Master Writing an Invoice for Freelance Work for Product Management

Writing an invoice for freelance work for Product Management

[Music] the world's completely changing people are no longer young people and I see this from my kids I got five kids so I see this from my kids nobody's really planning the one job one career thing where okay we're going to start working at General Motors or Proctor and Gamble and for the next 45 years that's where we're going to work and we're going to retire with a gold watch nobody is doing that people are looking for you know they have a view of their career but they're looking for side hustles ways to make money from home ways to make money while traveling and I'm not saying that people are lazy they're actually hustling really hard and where are all these jobs where are all these opportunities well I had a chance to talk to Miha Kaufman who's the founder and CEO of fiverr.com if you haven't checked out fiverr.com I will check it out this is the place where all of those side hustles and hustles and careers are forming there is so much opportunity there millions of jobs have been created from a company like Fiverr so check out what you know mihawk Hoffman and I and and what's the role of AI in all this is amazing because that literally could change your life combination of companies like Fiverr with you using AI so check it out I talk to Miha over this uh next episode this isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average Host this is the James aler [Music] show I'm glad you came on the podcast I've long been a user of Fiverr maybe describe what Fiverr is and I'd love to ask you like how it started this is such a great business I'm jealous of the whole economy you created around it so basically Fiverr is a platform that connects talent and that Talent could be individual Talent OR that could be agencies with businesses that need access to that Talent so basically it's a matching service and since Talent is global and the demand for talent is global we operate in 160 countries and the majority of our transactions are crossborder which is really interesting because it goes across cultures it adds flavor it adds nuances into work the idea basically at at the beginning came out of two realizations one was that when you wanted to and this was 2009 back then when you wanted to work or find a talented person the process of doing that was almost as bad is dating and so at the time though in 2009 there were already companies like fre freelancer.com Elance scriptlance so there were companies out there where it was a Marketplace for finding Freelancers and which I made use of extensively I probably used all of them why did you think okay I'm going to be yet another player in this space so I've also used these platforms I wasn't happy with it one of the reasons was that I thought that a lot what these platforms were trying to do is they were trying to replicate the way you hire people offline and just do the same things online which to me was not really harnessing the power of software and the distribution of the internet to do something much better than you do offline and this is where the idea of Fiverr came to be which is instead of saying keep the system where you come with a project and people beat on that project and you negotiate and you strike a instead of that let's flip it let's say if you're talented and you know what you can offer we just put it on a catalog if we can create a excuse system to describe the world of services through verticals and categories and the services themselves you can price that service as high or low as you want and people can just go through this catalog do a quick search find whatever they need they have the history they have the portfolio of the the person offering the service they have reviews by previous customers click order and you're done that compressed something that used to take anything between a week or or two to a month into something that took five minutes and this to me is the power of software this is what what we can create with it and what we can create with the right data presentation Discovery system matching algorithms which is what we've done so we've pioneered this approach of having a a true Marketplace two-sided Marketplace that connects Talent with those who are seeking to hire talent for specific things what are some of the most common Services now that people use f to to hire talent for and as I've said we think officially we past 800 different categories of services and all of these categories are very successful those who who are irrelevant are no longer on the catalog when you think about those Services you have services around things that have to do with programming software development graphic design marketing writing video and business or Consulting lately being year and a half now a lot of AI related Services a ton I want to ask about that but I'm curious in general about the rise of the gig economy over the past 15 years since you started I remember I visited LinkedIn I think it was in 2013 2012 they basically said the gig economy accounted for far less than 1% of the world economy and I'm wondering if now because of companies like Fiverr if that's no longer true if now people doing gigs and making a full living at it without having to get like a fulltime job how how much has that become a part of the world economy it about tripled meaning it's about 3% okay it's still it's still early Innings when you think about the size of this economy if if you just take so I've mentioned we operate in 800 different categories so if you take those categories not llers electricians dog walkers just Digital Services in the US that amounts to about $400 billion in earnings by Freelancers if you take all of the platforms are doing the online combined maybe 3% of that so it's still it's still in many