If you've been doing something as a professional for more than 5 years, you are a dinosaur. Up until AI, human beings were doing 80% of the work and software was doing about 20. And now it flipped. The 80 doesn't get you anywhere. It eliminates simple stuff that requires help. But here's the interesting stuff. The 20% are not 20% important. They're infinitely important. This is a moment where everybody is trying to figure out what does it mean for our species. The species that existed 5 years ago would probably not survive in its current shape and form. That transformation from the old to a version of the new is a lot of what the next 12 months are going to be. And this is where this is Mika Corman, founder and CEO of Fiverr. Over the last 17 years, he built a global freelance empire connecting millions of professionals worldwide. And today, he's revealing how to survive the AI shift and what talent and founders must focus on in the next 12 months to keep from going extinct. AI out of the box is not very powerful. You need to give it context. You need the technology to know you intimately, not to know everybody. Knowing everybody just makes everybody more average. There's an ongoing risk of outsourcing judgment to machines and assuming AI does great work for everyone. Where's the advantage? Because everybody has it. Some people have it in them and they can drive change and they can drive the above average thing and some are not. And this is where agile people, people that are adaptive, people that are curious, people that can learn fast, but also unlearning will have an advantage. If I'm not going to learn how to be a maker myself in this new reality, I'm going to be out of a job. This is the X factor. Eventually, it all boils down to this, which is welcome to new economies.
Hey, Mika, welcome to New Economies. Thank you so much for joining us.
So, you know, this year is the 100th year since the 9-to-5 work culture was created, but boy, we are living in different times. What does the 9-to-5 work culture actually mean in today's environment? And is it even a thing anymore?
Very little, to be honest. And what gets me most curious is how the next 100 years are going to look like, because I think that we're in a pivotal moment where a lot of how the next decades are going to look like. And maybe the first push into changing this was 2010 when millennials started getting into the workforce and then Gen Zers, then COVID with everything, you know, with the idea of remote work and the idea of digital nomads and a very different scenery in how organizations, how companies are actually structured. And obviously AI, which really was a much bigger black swan event than COVID for sure. So I'm really curious and I think what makes me not just curious but excited is that I think that we're dealing with coming up with the ideas that are going to shape the next 100 years. Um, which is a really interesting vantage point. We may get it right. We may get it totally wrong. But at least we have a way of actually shaping some of this, which is actually pretty hard right now because of timing. And I don't know, even if you try and go 100 years back, the first years of industrial revolution of assembly lines, all of this weren't stable and were in many senses we're in an unstable period of time right now where things are not clear. They're murky. They're undefined. But these are the most exciting times. So I mean, we can dive into all of this, but this is really a one-of-a-kind event that doesn't usually happen even in a 100 years.
The consensus seems to be like from all the guests I'm having on the show, this year, January 26, was really the breakthrough year for AI. You know, all of the easy jobs which were easy now AI can do. The hard jobs have become easy. And then the super hard jobs have still become hard, but they're becoming easier, right? We'll come back to this in a second, but it's almost a year today when I saw your name going viral on my X feed because you sent this internal memo to the team, which I thought actually was probably needed. I think Toby from Spotify also did the same thing, something similar, where basically you gave a very blunt, direct insight into AI is going to change our jobs forever. One year on, has anything changed that you didn't anticipate? And maybe just help the viewers give a glimpse why you wrote that moment in the first place.
So maybe start with the why. I'm going to give an analogy which may or may not be a good one. If you started your business more than five years ago, if you have a running business that started more than five years ago, if you've been doing something as a professional for more than five years, you are a dinosaur. And you are a dinosaur at the moment of impact of an asteroid. So that's my analogy. And I'll try to make it a little bit clearer or at least continue down that path. What I mean is if we compare it to a meteor hitting Earth, obviously the area of the crater is where everything gets annihilated and that's fine. But there's as a result there's a lot of debris going into the atmosphere which makes everything dark and the air polluted and not great for breathing. Then temperatures drop. Then there's the ice age. Then there's food scarcity and a lot of confusion because it's dark and it's cold. And this is a moment where different species get extinct and others actually flourish. Now, if you take this to biology, what you understand is that it's about DNA survival and transformation and it's not about species either, you know, getting extinct or continuing because everything morphed into something else biologically. It's not about evolution. Evolution takes, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years. It's about morphing and it's about some parts of these DNA sequences morphing into different beings. And this is a moment where everybody is trying to figure out in many ways. Um, this started boiling in me when I witnessed the meteor hitting earth and what does it mean. And so the memo was a wakeup call for this quest of understanding what does it mean? What does it mean for our species? The species that existed 5 years ago would probably not survive in its current shape and form. It doesn't mean that life ends. It just means that it needs to change. And the old existence would not continue. And so the idea was this very open sharing of concern or view of reality to wake up people. And in many ways, not just, I don't think that people were sleeping and not noticing this or living under the rock. It was more about this sense of urgency and a sense of validation that what they're sensing, their discomfort, their fears are validated by me, which again doesn't mean that just the fact that I acknowledge something makes it right, but because I think that we're operating together and I'm trying to lead in this environment. And I wanted to create a reference point, a new north. And you start by asking, so how does it look a year after? This has actually surprised me in a good way. Along the way we had to make changes that we as a company are responsible for in how we are or how a corporate is organized. How do we operate? How do we communicate? How do we create organizational structure and processes and all of this? But it also required people to sign in for it. Not just to sign in for what we do as a company, but to sign up for what they do as professionals. And some people signed out of it, which I think is fine. I think people are signing out of high-tech in some ways. Some of it is by behavior or complacence. But those who boarded the train are now doing 2-3x more than they used to do a year ago. And because of this process, what you also gain out of it is you increase talent density in the organization substantially. So, if I need to give you the net net, I'm much happier about what I'm saying. I actually think that we're able to find more joy in the process of building, making, creating than we used to. We're less high-tech technicians and we're more builders, creators. So it was a tough year, but it was a good year in that sense.
