YouSaid · the spoken record

Micha Kauffman

lines on the record: 63
first: 2025-06-09
most recent: 2025-06-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It means that you're not going to be judgmental to a point where you break them because your motivation is to help them. And I think this also, it's also penetrating my management style. If you think about this in radical candor, these types of things, it's encompassing. And my contribution, I'm probably an artist. That's what I do. I think I just express my art in the things I built. And sometimes you build a business, you build a company, you build a product, you build a community, you build a movement. So a builder, an artist.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My future generation is probably, I think I'm a part of a legacy. There's a lot of things that have passed to me from my parents and grandparents that are at the very core of what defines me and how what defines me as a human being, but what defines me as a husband, what defines me as a dad. And a lot of it has to do, and we've touched on some of these things, is about being a good citizen of this world. This idea that it's always better to be a giver than a taker, but in general, you can't just take, I hate takers. So maybe they'll remember me as a giver. The world doesn't owe you anything. So that's one of the values that I'm still my kids. And the other is home is a safe place. It doesn't matter what happened in your life. I don't know. You killed someone by mistake. Come home, we'll solve it together. Which doesn't mean that you're not going to be judgmental.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's about meaning when you look for meaning, when you pursue meaning, you are going to have a mixture of misery and happiness by definition. But I think that this is that. And as long as you're in your element, as long as you feel that you have deep meaning to what you do, then by definition your core is going to be very happy. Your life might have swings because we don't control everything in our lives and the surrounding our family, health, all of that. But I think that, generally speaking, I think meaning defines this for me more than the word happiness.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But maybe yes. But at the same time, if your contribution to the success of the company is not maximized, I don't know if like I know I have a rule. If I wake up five days in a row saying no, then I'm done. Now I'm done. And it never happened. You can have a day. Maybe you can have two. Like if you have them in a row, that's a bad sign. And sometimes, I mean, if you're not, sometimes you fall out of love. Sometimes you lose your energy. Sometimes life calls you to attend to other things. And if that's the case, yes, it's maybe you consider this to be your baby, but dude, it's time to move on. And find someone who's going to do justice with your baby and your creation. It is a hard exercise, but I think it's worth doing at least once a year.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know right now. Yes. I have this exercise that I do every year where I take a day or two or three aside. I'm doing an accounting of how I feel about the next year. And I'm asking myself, am I the right person to continue leading this company? And it has a process that I'm going through this process. It's measuring my energy, my contribution, my interest, my curiosity, the result.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the size of only fans, you understand why this could be a strategic opportunity from a point of our values as founders, we decided that this was not a direction that we wanted to venture into. The reason why I'm saying that we could have done it is because this was actually bubbling within the first versions of Fiverr organically. We didn't have a category for that, obviously. But we started noticing that this was happening behind the scenes. There were code words that people spread on social and said, oh, go to Fiverr, do a search for X and what it actually means is what you think it means. And so we started seeing that in the system and we decided this was not a direction that we're going to go down.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dude heavy questions One of the strategic opportunities was to create OnlyFans many, many years before OnlyFans we decided not to do it.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would rather give them an advice before they go to the university, and that would be don't go. Because I think it's a waste of time in most cases. If you're up for finding chicks and getting drunk, that's fine. If you need someone to tell you to wake up and get to a class and someone to scare you with an exam because if not, you're not going to learn, then this is a good institute institute to do it. In 90 plus cases of modern professions, you can study on your own and you can do it in a fraction of the time. And by the way, if you don't like reading, great, we have video for that. Oh, you don't like video, there's voice for that. And if there isn't, then ask AI to produce something for you. Whatever. It's like, in my view, it's just a waste of time.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way modern AI burst into our lives was driven by a non-for-profit organization, which made me think that this could be a global endeavor that I think would probably give more power to more people and not more power to less people. And obviously with the reality, I've obviously changed my mind seeing how open AI change their strategy.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I could cost marketing, I would always do it because the only way you can actually do it is because you can grow without it. If your organic component in growth is crazy strong, then you have a good case of going even deeper into your marketing and saying, do I need the incremental additional customer that I'm actually paying money for or not? But this is not because of pressure. This is just because we're not in that situation.