Lessons - How the Gig Economy Is Reshaping Enterprise Forever | Micha Kaufman - Fiverr Founder & CEO

In this lessons episode, discover how continuous reinvention is essential to future-proofing a company in a rapidly evolving market. Learn why complacency can lead even the most successful ventures to disruption and understand how embracing iterative failure and constant self-interspection fuels sustainable growth and innovation. So the question is really as somebody who's I would have thought five or the first mover but I'm not in the space and I don't know the history obviously as well as you, but the question really is how do you build a company that is that is undistruptible and I know you're going to say it's impossible to make it undistruptible but you as a founder CEO, you built a massive company. How do you not become an eBay? I know you're not going to become a blockbuster because again blockbuster was like an analog to a digital solution. But then eBay was disrupted by Amazon because they took a different perspective. So as a founder, what do you do to future-proof? Yeah. No, it's a great question and there's no easy answer to it. 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 of red, you know, crossing the casem. This idea of going through a J curve where in the bottom, you know, end of the J's, what's what's being fueled by VCs and investors, private investors, and then at some point hopefully you grow in companies. What happens is as years go by, you need to, if you don't disrupt your own model, someone else will. And so you need to keep this, you know, very fresh approach where you challenge everything you do. And you keep questioning your strategy and you keep thinking about the next ways of innovation because nothing, nothing is static, everything moves. There's ways of transformation. Some of them are cultural. Some of them have to do with generations. And in our case, 2010 millennials got into the workforce, then Gen Zers, it's changing the fabric of the workforce. Technology have changed the app store has become super popular in that created this massive opportunity cloud computing. Then now recently you have AI. So so there's there's multiple things that change once that you need to continue challenging yourself. And in one of the things that are really hard as an existing company that you need to do additional J curves, but now you are the VC. And every bone in your body, every, you know, every aspect, every person around you tells you don't do it 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. But you need to do it. You need to reinvent yourself. You need to do the next wave of transformation. If you if you failed to do it, you end up like many companies that we know like Blackberry and Kodak and whatever. I mean, the unfortunate, the corporate, you know, Trash bin is full of incredible extensive and big names that you know blockbuster was a six billion dollar revenue a year company. This is that you can't stop a company that size. Remember, yeah, well, it's greatest times. I mean, these it seemed to be impossible to destroy. But there's very few companies that are actually able to survive. And when you think about it on a personal level, there's a very few very few management founders, managers that are able to go through this entire thing. 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. And I think that this is I can and we do the same for the way we're structured and organized. And we keep challenging this because if you don't then you, you you become you become complacent. And and this is where this is where companies start falling. And I, you know, and I, you know, if you if you listen to the Netflix story, hold by 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. And then the move to digital was was not such a big deal. Right. But but because of management changes, they they lost it. And then they they lost an acquisition opportunity to with the correct for it. I don't remember what was 15 or 50 million. I was like that. I'm you. It was. It was crazy. But but again, the corporate history is full of these stories. And it's it's it's tough not to become one of them. You know it. You need to be you need to be very aware that you can be you can I mean if you become complacent if you if you don't disrupt your own business, someone else will be could you just proven that it's a great business which makes you, you know, which may target. Yeah, when you look back at like I want people because people know what fiber is and we can talk about we can talk about the future of work all day. But I think it's all important to understand sort of what you've experienced in your journey and your come up. If you look back because you this is not your first rodeo that you've done other companies. Talk to me about even before five or biggest failure or biggest lesson that you've the experienced over your career like a shit hitting the fan moment that at the time felt like, you know, this is not going so well. Yeah, oh man, I don't I wouldn't know where to start there. I mean there. There's a yeah, I've I've done my share of podcasts. I should have had a pre pre ready answer for this. But the reality is that there's it just the what happens between companies as you evolve as a as a as an entrepreneur is that just your miss rate is getting a little bit lower, meaning if if to begin with then you're on experience 80% of what you do is wrong. Then by the time you're an excellent entrepreneur, you're probably doing 70%. You're not going to I mean, I think I think what's changing in many ways is just is just the size of the cycle of recovering from a from a failure or a mistake. And you know, having having a system to quickly learn overcome not dwell on it and just move on and just and just take anything you've done wrong is a great lesson and promise yourself that you're not going to make it again because if you do you're just stupid. And by the way, this is something that I've applied to the company as well, like there's it's the same principle. I mean, it's okay to make mistakes mistakes as long as you make them in good faith not not by negligence. And as long as it's not the same mistake again, like if you do it, you probably shouldn't be here because you don't care enough. But if you made a mistake, even sometimes it's causing mistakes, but you've done it with with passion and like not out of negligence. And you were you're 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. So I've done mistakes in in how I picked co founders. I've done mistakes in in hiring people or not being very good at hiring people. I've done mistakes in in running boards and investors. I wasn't aggressive enough. I didn't realize that I was that I was not good enough at doing marketing or sales myself and not bringing the right people fast enough. There's I mean, there's such I mean, when you grow up as an entrepreneur, there are so many mistakes that you do. It's just I it's very hard to pick one. And if you think about shit shows in I mean, Fiverr started as a show when you think about it and funny enough, it was it was not because it was it was not going well. It was because it was going extremely well. So when so sometimes sometimes you you succeed and it it feels like it's the end of it. Because because when you succeed too fast, so many things start falling apart. And again, I'm happy happy to talk into anecdotal, you know, stories. You know, most of what we do were were a very iterative company were religiously testing stuff. So by definition, most of the things that you test will fail, like you you fail the mentality of failure of like getting comfortable failing is something that you you have to to be super rooted in your in your companies DNA. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.