ways like e-commerce back in 1995 and what do you think is going to I mean obviously everybody was afraid to use e-commerce in 1995 they didn't want to put their credit cards into this weird thing called the the web like what's going to change how do you see the economy growing and and leaving aside AI for a second because I want to explore the AI equation as well I I think in many ways you said it there is an intrinsic I I think you know the hiring space is still very oldfashioned right it's still resumés and it's still recruiters and it's still all the same journeys of interviews and peer interviews it takes time and for companies for businesses to change the way they hire is very hard much like it was very hard back in 1995 to convince people to shop online it just hits It's kicking in and it's it takes time to replace the things that you're used to do with things that you're I'm sure of and and give it a goal I know that Fiverr we have customers for 160 countries in the world some of them are micro businesses solopreneurs some of them are the majority actually of Fortune 500 companies use Fiverr so there is more openness but it's still not becoming a standard much like e-commerce started becoming a standard at some point but it took e-commerce more than two decades to reach you know 5% and then 10% and and as you do it by the way one of the things maybe we taking 3% of the overall Market but the market itself we've helped grow massively it was 15 years ago when we started the market was maybe a third of what it is now and the amount of people that were engaging in freelancing was was less than half of now when freelancing was something that he used to do in between jobs not as a career and today it's not just a career it's also a lifestyle and people are proud of doing it so like people could live anywhere you know the idea of kind of the no digital Nomad you know it kind of grew out of this freelance economy he said something very interesting though which is that companies or maybe Executives or CEOs out of habit have this old way of thinking about hiring and accomplishing tasks and that you need people sitting at desks doing things to have a real so-called company so here's how I'm thinking about this when you run a business you have a good grasp of what is the core competence that you have as a business if you're a software company that's specializes in in these highly sophiscated algorithms then having algorithm experts is your core competency but what about the rest what about sales what about marketing what about design what about product in many cases what you can do is you can tap into the most talented people in a way that gives you flexibility to scale it up or down as you need depending on whatever your needs are in that same moment so we have people that are full-timers these people are usually very much focused on what we do as core competency what is the core of what we do on the periphery of what we do at extending our team if we have a certain design team and sometimes we need help and we need to double it but we need double it just for a month all of that we'll do flexibly all of that we'll do through the platform which makes a ton of sense I sometimes I made the analogy for cloud computing and some people didn't like it because it was like I I was uh comparing human beings with computers which I wasn't but who cares if you were are so sensitive whatever yeah here's the analogy think about the move from hosted computers when I started building companies 20 years ago we hosted our servers at the office we had a safe room right and we had to buy them and we had to maintain them and we have to upgrade them and we need to secure them and and we need to keep them up and running and then came cloud computing and cloud computing leveled the plane field because if I'm a small startup I can still have the computing power of the largest companies in the world I'll just pay as I use so if I use it if I'm not successful I'm not going to use I'm not going to pay a lot if I am I will pay ingly but I don't need to maintain the servers I don't need to upgrade them I don't need to buy them I don't need to teach them new things whatever they're being maintained think about that in the context of talent think about you know the ability to tap into this cloud of talent that is always up to date where you can find people that know all the new things when AI started to become a thing I mean we we were using AI for five six years at least but when CH GPT came out and everybody was stared to talk about AI it took us probably 3 to four weeks to have about 15 different categories of AI experts okay so this is this is the speed in which in which you can respond and businesses on the other end you can tap into it it's just it's so easy it's so fre and free that's the idea take a quick break if you like this episode I'd really really appreciate it would mean so much to me please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast email me at alure gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed thanks [Music] how did you first attract people to your site because again there was some competition out there and before someone uses your site they don't really know the difference between all the sites like how did you do the basic thing of getting that Network effect working for you like I.E the more people on the site the more valuable it becomes it's a great question and one that I've been asked at all by many people and you know people that are starting companies so essentially when you're trying to start a two-sided Market base you always are driven by one side and constrained by another okay and you need to figure out what it is for you I'll give you an example I I'll I'll touch Fiverr but I'll give you examples from other companies um if you're uber you're Supply constrained so