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough so that if you say, Oh, I need to cut costs, there's like 50 people that you know are going to be the first. If you know this, you should say goodbye. But the message was let's figure out how do we maximize our capacity before we actually think about bringing more people? And if we think about bringing more people, these people need to be AI natives in whatever they do. I don't care if you're whatever. If you're joining the legal department or the finance or customer support, you need to be very well versed in this new world because again, I'm not going to teach you.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think most of them are just making the healthy assumption that we're closer to it than further from it. Because if it's further away, then great. Let's chill. But if you assume that this is closer, then you at least think about the necessary or you think about the implications, which I think is the healthier thing to do. I haven't seen companies go through massive layoffs. I think companies that had fought in them started doing that, which is what I wrote in my email as well. I said, look, before we figure out that we need more people, let's just make sure that we're extracting the most out of ourselves, out of our existing team. This was true five years ago, which is why, you know, if you run a lean company, not too lean, so you can actually be very, you can be aggressive.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been talking to other public companies, friends from other companies, and we were saying, you know, we need to, we should build our own investor relations, AI, so that we don't need to do these calls every time. We don't need to answer the questions. We don't need to write the letter to shareholders, all of that. It's anyway, most of it is read by machines for algo trading or whatever it is. And they analyze the tone, whatever. So let's feed them with their own.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that in marketing, the entry-level juniors have been replaced the fastest. Definitely faster than developers. Because still, if you use AI, you still at some point need to open the code and understand what the heck is written there. And if you cannot do this, then you don't have a job. But even relatively young developers can do this. It's not the same with marketeers. I think that this is the area where the most amount of disruption.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Odds, everything could be automated. And I think that what we've seen over the past year or so is that there's like an awakening out of this illusion that this could be fully automated.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI at the level that we have in programming in marketing. So we need to figure out how to use AI without actually screwing up or giving it too much freedom because essentially right now we're still marketing to human beings. And so whatever is being produced will be consumed by a human eye or ears. And therefore, there is a much deeper sense of understanding human behavior when you do marketing. And I think that this is where, you know, marketeers get tempted to use synthetic technologies to automate their work, but it's not ripe yet. They're not necessarily automating the right functions. This is a less charted territory in AI at this point. It feels like there's no need to write copy. There's no need to manage social. There's no need to write, you know, to create.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The area that is going through the most fundamental destruction is actually marketing. If you think about coding and you think about how developers are actually using AI, it's really interesting. But when you look at the fundamental function of all the types of co-piloting, what a lot of them are doing is actually what developers hated doing, which is copy pasting from open source, looking for a library, then reading the repo notes, and then figuring out if you want to use it as is or you want to go through it and look for security alls or you want to fork it and build something off of it. It's like doing research on Google following blue links, copy pasting stuff. from different websites and putting a document who likes to do this it's robotic i think in marketing it's a whole different thing there is no”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if building something took 10 engineers three months and you failed, that's unpleasant. If it took one person three days and it failed, great. So we reduced the cost of failure so that we can test more things, we can have more progress. The way I was thinking about this is really how do we double or triple the output per unit of time in the same for quality per unit of delivery, but we by doing so, we just reduce the cost of error. Now, if you do this and everybody else is doing this, you're in the starting line. And so you need to have those differentiators. And look, the profession of being a developer is going to change dramatically, but you'll always need brilliant people. Will you need many, many more of them? I don't know, but you asked me, is your team going to be, is your engineering team going to be? Larger? Yes.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then start building like crazy plus you're probably building stupid things. Stop doing that as well. Going back to this conversation I had with the team, this meeting with 200 people to 250 people in a cramp room, one of the things that I told them is as I'm thinking about velocity, I'm thinking of how do we read interpretation of it or the result of it is just reducing the cost of failure because essentially all companies, the majority of what they do fail. The reason why you don't know this or maybe some people are not aware is because they don't talk about their failures because there's nothing to talk. It failed. If you take a company the size of Amazon, I'm guessing they have 5,000 tests running concurrently because they have enough traffic to entertain that. The vast majority, maybe at some point of time, all 5,000 failed. Who cares?”