Lessons - Fiverr Almost Died Three Times. This Is How He Saved It. | Micha Kaufman - Fiverr Co-Founder & CEO

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In this lessons episode, discover why companies must reinvent themselves before disruption forces change.

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Understand how challenging strategy and embracing innovation can prevent complacency.

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Explore why failure should become a system for learning and uncover how quickly recovering from mistakes builds stronger entrepreneurs and teams.

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So the question is really...

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As somebody who's, I would have thought Fiverr is a first mover, but I'm not in this space and I don't know the history, obviously, as well as you.

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But the question really is, how do you build a company that is, that is undisruptible?

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And you're going to say it's impossible to make it undisruptible, but you as a founder, CEO, you built a massive company.

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How do you not become an eBay?

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Yeah.

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I know you're not going to become a Blockbuster because, again, Blockbuster was like an analog to a digital solution.

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But then eBay was disrupted by Amazon because they took a different perspective.

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So as a founder, what do you do to future-proof?

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Yeah, it's a great question.

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And there's no easy answer to it.

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This idea of reinventing yourself, some of the things that we're doing as we're thinking about this, when you start a company, you do the, I mean, everybody, probably your listeners have read Crossing the Chasm, this idea of going through a J-curve.

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where in the bottom end of the J's, what's being fueled by VCs or investors, private investors, and then at some point, hopefully you grow.

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In companies,

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What happens is, as years go by, you need to, if you don't disrupt your own model, someone else will.

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And so you need to keep this, you know, very fresh approach where you challenge everything you do.

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And you keep questioning your strategy.

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And you keep thinking about the next ways of innovation because nothing, nothing is static.

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Everything moves.

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There's ways of transformation.

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Some of them are cultural.

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Some of them have to do with generations.

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And in our case, it's,

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2010 millennials got into the workforce, then Gen Zers.

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It's changing the fabric of the workforce.

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Technology have changed.

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The App Store has become super popular, and that created this massive opportunity.

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Cloud computing.

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Then now, recently, you have AI.

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So there's multiple things that change constantly.

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You need to continue challenging yourself.

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And one of the things that are really hard as an existing company is that you need to do additional J-curves, but now you are the VC.

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And every bone in your body, every aspect, every person around you tells you don't do it.

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Because it's going to come at the expense of your profitability, at the expense of your growth, at the expense of being able to laser focus on just one thing.

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But you need to do it.

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You need to reinvent yourself.

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You need to do the next wave of transformation.

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Because if you fail to do it,

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you end up like many companies that we know, like Blackberry and Kodak and whatever.

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I mean, unfortunately, the corporate, you know, you know, trash bin is full of incredible... Extensive and big names that you know.

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Blockbuster was a $6 billion...

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Revenue a year company.

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This is like you can't stop a company that size.

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Remember Yahoo at its greatest times.

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These seem to be impossible to destroy.

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But there's very few companies that are actually able to survive.

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And when you think about it on a personal level, there's very few companies.

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management founders managers that are able to go through this entire thing i i have you know as a as a founder ceo i have a like i have a ritual a yearly ritual where i i take a couple of days to actually do an introspect and ask myself am i the right person to continue leading this company next year

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And I think that this is like, and we do the same for the way we're structured and organized.

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And we keep challenging this because if you don't, then you become complacent.

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And this is where companies start falling.

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And, you know, if you listen to the Netflix story called by...

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Netflix, you know that Blockbuster was really, really close to being able to beat Netflix at its own game because they had the advantage of doing physical distribution and doing online or via mail distribution.

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And then the move to digital was not such a big deal, right?

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But because of management changes, they lost it.

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And they lost an acquisition opportunity too with the...

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Correct.

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I don't remember what it was, 15 or 50 million.

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It was like panties.

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It was ridiculous.

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It was crazy.

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But again, the corporate history is full of these stories.

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And it's tough not to become one of them.

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You know, it...

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You need to be very aware that you can be, I mean, if you become complacent, if you don't disrupt your own business, someone else will because you've just proven that it's a great business, which makes you, you know, which makes you.

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Target.

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Yeah, exactly.

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When you look back at, like I want people, because people know what Fiverr is.

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We can talk about the future of work all day, but I think it's also important to understand sort of what you've experienced in your journey and your come up.

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If you look back, because this is not your first rodeo, you've done other companies.

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Talk to me about, even before Fiverr, biggest failure or biggest lesson that you've experienced over your career, like a shit hitting the fan moment that,

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at the time felt like, you know, this is not going so well.

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Yeah.

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Oh, man.

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I don't...

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I wouldn't know where to start.

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I mean, there...

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There is a... Yeah, I've done my show of podcasts.

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I should have had a pre-ready answer for this.

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But the reality is that there's...

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It just... What happens...

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between companies as you evolve as an entrepreneur, is that just your miss rate is getting a little bit lower.

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Meaning, if to begin with, then you're unexperienced, 80% of what you do is wrong, then by the time you're an excellent entrepreneur, you're probably doing 70%.

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You know, error.

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You're not going to, I mean...

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I think what's changing in many ways is just the size of the cycle of recovering from a failure or a mistake.

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And having a system to quickly learn things

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overcome not dwell on it and just move on and just and just um take anything you've done wrong is a great lesson and promise yourself that you're not gonna make it again because if you do you're just stupid um and and by the way this is something that i've that i've applied to the company as well like there's

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It's the same principle.

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I mean, it's okay to make mistakes as long as you make them in good faith, not by negligence, as long as it's not the same mistake again.

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Like, if you do it, you probably shouldn't be here because you don't care enough.

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But if you made a mistake, even sometimes it's costly mistakes, but you've done it with passion and not out of negligence, and you were on top of it and you found it and you fixed it, that's a great lesson if you can spread it, if you can share it with the rest of the team.

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So I've done mistakes in how I picked co-founders.

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I've done mistakes in hiring people or people.

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not being very good at hiring people.

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I've done mistakes in running boards and investors.

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There's, I wasn't aggressive enough.

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I didn't realize that I was not good enough at doing marketing or sales myself and not bringing the right people fast enough.

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There's, I mean, there's such, I mean, in your,

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When you grow up as an entrepreneur, there are so many mistakes that you do.

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It's just...

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It's very hard to pick one.

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But there... And if you think about shit shows...

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I mean, Fiverr started as a shit show, when you think about it.

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And funny enough, it was not because it was not going well.

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It was because it was going extremely well.

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So when...

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So sometimes you succeed and it feels like it's the end of it.

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Because when you succeed too fast, so many things start falling apart.

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And again, I'm happy to talk into anecdotal stories.

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You know, most of what we do, we're a very iterative company.

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We're religiously testing stuff.

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So by definition, most of the things that you test will fail.

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Like you fail, the mentality of getting comfortable failing is something that you have to be super rooted in your company's DNA.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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