Supply in the sense of drivers and cars correct because if you don't have enough density of drivers then the experience for C customers is going to be terrible because they're going to wait 10 10 minutes nobody wants to wait more than 2 minutes these days so you need to have high density so you have to have Supply you have to have that in abundance if you look at their strategy early on they were promising the moon to drivers just to get them on the platform and they delivered it's a great business think about Airbnb Airbnb is host constraint meaning they need to create again a lot of uh Supply a lot of choice um in and also across to have enough saturation in many major cities in the world so that customers can use it well but this is interesting they're constrained by Supply but Supply exists in the world right so there are many houses with empty rooms there are many cars with willing drivers so and if you look at Amazon or if you look at us is in example we're Supply driven but we're demand constraint meaning that essentially Supply is almost free you don't need to acquire Supply Supply wants to be there it wants to join and actually in the almost 15 years that that we're running Fiverr we didn't do Supply acquisition so Supply comes to us and the constraint is more the demand so bringing enough demand for about Supply right because and and sorry for interrupting I get curious every step of the way so if someone's a freelancer it's not like you needed to Market to them they're already on let's say freelance.com scriptlance Elance they're just going to put their information on another platform that any platform that exists they're just going to put their information on cuz why not doesn't cost anything when we started it was less about having other platforms it was more about us versus either marketing yourself locally which was the most and by the way still is the most common way Freelancers Market themselves so in their really in their physical proximity and it's word of mouth it's just having previous customers recommend you to others and websites just creating online presents but here's the thing that the number one need of a freelancer is to get opportunities right but it's also the part in their business that is just cost meaning if you start as a freelancer and you have zero customers what you need to do is you need to get customers how do you do it you start going out and marketing yourself either with marketing dollars or you just spend men hours in just meeting with potential clients blah blah blah whatever this is super costy and by the way most Freelancers hate that part of their job because they might be a super talented graphic designer that doesn't mean that they like to do sales that doesn't mean that they like to do accounting that doesn't mean that they like to do legal stuff of signing contracts with customers and and writing documents so spending a ton of their time on this for them we were a distribution net workk what we promised was to say if you think about the the maslo Pyramid of needs of a freelancer the very bottom of it is access to Opportunities okay but then there's other layers once I get the opportunities can I simplify a lot of the roggies that I hate dealing which I mentioned accounting you know Contracting negotiation chasing the customers to get Aid at the end figuring out how to which communication means we we should use where do we store files what whatever so we took care of all of this for them for for talent you need to sign up it's free set up an account decide what you want to offer we'll do the rest for you that that was it that was the promise and so that allowed us to create a very meaningful partnership with them because we were taking all the things they hated doing in creating a stream of income a stream of customers how do they even know about you like how do they even know you existed so when we started I didn't even incorporate a company because I was tired from setting up companies bank accounts whatever before we didn't have anything and I said no this time I'm flipping it well I'll hack a product I'll put it online I'll put a lot of energy in getting it right having a business model from day one having virality and stickiness built into the product and it would either grow succeed Grassroots or it would sale and will pivot or close or move to something else that was kind of the idea and so I didn't get any Venture funding it was all my money and I didn't spend I think for the first four or five years we didn't spend a dime on marketing it so we were lucky enough to set up the site in a way that made it super sticky and super viral because the initial business model which was really the goto Market strateg was to focus on microservices for micro businesses and the teline for it was the things people do for five bucks int intriguing right it was yeah because your first thought as a customer of it is oh everything is $5 exactly which it was for a while and but the way people join it was even smarter because if you looked at the website 15 years ago it was just a list of statements that people that that started with I will then something for $5 that was the syntax and the way I set it up is that there was a in that homepage you saw a list of things that people offer for five bucks above that you had a text box with I will blank for $5 submit and it looked it was just people couldn't resist it so they clicked on it once they clicked on it it took them to the second step of this form which took two more minutes and they were in this created this in incredibly viral product that started gaining momentum super super fast and at the time there were the equivalence of today's Tik Tok and and Instagram whatever and this this went super super viral and and it started having transaction on day one and as it was starting to grow we started building