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that you can generate tomorrow doesn't actually mean that you can just generate more, which is why when I talk with my team about the concept of moving fast, I never use the term speed. I always use the term velocity. Speed is just the speed of movement. Velocity is speed plus direction. So speed is not enough. You need energy in a certain direction. you're unable to push the code that you generate it means that you didn't solve your infrastructure to be able to do this so it means that your priority is incorrect because you don't solve the things that the bottlenecks that are actually keeping you from moving fast so take the same energy and instead of building infinite amount of things try to figure out how can i entertain”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably more Technology levels the playing field because everybody has it. It's square one all over. Great. Now you can squeeze 3x out of each person. So does the next company. Great. How do you do more? How do you move faster? You know, in a market of a lot of uncertainty, one of the biggest strength of a company is speed. It's just your ability to just move super, super fast.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If your capital structure is very solid, if you generate free cash flow, you're your own engine, if you have very solid execution, which means that you have high trust and confidence from the market, and you decide to make bold moves, you can raise more money. And that shouldn't be that hard.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, why not? I do. There's many reasons why I would advocate to being a public company, but there is time for that if you're under the illusion that you can actually control the market or influence your share. Don't do it. It's a bad idea. For those who are long thinkers and understand that this is a long game, it's a great choice”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it really different than the AWS Azure and like how many cloud providers are? Probably plenty, how many take 80% of the market two and a half, whatever. That level of concentration exists for many, many, many years. How is this different?”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, some functions of AI might be prohibited and kept only for governmental branches. I don't know. I don't know. I'm thinking about these questions. I don't have answers because this is like, these are equations with too many variables”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. And again, we're pre-expensive AI, we're pre AGI, we're pre-superintelligence. We're probably not that far, but we're not there yet. So I think that right now, companies are allowed to play. At some point, it's going to cross a line where governments are going to say, I'm not comfortable with that level of power. Not in my hands.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“will license the atomic bomb to do you see a government allowing this seriously think about that for a second if you get to ai that cures the worst disease in the world which actually is worth a lot of money do you see government leaving this in private hens if this could create the ultimate weapon this could be the whatever the ultimate solution for infinite food and energy dude no way so we're pre all of this so to try and extrapolate five years from now seriously”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's a fair question, and I think it's a fair question that we should ask ourselves constantly, but also understanding right now, and I told you we're in this, what I refer to as like this intermediate phase of technology. Things are not sorted out. The signal-to-noise is impossible. Then there is the question of will it get regulated? How would that change stuff? Well, countries, governments actually take hold of it. If you think about this, what AI companies is doing right now, like the foundational companies, it's like privatizing the Manhattan project. Imagine that they do build the atomic bomb. And now they're sitting and saying, you know, I don't know, maybe we'll do it non-profit, or maybe there's a...”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad was a very senior executive at the semiconductor business. The beauty about that business for many, many years was that it had Moore's law. Unless it breaks, you can extrapolate and say, I know exactly what's going to happen in 10 years to the power of computing and the size of chips. Period. We can reminisce about those times and miss them. So right now the cadence is super fast. People that ask me, oh, what do you think the business is going to look like in five years? I start laughing. It's a laughable question. You can have grand general ideas, but people that ask you to describe it are just out of touch with what we're seeing.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I was asked in another conversation, how is it like to be a CEO right now? And I said, you know, it's like you asking a captain of a ship in the middle of a storm, how is it to be a captain? And the answer is it's wet. It's dark.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some ways they force you to invent your oct 2 and oct three of a company. Most companies don't manage to go even the successful ones do not manage to go through the phase one of the company. Even if they're a big company already.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I wouldn't use the word pressure. I have a responsibility. It's not the same thing. One is external and the other is internal. The garbage of one's great companies that are now no longer with us is overflowing. And a lot of the reasons why these companies are not around is because they couldn't sustain transformational waves. compare this to surfing. You have to start rowing to get a wave and then you can ride that wave. It used to be for seven, eight years. And then you need to prepare yourself to catch the next wave so that you can ride it. Today those waves are much shorter in distance between the attack waves, but it is the responsibility of a leader of a company to ensure that you're able to actually be opportunistic about each one of these transformational waves.