strength, um, in, in many ways. I think a lot of people, they aren't aware of how
• 38:22
  their personality, their disposition affects the people around them. And that could be like a huge
• 38:27
  thing for the performance of the team too. Like, if you're like slamming your doors and, and you're
• 38:32
  hopping and puffing around the office, like, that's going to throw people off. Yeah. Yeah. So
• 38:40
  try, try not to do it. Try not to do that. Not try to find out about, um, yeah. I was, again,
• 38:46
  sometimes, sometimes people lose it. And yeah, it's just, it's just human. And that's also fine.
• 38:53
  Because seeing you as a human and not like a, like this over a car line, this business robot.
• 39:00
  Yeah. Exactly. I think it's, it's also good. Um, but, but to an extent, I mean,
• 39:06
  yeah, there, there's a limit. I mean, you, you, you can't become too vulnerable with the team.
• 39:12
  It's like, there's things that you, you shouldn't do. How do you, how do you, I mean,
• 39:18
  I'm actually curious about, because you mentioned before, this is just one point that I thought
• 39:23
  would be interesting, because you've spoken about it on other podcasts. And you've mentioned your
• 39:27
  wife's battle, uh, with cancer. And how this, like impacted your world view. And I'm curious
• 39:34
  about how that impacted your world view and how that shaped you as an entrepreneur. But also,
• 39:41
  that's a highly personal thing. Do you feel like things like that that you're going through as a
• 39:48
  leader? Do you talk about that with your team in the moment? So they understand all the different
• 39:55
  things that are going on in your life? Or do you try and shield them from that? So a little bit of
• 40:02
  a two-part question, because I am, I am very curious about, in fact, the due of course,
• 40:07
  but it does play into the second part when something that's about as traumatic of a life event.
• 40:12
  As most people, hopefully, they don't even have to deal with, but we'll deal with a death or
• 40:16
  cancer or something like that. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. So at the time, I was, I was, I was 29 and so,
• 40:27
  so was my wife. And we had our first son. He was about three years old. I was still practicing
• 40:34
  law at the time, um, which is something I didn't enjoy doing. Like, I was pretty frustrated. I,
• 40:43
  I was decently good at doing it. And I was making a lot of money, but I didn't enjoy it. And I
• 40:49
  knew that I wanted to make, to transform my, my career into a different, uh, direction. And
• 40:58
  my dad was, it was, it was a, it was a very senior, um, executive, the semiconductor company. And
• 41:04
  so he was, I think having this entrepreneurial spirit was, was a tone. And I knew that I wanted
• 41:12
  to go into business, but this was, this was dragging along. And this was, it's, it's kind of a
• 41:16
  golden cage. And you make a lot of money and you're young. And it's, it's hard to get out of that
• 41:21
  cycle. And so my wife was diagnosed with, with cancer. And this was, um, what, what's really,
• 41:34
  I mean, I can, I can, I can actually, um, remember the, the, the moments where, um,
• 41:43
  you know, we were very happy people. And we, you know, we're together from the age of 14.
• 41:49
  So we, at that, I love that. That's amazing. So, so she's my best friend. Um, we've been
• 41:57
  together forever since we were teenagers. And, and this happened in all of us. I mean, it's,
• 42:06
  I mean, you can wake up the happiest person in the world and go to sleep in the gutters. Like,
• 42:14
  you know, your entire world collapses on you. And she, she had a very rare and complex type of
• 42:24
  cancer with, with about 10% of survival. She didn't know that, but I did. Um, and so this was,
• 42:32
  this was a super tough period of time. I left work. I spent six months, you know,
• 42:40
  raising our son and taking care of her. And, but as, as she survived through it against all odds,
• 42:49
  the, the way this impacted me was, uh, this idea of life's fragility. This, this moment where
• 43:01
  you like, there is this, um, heavy realization that drops on you that, uh, even, even if you think
• 43:11
  you're 29, nothing can touch you. Nothing but can happen. All of a sudden, your life might end
• 43:17
  or the, the way you, you think about it and the plans that you've made for the future and all of it.
• 43:23
  So this made me get into this carpet, the M, you know, seize the, seize the day, mode,
• 43:31
  like turbo mode on it. Like, I went ballistics. For me, there was zero procrastination. I wanted
• 43:40
  everything now. I didn't postpone anything. I left my work as a, as a lawyer. I started my first
• 43:47
  company. It was, it was all about not postponing anything I wanted to do because, because there was
• 43:54
  this, um, sense of urgency of like, no, your future is not for, it's not a sure thing. Yeah.