When you sent out the memo, I can even remember people commenting online. People were freaking out. People were then I think a few other CEOs did something similar. But honestly, like even a year on now, I think the consensus is clear. If you're not using AI internally, then you're not hiring. And those who are using AI are hiring a lot more than previously anticipated. If we was to go inside the Fiverr culture and inside the Fiverr company, what actually changed in the last 12 months that you were very happy about and what are you still least happy about?
When you say using AI, I think that this is a key phrase, but it's a very ambiguous, very broad term. There's using AI and there's using AI, which is really key and really where I think some of the frustration is coming from. The usage of AI depends on how you integrate it, how you deploy it. It's about knowing the limitations. It's about knowing the fact that it's not just upside, there's downside to it. It's the constant dealing with the fear that the people outsource too much into it and practice too little judgment on what they're getting. It's about the concern that inadvertently you're giving your alpha to AI constantly, even though as a corporate you sign contracts as saying that AI cannot be trained, but there's still a fear and concerns that I think are right about it. And again, if you do this in process of increasing your talent density, you offset some of these concerns because by definition you work with people that want to exercise high level of judgment. And this is really something that I realized which I think is really interesting and some people including companies don't understand. There's something really interesting in this human and machine interaction and the things that we want or allow AI to do and the things that we think we should do, professionals should, human beings should do. And what I realized is that there's something really interesting in the fact that the one thing that AI lacks is accountability. There's a lawsuit against OpenAI because ChatGPT recommended to about 20 people to end their lives. But at the chat window, when it recommends you to end your life, it says I'm AI and I make many mistakes. Like this sums up the lack of accountability. And human beings are all about accountability. And there's an interesting question of why? And I think you can sum it up by saying that the reason is the fact that we're mortal. And since we're not going to live forever, our reputation is the most precious asset that we have and maintaining it requires accountability. When people talk about human in the loop and like which are buzzwords that say nothing, eventually it all boils down to this, to judgment and accountability. And again, if we go back to an organization, when you deploy AI, the risk is that some people start outsourcing accountability to non-accountable software or technology. And so deployment is super complex because AI out of the box is not very powerful in a personal environment. And a company is a personal case. You need to give it context. You need the technology to know you intimately, not to know everybody. Knowing everybody just makes everybody more average. That takes time. And for dinosaurs like us, we have a company that is 17 years old. Deploying AI is a thousand times more complex than starting a new company based on building everything on top of AI. And I'm not going to go into the technical stuff of like, you know, high-tech has been going for microservices and whatever and now everybody is going to single repos and whatever because AI is really bad at microservices, but it's really good at single repos because you have the context window is complex. And so this is hard, this is frustrating, but we're dealing with it. It's not a blind spot for us. It just takes time, which, you know, I'm an entrepreneur so I'm generally an impatient person. I want everything to happen now, immediately. So being patient is not one of my virtues. So that's hard. But the organization right now is so much more efficient and so much more sharp and can deal with so much more, which is amazing, but it comes with a price and it's really tough. It's really tough to make this transformation as a complete organization. It's tough as an individual, as an organization a thousand times tougher.
If you're enjoying today's episode, hit subscribe at the bottom of your screen. The guests on this show are getting bigger and bigger, and we need your help to grow this channel. So, if you're enjoying today's guests or any previous episodes, hit subscribe, and I promise you it'll be worth it. Now, back to today's episode. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's impatient. So, glad we have something in common there. I want things done, you know, pretty soon. It's interesting you mentioned the huge judgment. We've had founders and CEOs from Webflow, Replit, Base44 also from Israel company on the show in the last few weeks and they've all said the same thing. One thing I think though is has AI made us more lazy because do we actually work anymore? You know, like my friends, okay, they're not founders. They have a 9 to 5 and I said like when we're doing 19 hour days, seven days a week, I just think like have we just lost have we lost what work working hard actually means?
