Fiverr’s CEO on why AI is coming for everyone

Generative AI is reshaping the way people work, from full-time employees to freelancers. As coding copilots, design assistants, and AI-powered writing tools become more capable and accessible, creative and technical roles are starting to shift – if not become eliminated entirely. The pressure to adapt is growing across the board. Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, isn’t sugarcoating it. In a recent open letter to staff, he warned that AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, and the only way to stay relevant is to embrace AI tools and automation. Get better, get faster, or get left behind. Kaufman joined Rebecca Bellan on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to help unpack what all of this means for the future of work – be it freelance or employed – and what you can do to survive. Listen to the full episode to hear about: How Fiverr plans to stay relevant as a human-powered marketplace in an AI-driven world Why Kaufman believes AI will raise the bar for everyone, but top talent can still stand out and earn more What new grads and early-career professionals are up against in today’s tough job market Equity will be back Friday with our weekly news roundup, so stay tuned. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Beland, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Generative AI is reshaping the way people work, from full-time employees to freelancers. As coding co-pilots, design assistants, and AI-powered writing tools become more capable and accessible, creative and technical roles alike are starting to shift, if not become eliminated entirely. The pressure to adapt is strong. Mihal Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, isn't sugarcoating it. In a recent open letter to staff, he warned that AI is coming for everyone's jobs, and the only way to stay relevant is to embrace AI tools and automation. In short, get better, get faster, or get left behind. Today, he's joining us to help unpack what all of this means for the future of work,

• 1:02Rebecca Bellan?

  be it freelance or employed, and what you can do to survive. Mihal, welcome to the show.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Rebecca.

• 1:08Rebecca Bellan?

  So you made headlines a few weeks ago when you sent out a memo. It was in early April, and then you tweeted it yourself, didn't want any staff leaking it to the press. And you talked about the unpleasant truth of AI coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job, too, you wrote. This is a wake-up call. What prompted you to send that out?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  I think that this was boiling in for a while, having heard how my team actually speaks about this, whether you're a marketer or a programmer. I think most people are actually asking themselves if they have a future in their profession. I think it's a fair question. And if anything, this was a validation for them. But this was a wake-up call because I think my feeling was that people weren't adopting fast enough. And it's like the deer caught in the headlights of the car that is coming to hit them. Instead of taking action, they're just, you know, looking puzzled at what's going on instead of translating this into action. And I think that this is, I've said this

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Email. At the end of the email, I said, I'm gonna spend some time with anyone who wants to speak about this. And actually, a few weeks after I sent the email, I put in like office hours where I was just, I took a room that can entertain fifty people and I said, I'm gonna work from there with my laptop for three hours. If anyone wants to come and sit beside me and talk about this, then I'll happy to have this conversation. I went to that room and two hundred and fifty people waited for me. So.

• 2:42Rebecca Bellan?

  You're like, okay, I think this needs to be an all hands.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, it was far from all ends, but it was much larger than I anticipated. And one of the things I told them there, which I think connects to the reason why I felt that they needed a wake up call, is I think that in the past ten years, and I've been building companies for about twenty five years. In the past ten years, maybe slightly more, I think that it was this aberration in the high tech scene where people that came to high tech, regardless of what they were doing, got used to the fact that companies were responsible for making them better. This investment in learning and development and figuring out your career path and enriching your knowledge.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  And I said, guys, I'm sorry, but this is done. It was an aberration. It shouldn't have been the case ever. Like, who's responsible for making you a better person or a better spouse? It's probably you, right? Why is it my job to make you better as professionals? It is your job to upgrade yourself to become more competitive.

• 3:53Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, the company wins if you if you upscale, if you do any of these things, it means you can help the company more, right?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Yes, but if you don't have internal motivation to continue upgrading yourself.

• 4:04Rebecca Bellan?