• 44:03
  You need to do whatever you want to do, whatever your passion about do it now. So this got me into
• 44:09
  this mentality of, of like, going into it and, and not, and not optimizing for the risk, not,
• 44:16
  or worrying about the downside, but also only optimizing about the upside, only thinking about,
• 44:22
  and this is where, I mean, a lot of this idea of optimism and, and, and, and, and, and
• 44:28
  daring and taking risks and, and, and having a sense of urgency of, oh, really doing things and,
• 44:35
  and going to your second part of the question. So over the years, um, I've, I've done a number of
• 44:44
  companies throughout throughout that period, including Fiverr. Um, she had cancer quite more.
• 44:53
  And she was also diagnosed with MS, um, which is like, dude, this is like, it's, and I don't know
• 45:05
  how she handles it. It's just, she, it's incredible. But, um, but, but some of that happened throughout
• 45:14
  Fiverr. Enter a question. Um, I, I did try to shield the team from it. And the reason is,
• 45:25
  first, there's only a certain degree of vulnerability that you can have with your team because
• 45:31
  you are a dear leader and they need, they need someone with a steady hand. And as much as they
• 45:37
  would love you and trust you and have confidence, if they feel that you're, whether it's your fault
• 45:44
  or not, in a very weak spot, they, they might become less confident, right? And, and this will
• 45:52
  impact their performance. The second part of it is when you tell people this in, in some ways, um,
• 46:01
  you're, you're being open with them and you share personal stuff with them. On the other hand,
• 46:08
  I, I also felt that you, you give them some of the burden because now they know it. They,
• 46:15
  they cannot un-know this. And so it, this becomes something that, that hangs there in, in the
• 46:22
  room when you're, when you were thinking about stuff. And, and I didn't want to put them in
• 46:27
  that situation, right? Because, and it's, again, it's not, I am a private person and, and I'll,
• 46:33
  like, um, obviously, I wouldn't even tell the story if, if my wife wasn't okay with it, but,
• 46:40
  of course, yeah, yeah. But it's like, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and this is fine,
• 46:47
  but, but I think that this is, I mean, from a burdens standpoint, I, I wanted to shield the
• 46:53
  team from most of it. I mean, there's no real playbook for, for leadership when stuff like
• 46:59
  this happens. It's not like you can go watch, uh, uh, well, I guess it's watching, hopefully,
• 47:05
  this YouTube video or this podcast, but I mean, a lot of people don't know how to manage this stuff.
• 47:09
  This is the stuff that you don't expect. God forbid. Thank God you don't have to expect this,
• 47:15
  and it doesn't happen. But I mean, when you are the leader, you are the manager, just,
• 47:20
  it's not just the risk. It's the responsibility of, of, of everyone else's livelihood.
• 47:27
  It's, it's a very stressful position to be in. And I mean, like,
• 47:32
  that's why I don't even know if entrepreneurship is foremost people, because they never,
• 47:37
  they never tell you this when you're starting the company, what happens if somebody dies in the
• 47:41
  family. I mean, if you're responsible for everybody, it doesn't matter if you're solo printer,
• 47:46
  you're running a hundred million dollar company, you're running a public trade company.
• 47:51
  Like, you can't let that, you can't, you can't react to that a way a normal human
• 47:59
  wants to react to that, which is take time off and not do anything but care about the loved one,
• 48:03
  which is that makes sense. That's normal. But if you're running a public trade company and you're
• 48:08
  CEO of that, you, you can't just stop. It doesn't, it doesn't stop tomorrow for the next two,
• 48:16
  three, four weeks, five weeks, six months, whatever. So it's difficult, very difficult. It, it is
• 48:22
  and there, there isn't any, you know, a perfect playbook for it. I, I will say that there's,
• 48:30
  there's a saying that you've heard a million times and I did the same, which is being CEO is,
• 48:37
  is a very lonely position. And it is true. And I think some of that you can mitigate by creating a
• 48:49
  trusted network of either like-minded or people that are in the same situation with, with, with whom
• 48:59
  you can, you can have a conversation and open conversation and maybe even be vulnerable. Like,
• 49:05
  yeah, because if they're the right people, they would, they would tell you that they've been
• 49:13
  through the same or similar situations and some of them were devastating. And again, they,
• 49:20
  they would take you through their stories. And I think that this is, this is the closest you,
• 49:25
  you, you can get to opening up. And I, I found throughout the years, if, like, if you pick mentors
• 49:32
  for yourself and these are people that become, you know, some of your trusted, this safe zone of,
• 49:41
  of exchanging ideas and thoughts and concerns and, and sometimes private stuff, then, then it,
• 49:48
  that could be helpful. Otherwise, you need to be, yeah, it's pretty lonely and you need to,
• 49:53
  with some of that, you need to open your right, not everyone should be an entrepreneur.
