Co-Founder, Fiverr International
Fireside chat with Shai Wininger | Tech Bridge Israel-Ukraine (Part 6/7)
Shai Wininger tells how to increase a website traffic.
Shai Wininger, a сo-founding CTO at Fiverr.com, joined us for a Fireside chat on March, 20. The topic was “How to stay disruptive as you grow.” We talked about the challenges that the company had to face on the stage of creation, about managerial practices aimed at solving problems and building a strong team at various stages of company development. Shai talks about his experience in maintaining a team spirit during the growth of the company.
The event was held in March 2015 in Kyiv within Tech Bridge Israel-Ukraine, a SVOD Europe projec...
About Shai Wininger
Shai Wininger, co-founder of Fiverr and Lemonade, has discussed the insurance industry's conflict of interest, stating that "every dollar that I claim is a dollar less on their bottom line." He described Lemonade's model, where the company takes a flat 20% fee and donates remaining premiums to causes chosen by customers, as a way to eliminate that conflict. Wininger noted that about 30% of claims at Lemonade are processed by a bot in seconds. Wininger has also spoken about Fiverr's growth and operational challenges. He recalled an incident where PayPal's anti-fraud system shut down Fiverr's transactions at midnight, which he said "we actually thought would kill us." He advocated for a data-driven culture, saying that "one out of eight things that you're gonna build will actually make an impact" and that "data wins and discussions end" when testing ideas. Wininger described the $5 entry point as "the ability to try something before you actually pay a higher amount."
Transcript (3 segments)
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Shai Wininger0:21
Scary moment, yeah, of course we have several. I can tell you about one specific one, which was just as Fiverr was starting to pick up, like really taking off. We have this hockey stick exponential growth. Things happen. One of the things that happened was that we were one of PayPal's first micropayments vendors. Micropayments just started back then, and one of the first things they did with us, seriously, I mean it was like 25 transactions per day, and then it started taking off, then suddenly just spiked and kicked. So they have this anti-fraud platform within PayPal, developed in Israel, many people didn't know, but this platform decided that this was an anomaly and it needs to stop. So they just shut us down. Now this is like 11, 12 midnight, no one to talk to. Not that we had someone to talk to during the day because of a trade-off, seriously. And you're just stuck with explosive growth and no way to conduct business. It's just very frustrating, and we actually thought that that would kill us. We didn't know when it's going to be solved. And the most painful thing was that PayPal was not only not accepting the transaction through Fiverr, it was also showing a message that this was a potential risky, whatever, that could get fraud, whatever, and like the worst thing that we can make an offer. That was a scary moment.
Now for the org chart, org structure, I think in some parts of the company were not that different from others, but there is one area that I think is worth mentioning, and that is the system we developed. We call it the production floor. When we started, we couldn't get around developing more than one feature at a time. It was a real problem for the company. We had a few people that were rated above the rest, myself being one of them, and because you want to be involved in things that impact the product and the user experience, especially earlier, we just couldn't fix that. We tried all kinds of methodologies, we added more people to the team, the team grew, there was more noise, more management overhead for the development team, but we couldn't solve that. And at some point, I had a very interesting discussion with the CTO of Gilt in New York. And Gilt is a very interesting company. At the time, they had, I think, more than 500 engineers working in an environment where office space is very expensive, and the company was very fragmented, many, many offices. And they came to us, developed a system for them to work where each office, as small as it may be, became its own independent, self-sustained unit that has all the ingredients within in order to get something like an idea for a product, but then develop it and execute on it and test it and report back. They do all that in a totally autonomous way, which means that they had to set up a code structure that would support that, and source management that would support that, information, renovating all kinds of things, which at the time seemed very interesting for me. And I continued reading about that, and it turned out it was formalized by Spotify, and they called it squads. And you might have heard of it, or if you haven't, I really recommend reading about the squads. It's well articulated there very well. And I just fell in love with the idea. And I think that this was the first time after we implemented the first two task forces, what we call them, it was the first time that I saw the company actually executing on two major features at the same time without any kind of showstopper in the way or bottlenecks.
That was the decision ultimately. Sitting in your office, you just give your baby to two schools and just watch how it goes. Well, it doesn't happen over days, it's a process. And it has to do a lot with everybody letting go and giving more people more ownership of things, trusting people basically. It has to do with hiring the right people again, forgetting to hire, firing people who are better than you, and also having a system that kind of self-administers itself. So that I mentioned very driven, if you are working on something that I might think is not going to be a good idea, then we have a discussion, obviously, and we can have the kind of work, right? But what if you had this idea and you had the freedom to experiment for a few days, and then you come in with numbers and you say this, and I had this idea, then I have nothing else to say. So data wins discussions. And I think this is one of the things that led us to having trust in those teams, because everything they do is measured.