  So do you think people who use company resources to go back to school and upscale don't have internal motivation?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Well, those who do don't have a problem. Those who are actually active and involved in making themselves better shouldn't be worried. But they're ahead of the curve, or at least with the curve. My concern is those who are not waking up to understand that the world doesn't owe you anything. And if you don't get involved in orient yourself better in this new world, you're going to be left behind. And this is why I was very blunt in my email. And my point wasn't, it's not your job at Fiverr is at risk. It is your ability to have any value to any high-tech company if you don't orient yourself around this new technology.

• 4:47Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  That was the point.

• 4:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. So what kinds of tools internally are you expecting your staff to use? Or what kind of tools are you using that are making things more efficient internally?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Anything and everything. And again, what I told my team is that ideally I would like them to find ways of replacing 100% of what they do with automation.

• 5:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  100%. I know it's not achievable.

• 5:12Rebecca Bellan?

  How is that not like digging their own graves? You know, it's just like, okay, well, I've automated my job for you. Now you can fire me.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Well, that was exactly the question that I've asked myself as I was telling them this out loud. And I said, if you can replace 100% of what you do with automation, your place at this company will always be safe. Because now you have 100%.

• 5:34Rebecca Bellan?

  It's quite a promise to make.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's quite an achievement to automate 100% of what you do.

• 5:39Rebecca Bellan?

  Sure.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  But the point is, if you now have 100% of your time free, let's figure out what to do with it. Let's figure out how to use your special skills, your special nonlinear thinking, your ideation, to do more strategic things that cannot be replaced by automation. That's a dream. Because a lot of us, and this was where I was saying that this is true for me as well. If I continue to do stuff manually that I can automate, I'm not using my time properly, which means that I should probably upgrade my game as well.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  And the point is that a lot of what we're doing are robotic stuff, are technical stuff. If you do all day long copy pasting from open source, or if you continue doing research by doing simple search on Google and then following blue links and then copy pasting from that and then creating documents and then generating presentation, this is where a lot of people's time is going to.

• 6:43Rebecca Bellan?

  Definitely.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  This is a waste of your brain energy, of your capacity. And that is why those who can automate a lot of what they do free up their time to do more creative, human-specific things and not things that can be automated.

• 6:59Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, I mean, yes, that is the dream, but it's a dream for few. And a lot of that, I feel like, relies on life experience, time in the workforce. What about the people who are just graduating now and coming up and hoping to get jobs in tech or other white-collar work? And they won't develop those skills necessary to be those few people who can add humanities touch.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  I agree, and I think that this is an issue. I think that if you're mediocre, or if you're average, or if you're inexperienced, you are in a tougher position. However, at the same time, those who are starting right now are, by definition, more AI-native, meaning that they're more accustomed to using these tools. And I think that a lot of these people, they're doing two things. One, they're scouters, meaning that they have the ability to know the latest and greatest in everything, and they test stuff, they play with things. And people with a good eye and good energy to actually test things are extremely valuable for an organization.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  And they also develop this hacker mentality, where because they know the latest and greatest, they test stuff, they figure out how to connect different things, they figure out how to use tools in maybe ways that they weren't intended or designed for. They can break the boundaries. So even if you're not extremely experienced, if you do spend time learning these tools, you have superpowers that experience people. Don't have, and this is your value in an organization. And this is why, like, I don't care about your official diploma or your experience in the job. If you are a hacker, then your value for the organization is enormous.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And this is where I think younger people with less official experience can bring tremendous value.

• 8:51Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, okay. I mean, I think that you're not wrong there, but organizations aren't exactly hiring in the way that they were. A lot of them are doing layoffs, mass layoffs. They've been doing them for the last few years. They expect to do more. We've got tech CEOs like yourself, all the way to Anthropic CEO, saying that AI will probably replace 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in one to five years, pushing unemployment to 20%. You've given your employees the directive, you know, get to automation, figure it out. Do you plan to do layoffs this year, next year?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 9:23Rebecca Bellan?