• 49:58
  And that's fine. And by the way, I, sometimes I can tell about people and sometimes they can
• 50:04
  tell about themselves. And sometimes you need to just get it out of the system, just try it,
• 50:08
  which is fine. Like I, I would encourage anyone who wants to, to actually do it. I, I, I love it.
• 50:14
  It's incredible. Um, and I encourage people to take themselves through through the test.
• 50:21
  I, I agree. And there has to be seasons too. You have to know what season you're into. You know,
• 50:26
  like one of the biggest hiring strategies that I have is find people that should be entrepreneurs,
• 50:31
  but for whatever reason right now, the risk profile is in a line. And it's not the right season
• 50:36
  for them to be an entrepreneur, but they'll make incredible employees. And there's nothing wrong with
• 50:40
  that. And maybe they want to be an entrepreneur in five years or maybe they've done it. And I know
• 50:45
  people, I know exited founders that have taken roles back in companies because they don't want the
• 50:51
  stress anymore. There's literally zero wrong with that. You don't have to always be a founder,
• 50:57
  always an employee, or once you're a founder, you can never go back. Who cares? I agree. And I don't
• 51:04
  in the same applies for the, for the type of company of company you build or the outcome.
• 51:11
  There, there, there's no place that says that you have to build billion dollar companies,
• 51:18
  building a smaller company that is, is creating great impact on your ten employees and are making
• 51:27
  all of them very wealthy and happy. Is it great business? Love it. So it comes in in different
• 51:36
  shapes. And there's nothing wrong about it. So I do, I do encourage people to try it. And
• 51:45
  when you think about this, when you think about companies like Fiber that have went through
• 51:50
  everything from like product market fit into growth into being becoming a public company into doing
• 51:55
  another, you know, further waves of innovation. This is like a factory for incredible entrepreneurs.
• 52:05
  I mean, we, we mentioned companies like Gamasal and Netflix. I mean, think about the
• 52:14
  think about the PayPal Mafia, right? Yeah, you know, the, the first one hundred one hundred and
• 52:20
  one hundred and fifty employees. I mean, that includes Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. And I mean,
• 52:26
  it's just, it's just incredible. And I think that these experiences, you know, prepare you for,
• 52:34
  I mean, these are the best schools you can have. It's, it is a hundred times better than doing
• 52:40
  an MBA. Oh, a thousand percent. Right. And I think that people with entrepreneurial spirit would,
• 52:49
  would be noticed. I mean, within companies, you, I mean, I know the people here that are
• 52:54
  entrepreneurial. And it's, it's, if you can keep them and create and create space for them to
• 52:59
  continue creating things inside the company, having their own organizations and, and following
• 53:06
  through an ideas, this is incredible. And if not, you know, give them the blessing of starting
• 53:11
  somebody, maybe invest money in them. Yeah. Because you have the first, you know, you have,
• 53:16
  you have the best due diligence and vetting process. Anybody could ever hope for it. You've
• 53:21
  already worked with them for two, three years or whatever, right? How did your life, how did
• 53:27
  your life change? How did five or change when you went public? I find that fascinating. And there's
• 53:34
  not a lot of people that I speak to that go through that process. Not a lot. It's very interesting
• 53:38
  that you stayed on as CEO for the whole life of the business. Because I think a lot of people,
• 53:44
  at some point, will go through that exercise that you went through, or they're, or they're bored,
• 53:49
  will make them go through the exercise that you go through to see if you're the right CEO. And then
• 53:53
  at some point, between zero dollars and IPO, there's going to be some sort of founder, CEO injected,
• 54:03
  that's a professional CEO, but you went through the whole thing. So how was that?
• 54:07
  It is, it is a super, super interesting process. It's highly educating. It makes your
• 54:15
  companies so much better as a machine. Yeah. No, the way you think about how you operate,
• 54:23
  how you budget, how you plan, how you project things, how you do you think about growth,
• 54:30
  how you think about stability, how you think about talent, all of this. It forces you to do
• 54:37
  very different things than you were doing as a private company. And as we were thinking about,
• 54:45
  or deciding that this is the afternoon that we want to take, becoming a public company,
• 54:52
  I decided, first, what I've done is I replaced about half of my management team. And these were
• 55:01
  people I, I absolutely loved, but I, I felt that they were incredible at getting us to that point.
• 55:14
  But we're not necessarily the right people for the next phase, next phase, you know, the next 5-10
• 55:20
  years of growth. And, and this was very important, but this was, this was a tough, a tough
• 55:28
  transition. Again, it's, it's, it's saying goodbye to people that you really love and appreciate
• 55:32
  and they, they've given their life to the company. It's tough. It's not, it's not an easy thing to do.