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have news for you. You are working for AI, and so do I because we're producing content, and that content is going to be eaten by a machine and used to produce new stuff. It sounds good? I don't know, maybe. Fine. But I think that we lose our place in the center when we start working for something else.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fair use. I'm fine, whatever. Like, I'm not a regulator. My fear is that if people produce stuff, they publish it, it gets eaten and churned out without any recognition, without any connection to what they've done, their motivation to create and share is going to start slowing down and then decreasing because you lose the benefits of actually creating and getting the recognition and maybe commercializing this. To me, it's troubling. I don't know if this would be the case, but I'm raising a flag. I'm not raising the flag as the CEO of Fiber. I don't whatever. My place on this planet is finite. It's like, but I have kids. There's future. Everything that happened in the past 500 years made our quality of life much higher. I don't want this to slow down and I don't, we should be the center. Right now, Harry.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their name. To commercialize this, if they want. So one is a moral, right? Another is a commercial right. And this is how we advance because people wanted to both create stuff but share it because they got the recognition and because it created connection because you knew who wrote this piece so you can get in touch with them. And maybe it nurtures new ideas and maybe there's forks and maybe it inspires other people to do stuff. This was on steroids over a course of 500 years with, you know, modern media, with the internet, and with AI. So now the distribution of information is incredible. But what happened with AI is it jumped over the hoop of attributing anything to anyone. It is based on, which is why I say that essentially copyright is dead. And everybody causes it.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, look, if you look at the arc of advancement of humanity, Homo sapiens have been around for what, like 300,000 years. It was pretty linear for a long while. What changed the pace of advancement of humanity was the printed press because it allowed for the distribution of knowledge, which made more people knowledgeable, which inspired them to create stuff and then through press distributed so that more people can enjoy it. Very close, maybe 100 years, maybe less after the Gutenberg, there was the 1710 Act in the UK that was the act for the advancement of learning or something, which was the basis of copyright, which said to motivate people to create and share, we want to give them protection. One is their right for their creation to bear.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but that wasn't the question. The question is what is the value for those who created the actual content on which AI is being trained? If when AI generates something because it learned from me, I don't get any credit for it. I don't get compensated for it. You know that copyright is dead. It is dead. It's a notion from 1710, dead overnight. There is no copyright. It's done. It's dead.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My actual concern is that if this will go on over time, then what's going to be our motivation to continue creating and sharing stuff if it has zero value? Human beings, we need feedback. So we want to see how the things that we create impact others. This is why we share. This is why you have open source code, right? Because people can use what you've done, but they can build off of it. If it has no value, why would we create? And if we stop.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that questions like are we okay with the fact that truth is dead? We can't even tell what's real and what's not. Are we okay by not being My view is, I'll give you my view. My view is that humans, you and I, are the center of the universe. Everything evolves around us, acting from an assumption that we are in the center. Are we okay with losing that center? What's happening right now is going there. It is going there. Because if we continue to develop technology in a way that eventually is going to be unsupervised because it develops itself, and we feed it because it's based on us, but it doesn't care about us because AI now is eating the world. It is learning from everything, everyone ever created, it's mixing it, churning new results without even saying, you know, I've just generated a nice podcast based on what I've learned from Harry. No, fuck Harry, right? It's just generating stuff.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look fine, they shouldn't use it, which is going to be another reason why banks are going to be left behind, whatever. But look, it needs to be sorted out. So if compliance is the issue, compliance is going to sort itself out. Some of it is going to be like hosted on location, some of it, whatever. There's solutions for that. Do banks use any cloud services? I guess they do. Is cloud safe? Here and there. Do you have companies on the cloud with compliance? Yes, you do. So you can use them. Nothing is 100% safe. I don't think that these are the interesting problems, to be honest.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so those are already large or at least have the backing to actually invest in it are going to have it. And those who don't. And that's fine. Before these two transformations, regulation and expensive, expensive tech. And this is going to be another force in arranging and sorting out the market.