  No.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  In my case, we're not planning. I mean, we've been running a pretty lean team always. And the one thing that I did say is that my expectation, as I'm thinking about the level of productivity that we're doing, is that we should double or triple our output per unit of time, and the same for quality per unit of delivery. And until we do this, I don't see a reason why we should grow the team substantially. Meaning that first, let's figure out that we're in our best game before we actually continue growing. And if we do grow, our focus is going to be on these AI natives that can actually help the organization become better.

• 10:06Rebecca Bellan?

  But there will be like a section of your team, like a good chunk of your team, that just isn't figuring out how to use AI and isn't staying competitive. And like, surely those people will need to go in this philosophy that you've put forth, or that the world has put forth.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  But Rebecca, this is, what's different than 10 years ago? I mean, if you...

• 10:22Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, it's happening at a much faster scale and it...

• 10:24Speaker 02

  That's the only, but that's the only difference. But the pace of learning is much faster as well. You don't need to apply to an Ivy League university to learn the new tricks. You don't need to buy super expensive material or lectures on how to do it. Just go online. It's just ask, just go on YouTube and everything is there. There is no excuse of why certain people should be left behind if they're motivated to embrace these new technologies.

• 10:56Rebecca Bellan?

  But that's something that you think workers should be kind of doing on their own time. That's not something that like Fiverr would invest in helping to upscale or rescale its workers.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  They should do it all the time.

• 11:07Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  On their own personal time and when they're working. My point is, if you want to be competitive, you should put in the hours. Again, I'm not inventing something new. This has been the case. No one is making me a better C. It's not the job of anyone else. I need to put in the time. If you decline to do so, that is your decision, but the implications of that might be such where you're not going to like it. Obviously, as much as we can liberate the usage of any technology inside the company, if we find something that has been giving great results, we'll make these resources available. But I don't want people to be passive

• 11:52Speaker 02

  waiting for food to be served for them.

• 11:54Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  I want them to be involved in finding things that can serve the entire company, not just their own needs. And I'll encourage this. And I said, I promise that people that are going to be engaging or embracing technology and utilizing it to the maximum are always going to get my support. I'll go way and beyond for them. But if you're passive, if you want to be this looking at the headlights that are going to hit you, it's your decision. I don't think that this is different than 15 years ago, 20 years ago. It was just slower, but that's not an excuse.

• 12:27Rebecca Bellan?

  This may not be as relevant for Fiverr because I don't know that you're, I mean, you haven't said that you're planning to do mass layoffs, but there are certainly companies that are doing big layoffs. They're investing in AI and they're claiming that they need to do it for cost-cutting measures, for cost efficiency, while at the same time, they'll spend, as Fiverr has done, you know, $100 million on a share buyback, which is to enrich shareholders at the top. Does that come at the expense of the workers who've been giving their, you know, lives to the company for years, who rely on it for a living, who might be finding it difficult to find other work after, given the fact that most companies aren't really hiring right now? And if they are, it's only like the most skilled people who have experience.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Look, I can hypothesize with you about other companies. I don't know. I think that for some companies, this might be an excuse to just change cost structure. Since we're not doing layoffs, it's not our case, so I can respond to that.

• 13:23Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, I guess my question is more as a CEO. How do you envision that balance between like what you owe to the shareholder versus what you owe to, you know, your community of employees? Not necessarily you in general, but what CEOs in general, how should companies be looking at this when we're coming up to a world of like, you know, but what everyone's saying is mass unemployment. This is, this is a problem.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Right. Look, obviously, it's a balance. And different companies are in different situations because it's, I mean, the fact that companies are doing share buybacks doesn't mean that they don't have enough free capital to continue investing in new things or to retain existing talent. I think that as a financial organization, you have the obligation to run a very efficient organization. When you think about building a company, there's a lot of people that have been very loyal to the team. Obviously, there is a lot of loyalty over the organization to these people as well, so they're not being thrown in front of the bus. At the same time, these people are shareholders as well, and so they benefit from the success of the company.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  So by the way, if you screw up the company, they will suffer as well. You can consider this to be more indirect, but it's actually where a lot of the compensation in Silicon Valley and in places like Silicon Valley are based on. So I think it's a balance, being very direct with the company, being very open and transparent. People explaining the situation, giving people the opportunity to actually do this transition with the company, I think is the right call, which is why we haven't done layoffs and we're not planning layoffs. But from that point on, it's a shared responsibility.