being the cues of the market base and you know we started with just five categories of services and it was super naive from that point we started you know extending the catalog building more categories understanding how people were using it it was incredible it was a crazy ride I mean it must be such a pleasure to see something like that grow virally and how did customers like the ones purchasing you know services and talent how did they find out about the site both sides of the equation were extremely vocal the ones who were offering the services were just super proud of it it was almost half funny it was just you wouldn't believe what I'm doing and they were just talking about this which attracted many other people to either offer or buy and people that bought things were so proud of it by saying oh my God look at what I've just purchased for $5 you have to go there you to be blown away people used to spend on average at the beginning 25 minutes on the site every session it was just people were just so curious it was like a rabbit hole of like how deep can I go into people's imagination of what they can do for five bucks breaking this the mold of $5 was one of the most complex things I've ever done as as an entrepreneur it was really hard because then you have to get into the ROM of negotiation and specs and staging you know results which by the way we didn't meaning we we extended it but we still had the same Market based model where the providers the talent the sellers can set their price as they like and you as AER can opt in into it or or just pick someone else so leaving it to the forces of the market Bas and the reality was that in contrast to how most people thought about this people thought that this would be a race of the bottom because essentially there's always someone is going to come in and maybe offer something for a lower price the reality was that the more successful you were on the platform you had more demand when you have more demand what do you do you increase prices because your capacity is limited so you increase prices because you're famous everybody knows you on the platform your profile is extremely successful you have enough reviews and it's easy and it created exactly the opposite Trend that everybody was was expecting to happen AI is changing this obviously on both sides of the equation right people are offering AI services but also AI is perhaps taking jobs like now my takee on this is if AI is going to completely replace us I have bigger problems than okay you know or or I mean the the job economy in general is going to be is going to be in shambles and I'm thinking of younger Generations that need to figure out what to what to study one of the hardest things right now is actually figuring out what to do with with yourself because whatever you're going to learn could be obsolete in but by the time you you finish your degree and so everything is changing zat said AI is going to replace some types of jobs some types Services that's perfectly fine this is what technology does when it is smarter and sometimes more creative or definitely more efficient than a human being probably human beings shouldn't do it but the reality is that it's generating so many new jobs that didn't exist 5 minutes ago like what you know anything that has to do with the technology itself so so if you think about AI think about everything that has to do with the technology around AI it's either the models the training the applications that are being built with AI it's about voice synthesis uh in AI it's about AI Consulting for for companies on how to integrate and build it better it's about the usage of AI Bots it's about AI Art here's the thing about AI AI creates for me a new Bas sign because all of us have access to AI so all of us can use AI which means that this is the new you know it's it's leveling the the playing field but it's not giving superpowers to any one of us we have equal Powers because we have access to AI how do we create this advantage over over others it's usually by human creativity ingenuity and sometimes it's just about how you use AI but the fact that a more professional have more experience in taking AI to whole new levels that you cannot or I can mix uh a number of Technologies in a way that produces something that is breathtaking this is my advantage so sometimes it's about the way you use it AI is a tool in for as long as human beings are this subject meaning we consume whatever is being built by Ai and this would change over time because over time you'll have ai building things for AI itself but in that case we're out of the equation anyway for as long as we're the consumer we're needed [Music] so like you mentioned how like as soon as like chat GPT was out there suddenly there's like 15 new types of services that people were offering what were some of the ways that suddenly people who didn't know anything about AI maybe a year earlier we're suddenly making a living in the freelance economy using AI here's the great thing about and we we talked about the analogy of cloud computing and how those nodes in the network upgrade themselves over time this is what great about talented people and specifically Freelancers who who live in a very Dynamic vibrant agile fast moving they're the the earliest adopters you know whatever there's out there they're going to try months ahead of you which gives them a lead time to master in specific areas so while you were you know figuring out what CH GPT is they were already prompt experts they've already accumulated hundreds thousands of hours of checking out every possible technology that is out there trying to figure out what is the best for each task and understanding how to command these Technologies to yield the best results if you want to spend the same amount of time mastering it congratulations do it it's fine or if