So this is exactly what I meant when I said that there's an ongoing risk of outsourcing judgment to machines. When you do this, you basically outsource everything. If you outsource everything, then you're not working at all. And you know, the big difference in my view is if we go 25 years ago to a time where accountants were still doing balancing on paper with a pencil. And then we had Lotus Notes. And then we had Excel. And then we had these funky models that do whatever. Up until AI, I think the balance was mostly human beings were doing 80% of the work and software was doing about 20 and now it flipped. But here's the interesting stuff. The 80 doesn't get you anywhere. It just gets you faster. It does a lot of things that you used to do manually. It eliminates simple stuff that requires help but now it doesn't. But the 20% are not 20% important. They're infinitely important. But the risk is you start outsourcing that 20%. And I agree. I think that when you start letting go and think that things can completely be automated then this is and these are the dystopic views of what the world could be, dystopic or fantasies of what a world without work might look like, which I don't think that's the case and I may be wrong. The other thing is that the way right now the way the interface with AI is set up is super hard for some people because it is definitely a heaven for highly verbal people and it's a nightmare for visual people, for designers. A lot of designers, the really good ones, the pixel perfect, the people that created the breakthroughs of design, this is a living nightmare. They don't want to write stuff. They want to show, they want to experiment. So, yeah, there's this tension, but I think I said this many times before, it forced us to discover our humanity again. And what makes you and I and others unique? I mean, it doesn't matter. I mean, there's, oh, fable. Oh, it's the end of no, it's not. It's as good as what you give it and how you interact with it. So, if you give it garbage, it's garbage in, garbage out. And if you talk back to it, it would constantly say, "Oh, you're right. I missed that. Oh, that's a good point." What? Yeah, but the user interface is tough. It's just verbal or voice. So, people that are less verbal are having a really hard time. Plus, it's tiring. It's chatting all day long. It's tough. It's really tough. Some people find it to be impossible.
I do agree. Like I had this experience yesterday, right? Doing a super complex graph. There was one thing I wanted it to be removed, one thing adjusted. Had to prompt it like 20, 30 times until kind of got something then it was just easy to do it myself, right? But I think what we can agree on hopefully is even in the last 12 months, if you want a basic design, some of these AI models are pretty good at that now, right? And I'd love to get your take here a little bit. You know, there's obviously there's big debate, right? And Fiverr's the freelancers, first of all we should actually tell around should they even be called freelancers anymore like why isn't there a cooler term right for freelancers but the main question here is around the freelancers which can do basic designs what happens to them because really like AI can now do it if not better if not cheaper if not at the moment. They need to find a new profession. What does that look like?
Landscaping or that could be doing more complex high-end work in design that requires deep human judgment, a sense of taste, a special eye for things, an extreme understanding of human behavior. Because you create design to inspire people, to make people react to it. There is no thing as a good design, like how do you measure a good? If this is in a business context, this should generate an action, this would generate a response, a reaction. And so they either grow to that level of professionalism if they have it in them or they find something else to do. Again, that's fine. If you were driving a horse carriage and now nobody used them, you need to find something else. If you automated coal mining, now you need to know how to man a machine or you find yourself out of the job market and need to find other ways of making a living. It is what it is. But this is like if I'm not going to learn how to be an entrepreneur, a company leader, a maker myself in this new reality, I'm going to be out of a job. That is getting back to my memo. But it's a decision. The bar is just going up. But again, if you think about you said basic design, I don't know what that means, but if everybody has access to AI that can design things and assuming AI does great work for everyone, so where's the advantage? Like everything looks great but there's just more great things which whatever it can spit out is the average because everybody has it. How do you become above the average? The fact that something looks slick doesn't mean that it's going to work. The bar is just going up. And this is how human beings are. You give them these amazing devices and they get used to it and they want them to do more. Like why can't it? Yeah, go create it. Like everything becomes a standard like this. How do you get above the bar? How do you get above the average? Some people have it in them and they can drive change and they can drive the above average thing and some are not. If I prompt Claude design and you prompt Claude design, we're not going to get the same results. Why? Some of it is just random because it's statistics and it gives you random stuff. But maybe I'm a better, I have a better design attitude. I have better understanding what works, what doesn't. So I'm going to win. That's it. But it's not Claude design. It's me. This is the X factor. So yeah, professions are going away. Dude, that's not no, like I'm not. Let's let go of it. Like, but we shouldn't resist. And by the way, no, we shouldn't call freelancers by a name. I don't call you a full-timer. So, like, and definitely, I mean, there's about 50% of the US workforce that are freelancing in some capacity. So why do you call half of the workforce by name and you don't call the other half by name? They're just talent. That's it. I actually, you know, pitched this to my team years ago and they said, "We don't think that the world is ready for it." The construct of how they work has some characteristics that are different than full-timers, but these are getting blurry anyway, right? Like if you don't work from the office, if you work on vacation part-time, if like what does it make you and who cares? Like who cares? Why are people need to be defined by a word? It doesn't define them. If anything, what defines them is a talent at something. But that's true for all means of work or interaction.