• 15:12Anthony Ha?

  Every company today is looking for an edge. Better insights, faster decisions, greater resilience. But as AI drives new growth, it also creates new demands on energy and infrastructure. Schneider Electric is connecting energy, automation, and digital technologies to help organizations make smarter decisions and operate more efficiently. Because the future won't be shaped by AI alone, it will be shaped by energy and industrial intelligence. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 15:40Rebecca Bellan?

  Looking at the freelancer side of things, I think you've mentioned before that some of your freelancers are adopting AI tools faster than your own employees. Of course, they are. Is the long-term vision for Fiverr to still be a human labor marketplace? Or do you envision that changing with generative AI?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Two things. One, what's really interesting about freelancers, and this maybe connects to the point I was making earlier, is that because freelancers don't have the infrastructure, the safety net of an organization that deals with their learning and development, they're responsible for doing it on their own, which explains why, in many cases, they're ahead of the curve. There's no one responsible for upgrading them. They need to upgrade their system constantly, which is why we've seen them as being ahead of the curve in being early adopters and knowing how to use these technologies. As to Fiverr, we're very much based on connecting businesses with talent, human talent.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  And as much as we can empower both our customers and the talent side with technologies that would make this experience more seamless, less labor-intensive in things that human beings are not necessarily the best at, we will have technology integrated deeply into everything we do. But the idea is not to replace the human talent. It is actually to liberate it more and to allow it to do more and spend less time on doing the operational stuff and the admin stuff of things and more on what they're really talented in doing. And by the way, I don't think that the fundamental reasons why people work with people versus people with technology

• 17:22Speaker 02

  has changed between 15 years ago when we started Fiverr and today and probably in the next few years. They remain the same reasons.

• 17:30Rebecca Bellan?

  Right, but do your clients know when it's AI-generated content on Fiverr? Do they know the difference between human and AI work? And should they, right? Like, there's so much that the human is just kind of the middleman to the work. Like, for example, I've used Fiverr for I've written a book and I use it for beta readers. How do I know, right, that the beta reader isn't just collecting money from me? And is actually just throwing it into ChatGPT and getting comments through that?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so based on our community guidelines. So first of all, you can't do stuff just with AI. And if you're using AI, you need to declare this. It's fine if professionals are actually using AI in their work as an ideation tool, as a co-creation tool. But if all they do is just use technology and deliver that to the customer, that is prohibited and they need to disclose their usage of AI. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to put maximum transparency in that relationship. And it's fine, I mean, customers use AI and they bring what they've, you know, created with AI to a professional saying, okay, so this is what I've done, but this is not exactly what I'm looking for.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Can you make it better? Sometimes they're better prompt engineers, sometimes they have funky MCPs, sometimes they can do whatever. But it's always they need to bring some of their talent, some of their judgment, some of their manual work, some of their creativity into the process. This is very well rooted in the guidelines that we provide to our talent side.

• 19:01Rebecca Bellan?

  Do you imagine AI is gonna, you know, they're already underpricing each other to compete? Like, will AI force a race to the bottom?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  I don't think so. And the reason is this, the thing about AI, and I think a lot of people are just missing this. When ChatGPT burst in our lives in, what was it, November 2022? Everybody felt smarter. Oh, I can write better. I can find stuff faster. I can create better things. Now with images, with video, it is true, but so does everybody else. Meaning that essentially what AI is doing, it is just elevating the baseline for everyone. But we're Competitive creatures. We're competitive as businesses. We're competitive as human beings. How do we compete? How do we do something that no one else is doing? How do we elevate ourselves above the noise?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  This is where those specialities, those masteries come in. And usually, unless you want to gain that mastery yourself, you're going to have to use someone else. That is not cheap. Anyone can design products, but if you want to work with Johnny I, you know, it's like, if you want to work with a master, the same goes for any other field. So I think the best are always going to make great money. And for them, it's just going to be prices going up. Because the more demand you get, the higher your prices go. And the demand for the average that could be automated replace is just going to disappear. And so I think that if anything, it just elevates everything up.