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm out. I'll let it sort out and then I'll figure out. So that's going to dry up. If you're an AI company right now, you have two fundamental problems. One is getting noticed, getting customers, and then it's retaining them. In both, the overwhelming majority fail, rightfully so. There's no space for so many companies and there is so much space for people to actually pay for something or in the infancy of that market. There's, I think, two main things that are missing. One is regulation and the other is expensive tech. And what I mean by the second is the type of technology that is not free or 20 bucks or 200 bucks, technology that is freaking expensive so that very few can actually allow themselves to have it. So that's going to create differentiators between players.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be very, very large players that are going to be foundational players. Some, I think we know who they are or have a good chance of being these companies. I mean, the Googles of the world of, you know, the anthropics, the open AIs, which I don't know what the play is going to be exactly, but it might be reduced to the equivalent of paying for CPU cycles. It's just going to be GPU cycles. It doesn't matter, but it's a cloud play. And then there's going to be the other applicational layers on top of it. But again, I don't think that we can judge from where we are right now because it's just changing too fast for the market to organize itself. I think it's going to go through a cleanup process. And that cleanup is going to be triggered by investors because at some point they'll say, you know, fuck it.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of the amount of companies that are going to be around, absolutely. Like 999 companies out of a thousand maybe is going to be around for a year, maybe two. It's going to be ruthless. And I've already explained why I think there's just too many companies that are not introducing interesting advancements. It's just opportunistic. By the way, there's nothing wrong with being opportunistic, but the market can sustain it. I think that the market is going to start sorting itself out. So you're going to see, much like we've seen before, you're going to see, I mean, I was speaking about the dot-com, the dot-com also gave birth to Amazon, right? So it's like there are companies that have true value in the patients who actually build that and staying true to your core reason to exist. It's going to be the same here. The market is going to arrange itself.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, the fuck seriously? And I think that this is probably the best investment I've ever ever made. The multiples were in the 50. Crazy, crazy story. It's all about the people dude.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's a public company. And I don't know if telling the story would do well. This was seed stage tough market tough not to crock. The company had internal things between the founders, all the tough stuff. And I said, there's so many reasons why this company needs to die, but it didn't. I mean, people, one of the investors of Etsy talked about them in the same way. He said, you know why I invested in Etsy? I said, no, why? He said, because this company should have died at least seven times and it didn't. And this to me speaks for the strength of the company. And the strength of the team behind it. And so this was the same story with this company. I mean, at some point, I also lost a little bit of connection with a company, which is fine. And then I realized that they were going public.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The standard, but it is just picking up everyone to the starting line. And so as you think about how to apply this to a VC thinking, it goes back to the oldest way of making judgments, which is look at the people that are running the company because you make decisions based on people. Technology will evolve. Ideas will change. Companies will pivot. But who are the people that are running the show? Are they 100% opportunistic or are they missionaries? They're not going to rest until they get it. Are they adoptable? Do they have these things? And investing people, I mean, at the end, I mean, I've invested in tens of companies. It's the best people that get it. I wrote off companies of saying, okay, this is money lost for sure. And these were the most successful companies I've ever seen. Invested in, they had the best people, period”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes down to a more fundamental view of what's happening with technology right now. Technology by itself doesn't give advantage to anyone when it's 100% democratized. And here's the tricky part. The go-to market of open AI in, what was it, November 2022 was as democratized as possible because they gave it for free. You can't be freer than free. And so what happened with that is everybody felt smarter. Oh, I can write incredible stuff. I can, you know, do research much faster. Yes, but so does everybody else. It's super powerful, but then it doesn't give you advantage because it's giving the same advantage to everyone, which makes everyone get back to ground zero. It is elevating.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely true. And I think that this is where again, as I was saying, that AI forces us to discover our humanity, these are the things that are going to generate the most interesting startups. That level of thinking, that level of building, I'm not just building for the sake of building. I'm taking the time to understand the real needs, their real challenges, and trying to build off of that instead of saying, oh, people like this, so let's make x.1 or the next version of something.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Community around it. If the time to clone is 10 seconds, you don't have that time to develop it. You leave more to luck. Look, luck has a tremendous portion in success. I'll be the first to admit. But the portion of luck varies. And if you don't have the head start, then you need to be super, super lucky, all the stars need to align for you. And I think it just makes things very hard. And what I see a lot of entrepreneurs doing these days is they're just building off of stuff. And they're trying to introduce a marginal advancement on what was already built because their imagination is not large enough.”
2025-06-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source