• 55:40
  And then it was what I decided is I wanted to start exercising what it meant to be a public
• 55:48
  company as a private company, which meant that we started having our own fake earnings or, you
• 55:56
  know, having, having to do the projections, order by order and do the yearly thing. And so,
• 56:02
  putting the, the right systems into place, but, but having like two years to do it. So this was,
• 56:09
  and then I spent so much time with companies, I've, when, that I've gone public the, the, the two
• 56:16
  years before. So, companies that, that, that had fresh memory of the process. And they, through
• 56:25
  these companies, I, I took a lot of the, you know, the heavy lifting of learning the process that
• 56:31
  this was, this was just, this became really easier. And then it was starting to do non-deal road
• 56:39
  of just getting, because we were at the time that there weren't public companies in our space,
• 56:46
  it was educating the market about what it is. It wasn't like, oh, we're the 100, you know, companies
• 56:53
  company that is doing SOS, you know, model. It was the first time. So nobody really got what we
• 57:00
  were doing. And this was, so we were a strange creature in, in this space. It was important for me to
• 57:05
  start meeting with investors a, well ahead of time. So once we do the actual road show before
• 57:11
  the IPO, this is like the third, fourth time they've seen me. Okay. So they can, they can also
• 57:18
  understand that because they've seen me three, four times, three, four times, the consistency
• 57:25
  of our execution is there because they, they can, they can actually look at their notes.
• 57:30
  So this was one. And then, and then it's just, you know, it's the, it's preparing the team
• 57:37
  for the roller coaster of being a public company, which is not a small feat, but you need to,
• 57:43
  need to spend time doing it. And, and explaining to them what's going to happen. And
• 57:50
  explain to them what actually matters in this game. And explain to them that it's a long game.
• 57:56
  It's not the short game in the short game. It might be a, like getting into a washing machine.
• 58:00
  It's going to be terrible, but, but you can't be super myopic on a certain week or month or quarter
• 58:08
  or even a year. And, and then it's getting to into the routine of being a public company.
• 58:14
  Uh, you know, doing the earnings, doing the, the road show, you ever stressed about stepping into
• 58:20
  that position as CEO of a publicly traded company? Because does your job change at that point?
• 58:28
  Well, it does. It does. And in the actual IPO process itself sucks you in. I mean, it's,
• 58:34
  you need to have a very strong, a very strong, uh, backbone or, uh, like, like an infrastructure
• 58:43
  internally to be able to zoom out and deal with this. And I think, you know, this is one of the
• 58:51
  things that I told my management. I said, the only way we can do it is if as management,
• 58:59
  we're making sure that at the beginning, I spend most of my time in the future and nothing
• 59:08
  deprevent. And over time, you do the same, right? If we're obsessive about the current quarter
• 59:16
  or we're doomed, it's going to be, it's going to be misery because some quarters are going to be
• 59:22
  incredible. Some quarters are not going to go as well. We don't control everything. We do our best,
• 59:29
  but, you know, there's geopolitical stuff. There's macro stuff. There's stock market,
• 59:34
  doesn't behave, whatever there's elections. There's, um, it's not everything is going to go as
• 59:40
  planned. If you're obsessive about the quarter yourself, it means that you're not spending
• 59:44
  enough time thinking about the future. So I created the system to, to really allow myself to do
• 59:53
  it. Now, when you tell things in hindsight, you know, about about the history of you, Donna,
• 1:00:02
  you sound like a hero. But, but, I mean, I've done my share of mistakes doing this as well.