• 20:38Rebecca Bellan?

  You know, I'm on Fiverr's website right now. I'm looking at some of the main services that you've historically offered. Programming and tech, graphics and design, digital marketing, writing, translation, video and animation, some audio stuff, narration. Again, all of this can be done by AI and AI agents, right? That's something that a lot of companies are putting a lot of time into and see a lot of promise in. People don't need to come to Fiverr now for these things. They can go to one of the top AI firms or any of these specialist AI companies that I'm sure a lot of your freelancers are tapping themselves. But what happens when Fiverr becomes the middleman?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  So essentially, building things has become easier. If you want to generate code, if you want to try and build a website. But the reality is, again, as I've said, one, everybody can do it, which gives no one an advantage. And so finding this competitive edge is something that people are always going to come to experts. Two, if we think about vibe coding as an example, it seems like everything is super easy. But the reality is that the percentage of people that can actually create something from start to end is very, very small. Because at some point, you run into technical stuff.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Could be APIs, hosting, that could be, I think yesterday I've seen this tweet telling the story of this app that was built with one of the vibe coding platforms that was hacked three times because poor code, tremendous amount of bugs and security issues. So yes, the simple stuff have become really simple where probably you don't need an expert on fiber to do. But if you want to do the last mile, if you want to make it secure, if you want to make sure that it really runs without bugs. And then if you build it, how do you get audience if you need to market this, if you need to get exposure? You're always going to have these challenges that you're going to have to have expert help you with.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  I think that this is changing the nature of the services that we offer as a platform, but it doesn't change the very primary function of what we do.

• 22:43Rebecca Bellan?

  Lastly, before we wrap, I want to give people some hope, your letter to your staff. You had some areas that I think were really, some really good points about what people can do. I think we're all thinking, what can I do? How can I be better? How can I embrace these tools so that my job is safe? I mean, it's scary to think that way, but here we are.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  I think that the beauty about this area is that you can study it. There's plenty of information out there. And if you don't like reading, then watch video or listen to podcasts. It's there, it's moving really fast, but the latest and greatest is mostly covered. You cover a lot of it, so listen to this podcast. I think that experimenting is really important, building things, trying tools, not just reading the background story of it. Figuring out what are the things that I do where I spend my time playing the rowboat, right? Doing the technical stuff that could be automated, but it forces us to also, in a funny way, rediscover our humanity.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  When we automate a lot of what we do, we ask ourselves, oh, great. What do we have? What are our assets that we have as human beings that cannot be automated? Because these are the things that makes us special. Rediscover those and figure out how from that vantage point, from these superpowers that everybody has, you can be more involved in what you do on the organizational level. I think that these types of thinking allows us as individuals to become better and improve our team. But I'm sorry, but there is no substitute to actually learning it on your own and playing with it. But there's plenty of tools and there are people within the organization that are a

• 24:29Speaker 02

  little bit ahead of the curve of other people. Spend time with these people.

• 24:33Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Figure out how to learn from them, figure out how to build stuff with them. I think that these are the top recommendations that I can give. And by the way, I'm super optimistic because I do think that on our industry, at least in my view at Fiverr, there are no people that it is beyond their capability to actually learn and become great. We picked people because they're incredible, because they're talented, because they have a lot to give their incredible assets. There is no excuse of why you can embrace it. It's not beyond your IQ. So it's mostly about being motivated and just jumping on the train.

• 25:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Great. Well, I appreciate that, Mija, some words of optimism. Thanks so much for joining us. Where can our listeners learn more about you, find you online?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  On X, that's Micha Kaufman, same on LinkedIn.

• 25:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Awesome. Well, thanks again, our listeners. You can find me on X and Blue Sky and Equity as well on those platforms at EquityPod. Talk to you next time.

• 25:37Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.