hire one of these people cuz they've done it for you and they can just get you the best results it's all about results that's the bottom line the technology itself people fall in love with this idea or are very afraid of this idea but this is just an idea the the question is what do we human beings are doing with these tools and those who are going to be the most creative the most professional you know take time to master these tools are going to be ahead of us then you can connect to these people because they're there let's take a specific profession or or service like logo design so someone who is a logo designer on Fiverr let's say a restaurant or a record label or whatever would say hey can you make me a logo sure cost you x a number of dollars and they'd spend a week they'd hand over a logo now how has it change they could use AI now to make 50 logos a day how has it change the lives of the Freelancers but also B what are some other pure AI related jobs that people now are are making money on how has it helped to be original Freelancers made their lives easier yeah so if let's take the logo design as an example I don't know if you've tried to create a logo with AI it's not that simple so it spits out all kinds of things but there's not a lot of judgment behind it AI Is Not a Human Being they don't know how a certain thing that they spit to your screen is going to be perceived by human beings if you ask AI what's a great color for a logo it it would probably answer it's blue why because people relate to Blue and it's a great color but the Coca Cola brand is red um sometimes it speaks out things that when you in dings look at it it looks like you know this the symbol of the Satan AI cannot see it they cannot perceive whatever it's spitting out plus it's very hard to edit whatever you design with AI I mean you it's very hard to just say oh no no no I just wanted to have rounded corners and just replace the color it's it's something completely different for you if anything I think that this is kind of an aviation tool and I know that our sellers are using it extensively not necessarily to produce the final product but to ideate to create to put together ideas and then if they feel that there's something in the right direction they would bring their experience whatever they know about the field of logo design uh whatever they know on how people react to certain symbols colors typography and they would craft this thing together so for them it's a tool but that that can also be a tool for customers sure play with AI idea try to create something if it's good enough awesome take it use it I found it to be very very hard to get to the final result and again think about what I said earlier which is as long as human beings are the consumers of the output then the way human beings respond to something remains super important which is what AI locks at this point it doesn't have the the feedback loop of a human being without a human being so it might make the logo designer's job easier than like oh I can generate 50 ideas oh I like this one I'm going to enhance it and and improve it and two-thirds of the work are done for me here's the first draft of the logo but it hasn't taken their jobs correct like logo designers haven't disappeared yet correct I mean it might happen in the future but not yet in May and again I I think if I think about the the amount of uh jobs that uh sustain across Generations from my grandparents to my parents to me my kids very few the more rapid technology evolves the cycles Frink so this idea that certain types of professions or jobs are going to disappear is something that we should get comfortable with right like and like you say though it's getting faster and by the way we were talking about yal Harari earlier yal Harari when I I had a conversation like this with yal where he said AI might divide the world into the halves who have ai and the have NS and my comment to him was but AI might just like the internet it it's going to develop so fast there won't be time for the halves to separate themselves from the Have Nots everyone's just going to get it and that's sort of what happened but to your point about the Cycles getting faster okay maybe it took 30 years before typewriters to be replaced by computers 15 20 years before horses to be replaced by cars in the 1910s and those the people did lose their jobs but maybe Ai and but then they found new jobs I don't know how I we never asked the question where where do the people who make you know Force carriages where did they find jobs later no one really asked that no one I have no idea they didn't all move to Detroit and work on cars but it might happen so fast with AI that do you ever get worried that there's just going to be a bunch of people with no work because AI is doing it all like how where where are people going to go I've mentioned this aemma of figuring out what to do what are younger generations going to do it themselves what should they choose as a profession and I think this is becoming more fluid which is just making higher education less and less relevant because it's just it's spending three four years in an Institute that teaches you things that were relevant five years ago doesn't work anymore you you need to store less information in your head and more information is accessible for you in a click of a button it's not just indexed for you it's curated for you meaning you don't look at links and click on a bunch and figure out what's right you get it already curated and digested for you which is very dangerous if it's misused but it makes it very easy for people to learn and to master new areas we've seen that in the past 10 15 years look when my dad who's a semiconductor executive built his career I think he probably had maybe four or five positions in his entire career of tens of years of of decades and