• 1:00:10
  One of them, which is very typical, and I've heard Brian Chasky talk about this and, you know,
• 1:00:16
  I've heard CEOs, it's like, when, when you start as a small company, every company is very top
• 1:00:23
  down, right? It's, it's under as they dictate, you know, the, they, they create this, uh, this,
• 1:00:32
  directive of like, we're, we're what we should do. And sometimes it goes really granular. And
• 1:00:38
  over time, it becomes more general. And you expect people to, to chime in. What happens is the
• 1:00:44
  company grows is sometimes it by mistake, not, not by design, it becomes, uh, it, it becomes
• 1:00:53
  like a hyper democracy where it's mostly bottom, bottom up because, because your head is like,
• 1:01:00
  you're, you're doing important things. And, and, and, and you're running, you're running the,
• 1:01:07
  the company, um, on the outside, not on the inside, and all of this. And this creates, in this,
• 1:01:14
  pushes the company to do what, when, when you do mostly, uh, bottom up, you do mostly incremental,
• 1:01:22
  because people are obsessed about the, yes, yeah. They're, you know, very narrow, uh, uh, uh,
• 1:01:30
  point of focus. And so what they do is they constantly do small changes and, and you, you become
• 1:01:35
  an incremental company. So instead of doing, like, step functions and, and doing moonsholt,
• 1:01:40
  doing, like, brave stuff, you do, you do, you keep one stunty, obsess about. So it's really,
• 1:01:46
  like, it's your job as a founder to make sure that you keep that big future vision, because if not,
• 1:01:53
  then you're just going to be like, like, like, like moving, like, nothing, like centimeters at a
• 1:01:58
  time when you really have to be just as innovative post IPO, as you were pre IPO, sometimes more,
• 1:02:08
  sometimes more, and you, in many cases, you need to be, you, you need to openly speak about it,
• 1:02:14
  because like, this is how you communicate with the market, and this is how they, they get what
• 1:02:19
  you're doing. Sometimes, sometimes you can't tell what you're doing because of competitive reasons
• 1:02:23
  or whatever. But, but you need to be pretty vocal about it. And it's, so doing this, there's this
• 1:02:31
  moment in time where you actually realize that, that this is wrong. And you need to, you need to,
• 1:02:36
  you need to be, you need to get back, get more involved. But I think that these are very natural
• 1:02:42
  things that happen to most CEOs that go through this process. And I, I had the lack of having a very,
• 1:02:48
  very strong management team that was not dropping the ball. So, so in that, in that sense, sure,
• 1:02:56
  it changes your day to day, but over time, if you manage to stay focused on strategy and on the
• 1:03:06
  next, you know, three years, not the next order, then having the ritual of doing the quarterly
• 1:03:16
  earnings and all of this is not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Well, it's just you, you,
• 1:03:22
  it gets into the rhythm. And it's just the way you operate. And you have a, you have a team that
• 1:03:27
  does it. And so, and when you're very, when you're in the details of your story, then it's very
• 1:03:35
  easy to tell that story. It's not, you don't need to come, I'm not, not spending, maybe I shouldn't
• 1:03:42
  say it, but I'm saying it anyway. I'm not spending a ton of time getting prepared for those
• 1:03:47
  earnings. It's not like, I'm not doing, you know, because you're, you're being an entrepreneur,
• 1:03:51
  and you've never stopped being an entrepreneur. And I think that that's the most important.
• 1:03:55
  Like, when I'll stop, I'll quit. Like, this is, I mean, because, because it's not going to be
• 1:04:01
  for the benefit of a company A in two is because it's boring. Like, I'm not going to, you know,
• 1:04:08
  I don't have to do it. I don't have to do what I'm doing right now. I can start five more
• 1:04:13
  companies or not. Yeah, it's not a money thing. It's not a money thing anymore. Fun. It's a passion
• 1:04:21
  thing. Yeah. Passion and it's, it's also, there's, I'm facing challenges right now that I
• 1:04:30
  haven't faced before. And it's interesting. Like, I want to be able to succeed going through
• 1:04:39
  these challenges. It's not obvious. It's not, if I thought I didn't have a chance, I would
• 1:04:44
  bring someone to replace me for sure. But, but I also think, I mean, I know that some,
• 1:04:52
  some CEOs don't go through the process of either going through the IPO or just after the IPO,
• 1:04:58
  they're getting moved. I haven't seen that as being super successful in many companies. In
• 1:05:04
  some companies, it does work. But I think that there's having a founder CEO throughout many years
• 1:05:15
  with a very long vision, not optimizing for like a big exit, but just wanting to see this business
• 1:05:22
  thrive 30 years from now is a huge plus for investors. And I'm also an investor. So I,
• 1:05:30
  so as a VC myself, I would, I would always opt to invest in, in, in founder CEOs, then,
• 1:05:39
  then having hired CEOs. I think that's so smart. I think that's also the reason why, like,
• 1:05:44
  even at a, at a micro level, when companies do acquisitions and they kill the innovation,
• 1:05:50
  because they do the acquisition incorrectly, and they try and bring that company that they've
• 1:05:53
  acquired into into the fold. And then all of a sudden, the company has like an autoimmune response
• 1:05:59
  to this new acquired asset as opposed to what Google does and I'm sure what meta does they do the
• 1:06:07
  acquire. And then they move them to the sort of the outskirts of the company, and they leave them
• 1:06:11
  alone, and they let them do their thing. And they sometimes don't even want to physically have
• 1:06:15
  them in the same office as the, as the employees because they want that team to stay forward looking
• 1:06:21
  and innovative. So it's always about keeping that innovation alive. And it's almost like these two
• 1:06:26
  conflicting ideas where you have this like corporate structure, just stifles innovation and
• 1:06:32
  creativity. But how do you keep that going? So you've kind of done it your own way with the
• 1:06:37
  Piver. And I think that's probably why you're still going to be very successful because you never
• 1:06:41
  kill that innovation. And if somebody replaced you, I think it would be next to impossible to have
• 1:06:48
  that same creativity and vision and future outlook, because it's just, it's like that Paul Graham
• 1:06:55
  founder mode, right? It's just a different kind of person. It's a different kind of person.
• 1:06:59
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's, it's, it reminds me of the story of the replacement
• 1:07:06
  Steve Jobs said, yeah, first, you know, the, the, the first part of the Apple story. And Steve Jobs
• 1:07:14
  has said, I was replaced by a person that thing that thinks that just having good ideas is enough
• 1:07:23
  and not understanding the photo through that, that you need to put into every idea. And I think
• 1:07:29
  that this is where founders have some benefit, Russian understanding what it takes. Just, you know,
• 1:07:35
  we were talking about this craftsmanship that comes out with turning an idea into into something
• 1:07:43
  where you have a benefit, but, but also seen, you know, non-founder CEOs come in and just,
• 1:07:51
  you know, do incredible things. And to your earlier point, it's all about, it's all about timing.
• 1:07:58
  Sometimes, you know, that timing is right. Sometimes you would just bring the right person in.
• 1:08:04
  So I don't know if no one else could do my job. I'm sure they're hard. There are probably some people
• 1:08:10
  true, but, but you'd have to look, you'd have to look hard. That's all I'm saying.
• 1:08:17
  I'm here for now. So we've gone through a lot. I guess last thing, because we didn't really
• 1:08:23
  touch on this at all, which is actually I'm very happy that we didn't even go into this because I
• 1:08:26
  feel like this is what you always speak about. But the last, just like a thought, you're looking 30
• 1:08:32
  years out, you're looking to the future of where five is going to be in its place in the gig economy
• 1:08:38
  and the future of work. Maybe just a couple thoughts because you study this all day. Where is the
• 1:08:43
  future of work going? You know, I, you know, to it earlier, I said, you know, we started the company.
• 1:08:51
  It was, you know, they say that timing is everything. So in our case, timing was 2010. It was at the
• 1:08:59
  wake of the recession of Lloyd. There was a lot of people waking up from this illusion of
• 1:09:08
  safe work because they've seen their parents losing their safe works during the recession.
• 1:09:14
  And young generation came into the workforce. They, they were thinking differently about work. They,
• 1:09:21
  they had, they had more access to information. They had more access to opportunities.
• 1:09:27
  And this started changing the fabric of what, what work actually means. You know, when we
• 1:09:34
  start the company, freelancing was something people used to do in between jobs. It wasn't a career.
• 1:09:41
  So, and this has changed. And not only became a, like a very legit career, it became also a
• 1:09:51
  lifestyle, you know, it comes, it comes with, with, with its negative side effects. And obviously,
• 1:09:59
  it's not perfect. But it gives you the type of freedom that these younger generations were
• 1:10:05
  looking for. They, they sometimes call it balance or freedom or, you know, being their own both.
• 1:10:12
  Or pursuing their passions. And I think that this, this has created a massive change.
• 1:10:19
  No, but by US statistics, by 2030, half, 50 percent of the workforce are going to be engaging
• 1:10:29
  in freelancing in some capacity, which is incredible. It doesn't mean that they're going to be full
• 1:10:35
  time freelancing or being free agents. But they're going to engage you with it, which means that
• 1:10:42
  a lot of these people are not going to be out there for full time hire anyway.
• 1:10:47
  So, I think that the, the constructs of work are changing. When you think about what is it, what,
• 1:10:52
  what is full time? When you look at high tech, the average 10, 10 year on high tech is 1.8 years.
• 1:11:02
  This is like short lease. What about it is full time. And your employees are doing 20 percent
• 1:11:11
  of their time doing whatever they want to do or working on their side project or which is fine.
• 1:11:17
  So, and then came the pandemic and changed things even further. And created this situation where
• 1:11:26
  you can have some of your team being remote. Maybe your or competence team needs to be in place
• 1:11:33
  or you need to spend time at the office because it's how you perform the best. But you can allow
• 1:11:41
  yourself to augment on it with flexible models. And so, this is already happening and it's going
• 1:11:47
  to happen with or without us. On top of that, you have AI coming. So, AI is changing how people
• 1:11:55
  work, how companies work, how the types of jobs that people are doing. It's, it's, you know,
• 1:12:03
  at the end of the day, these are just tools. And it's what matters is what people are going to do
• 1:12:07
  with these tools. But, but it is also changing the way people think about work and, and, you know,
• 1:12:15
  that the types of jobs that we can even imagine are going to be around in 10 years. We can't. I can't.
• 1:12:22
  I'm doing this for 15 years. I can't imagine the types of jobs are going to be here in three years.
• 1:12:29
  Nothing 10. It's very, you know, when, when we launched, we launched a category a few years ago
• 1:12:39
  called drone footage editors. Two years before that, that didn't exist. It did like no one could have
• 1:12:49
  imagined that the time would be a thing. And then there was, was crypto and NFT and whatever. Like,
• 1:12:57
  so, so the landscape is going to change. For me, the only constant is that human creativity,
• 1:13:08
  human talent is always will always be in demand. And those structures are going to change. And,
• 1:13:19
  you know, I sometimes I refer to the way I'm thinking about how businesses will work with talent.
• 1:13:27
  I compared it to the idea of cloud computing. I said, you know, what cloud computing has done is
• 1:13:33
  it's liberated computing power by by having much larger distribution. And so you as a small startup
• 1:13:43
  can can actually have access to the best computing power in the world. And you just pay per use.
• 1:13:50
  And that computing power is always up to date, managed, secured, upgraded, all of it. Think about
• 1:13:59
  the same principle in how you think about talent. You can have access to the best talent in the world
• 1:14:06
  in a click of a button. You don't need to train that talent. You don't need to maintain them. You
• 1:14:14
  don't need, you can work, or as long as you need it, you can scale it up. If you need more,
• 1:14:19
  you can scale it down if you need less. But that's the beauty of it. So I'm not really comparing
• 1:14:25
  human beings to computers. But the principles of having this, this democratized network,
• 1:14:35
  or platform where you can connect to talent. This is how I think, you know, we're going to see
• 1:14:42
  work in like 10 years from now. It's going to be, you know, I was at also lower the barrier to
• 1:14:47
  entry to build, to be an entrepreneur. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, when, you know, one of
• 1:14:55
  the important things as we're thinking, we were talking about the e-day versus Amazon idea and
• 1:15:00
  so forth. I think that there's, there's a massive, important component of, of, of a community
• 1:15:08
  that is ingrained in the fiber story. You know, when we, when we took the company public,
• 1:15:14
  we did that in the New York soccer change. So there's the famous balcony where you can have
• 1:15:19
  13 people stand and ring the bell. And I decided that when we do the IPO, we as a team are not
• 1:15:27
  going to ring the bell. We're going to bring community members. We're going to bring sellers
• 1:15:31
  that have been with us for many years. And we're going to let them do the ceremony. Because this is
• 1:15:36
  their day as much as it's, I love that. Right. And so, you know, in this in contrast to the idea
• 1:15:45
  of cloud computing, these are human beings. And it's important in the human aspect behind
• 1:15:51
  this, this incredible passion to create and succeed and learn new stuff and, and provide
• 1:15:58
  excellent service and be there for those who need you and be a bridge between people and technology
• 1:16:06
  by, by helping them use it. This is so incredible. And this is so, so very much of what we,
• 1:16:13
  we are as a company. And when you think about the transition for a public company at the office
• 1:16:19
  here, we have, it's mostly open space. Nobody sits in rooms including myself.
• 1:16:24
  We have meeting rooms and whatever, but we've seen open spaces and we've asked our community
• 1:16:30
  to decorate the office. So to create art that we're going to hang across the office.
• 1:16:36
  And the reason why this was so important was that I told the team, I wanted to have a line of
• 1:16:42
  sight with something that was done by one of our community members, because this is a good
• 1:16:48
  reminder of who you work for. You don't work for B, you don't work for our shareholders, you work
• 1:16:57
  for our community. And if you do well by the community, our shareholders are going to be very
• 1:17:03
  hot, because it means that we're, we're succeeding. So I think that this is like having, holding this
• 1:17:09
  story throughout the years of the company is super important. I love that. I absolutely love
• 1:17:15
  that. Where, where should people, if they, I mean, five or five or people can go if they want to
• 1:17:20
  explore, if they want to participate, but where else would you want to send people? Do you want to
• 1:17:25
  send people to your own socials? Is there anything that you want to, you having any events or
• 1:17:30
  anything that people can go like, you know, learn more from you? Where do you want to send listeners?
• 1:17:36
  So, um, so we're having, or our community is having a ton of events.
• 1:17:43
  Because I'm sure that people that are listening to this sell services on Fiverr, I buy services
• 1:17:48
  on Fiverr, I mean, everybody's used it in some capacity. If you're even a little bit entrepreneurial,
• 1:17:54
  you've used it. So, so, um, so if, if you go on our website, you can find out of our events,
• 1:18:02
  a lot of our events are self-organized, which I love. Um, we started by doing events ourselves,
• 1:18:09
  but we realized that we can't be, we can be everywhere all the time. And so the community actually
• 1:18:16
  reached out to us and said, can we throw our own events where, you know, just like minded people
• 1:18:21
  gather and just talk about their, you know, their success and hard times. And we said, of course,
• 1:18:28
  we'll, we'll just give you the, you know, we'll give you the infrastructure to set up a venue or,
• 1:18:32
  and if you need help, we're there. Like, you don't have to have us in that discussion, but you could,
• 1:18:38
  so, so we have our professional forums. Like, I encourage people to get in touch. We have
• 1:18:44
  programs for new sellers that want to join the platform and succeed. We've created very,
• 1:18:51
  very advanced programs for those who want to get more involved in their success. Um, and obviously,
• 1:18:58
  that there's, we have our social media and we try to share a lot of these success stories. This is
• 1:19:04
  like, this is where we're, we're obsessed about this, like, people that have managed to either
• 1:19:10
  use Fiverr to grow their business and create incredible stories, or people that that have started,
• 1:19:17
  you know, selling on Fiverr and, and created multi-million dollar businesses. And sometimes,
• 1:19:23
  you know, started as individuals and became agencies. These are incredible stories. You can find
• 1:19:29
  them if you go on our social, if you go on our, on our site. Um, I would encourage people to,
• 1:19:36
  to try it and get, get involved in, in the conversation. I think it's really empowering.
• 1:19:42
  Um, you know, I, I draw a lot of, um, optimism from, from hearing people's stories of,
• 1:19:49
  of success, you know, it gives you, it's, it's, it's a reason to, to get out of bed every morning.
• 1:19:56
  I love that. Which is incredible. And, and obviously, anyone can, you know,
• 1:20:01
  you're happy to follow me on, on, on Twitter or, or anywhere else. Um, and I really appreciate
• 1:20:09
  the, the toll. No, I appreciate you. I mean, like, listen, like, this podcast has been built on Fiverr.
• 1:20:15
  So, like, uh, we have used it, I've used it for, not just this podcast for, for past businesses.
• 1:20:21
  So it's a very, I mean, what you built is amazing. So I, I, I thank you just personally. Thank you.
• 1:20:27
  Um, uh, last thing I always like to ask, because you had such an incredible life and career,
• 1:20:34
  and you've gone through so many different seasons. Um, when you look back, what would be one
• 1:20:39
  thing that you would tell your 20 year old self? If this was, you know, my, my 20 year old self,
• 1:20:46
  um, I would probably push myself to, to go into entrepreneurship, even, even Oscar. Um, but also
• 1:20:56
  take deeper breath as I was doing this. You know, when I, uh, when I decided to move on from my,
• 1:21:03
  I think it was my second company. Um, onward, I, I spent, I spent like a couple of weeks just
• 1:21:12
  writing, you know, just sitting down and writing all of my learnings into a notebook and all
• 1:21:17
  of the mistakes that I've done and promising myself, I'm not going to do it again.
• 1:21:22
  And, and at the end, I closed this notebook and I never opened it again because it's already
• 1:21:28
  stored as you do with this exercise. Um, I, what I would say, but this is like, it's easier said
• 1:21:35
  than done. I mean, you can, you can talk to a 20 year old, but it's like, it's like expecting people
• 1:21:40
  to learn from your mistakes. They rarely do it, right? People are wired in a way where they need to
• 1:21:48
  do the mistakes themselves to do it. So I, there's a million things I could, I could have done,
• 1:21:54
  could have said, but I'm not sure if my, my 20 year old self would, would actually listen or if
• 1:22:01
  this would, this is actually change anything to be honest. Um, but it was, it was maybe, you know,
• 1:22:10
  this idea of being able to recover faster from setbacks, mistakes, problems, even, even
• 1:22:18
  devastating, like closing company is recovering and, and, you know, getting back into the game.
• 1:22:25
  He's something that I've learned over the years to just, as I've said, shorten the cycles.
• 1:22:30
  Um, but I'll be honest, I'm not sure if my 20 year old would, would listen to it.
• 1:22:36
  I think that's the best advice ever. Like, sometimes you just have to go through it yourself
• 1:22:41
  and learn it yourself and you can give it a 20 year old as many pieces of advice as you want.
• 1:22:47
  Doesn't mean they're going to listen unless they live that exact life that you went through.
• 1:22:51
  Um, Micha, thank you so much. I really appreciate, I appreciate what you've built because I think
• 1:22:55
  what you've built has truly made entrepreneurship easier than it's made it easier to turn your passion
• 1:23:03
  into a freelance side hustle, which can then turn into all business. It's made it easier for entrepreneurs
• 1:23:09
  to start because now I don't have to worry about how, okay, I can't afford a $100,000 per year
• 1:23:16
  developer or even a $60,000 per year graphic designer, uh, right out of the gate when I'm building
• 1:23:21
  my company. So you've just lowered the bar and made creating things and building things easier for
• 1:23:26
  everyone. So that is phenomenal. Thank you. I appreciate you. Appreciate that a lot.