these days the average tenure in high-tech is 1.8 years meaning that less than two years people switch to something and it's not just necessarily trying to get a higher salary it's is because they're bored or they want to try new things which is by the way why why so many people are being attracted to freelancing because that allows you to in reinvent yourself every month right and try new things and see if it sticks so I think that you're seeing that compression of Cycles even right now and this was true even before AI this is just the pace of things is is accelerating and I think AI is just going to accelerate this further unfortunately I I don't think we're imaginative enough to know which professions are going to be the hottest in five or 10 years from now but definitely it will require people to be more agile responsive to changes and find new areas of passion and expertise many many times in their lifetime like how do you see the gig economy evolving what should people be looking at what what kind of if I'm want to be a freelancer and I want to use AI what should I learn what should I be thinking about depending on which areas that AI covers are interesting for you that could be writing that could be design that could be videography that could be music do is it's prompt like coming up with prompts I feel like that was a job for a brief moment maybe not as much now yeah it it still is by the way and again remember what what I said before which is everybody has access to AI which makes all of us stand on the same starting line we don't have any advantage the only Advantage is the experience of using these tools in remixing these tools and I think that a lot of what we're seeing right now is how people connect different Technologies together to produce new things to produce breathtaking imagery or video or sound or voices and and this takes time it's going through there's you know AI exploded into our lives there there's hundreds and hundreds of different companies that that provide either modles or applications that you can use just going through these options take a ton of time but if you want to understand which tool is the best for every specific task this is the job you need to do that takes time then it's mastering those tools understanding how to prompt them well how to sometimes manipulate them because they don't necessarily respond in the way that you would anticipate but there's tricks on making them do that then it's connecting those different tools of together to get very special results the most incredible things the that that were done with the AI is are just incredibly talented people behind it that knew how how to make technology uh at the end turn out something that would blow all of our minds what do you see as one of the potential problems in the economy from AI like what if any well if it's there's this stopic of the that some have that this would completely uh replace the need for human beings start it it would start with labor meaning there's not going to be any jobs for anyone which which means lack of income um but but then if AI evolves into a self correcting mechanism self- feeding mechanism where it doesn't need input from us then it's a different entity that in size would become so much larger than than the entire human race which would make us as the minority here in terms of brain power in terms of resources and so forth I think that this is a very I'm not saying it's impossible but I don't think it's very likely that this would happen anytime soon and if we put the right guard rails on it I I don't think it's going to evolve into it I do feel that and you you've asked any smart questions about this which is okay great so what do we do now what are the next professions if some professions are are getting displaced um what are the new ones what should people learn what people major in I think this is when I look at people in general and and these could be full-timers not just free announcers and this not necessarily only super young people but also people that have been around for years in building a career it's a scary moment you know if you're a software developer would I have a job in five years from now I think that is scary I think people are worried about that and look I see it in among musicians I spoke recently at a conference in Hollywood in the entertainment industry movie studios are worried that instead of spending needing movie studios to spend $40 million to make a movie anybody can make a movie and you won't even need actors because the AI will will make the actors so what do you say for people who kind of like opt on the side of pessimism more than optimism here I I'm generally a techno Optimist because I've seen over my lifetime if I was looking also Generations back how technology on a net basis Mak human beings lives better I think that this would be the case here or just confus because things are happening very very fast and there's a lot of information that nobody knows if it's true or untrue about how far are we from AGI and for from Super intelligence some say we're decades away some say we're there already I think this this you know it this unknown factor creates a lot of anxiety as I've said for as long as human beings are the center of this universe and for as long as this needs to serve us and not the other way around we're going to be well it's just hard to imagine how jobs are going to change our lives are going to change but it's serving us which means that we were essential in this feedback loop because we're consuming it needs to serve us and it needs us in the equation to continue creating calibrating inventing imagining things for it to be better for us so I don't think it's likely that we're going to be left out of that equation and as the freelancing landscape changes and and evolves because of AI what do you think's next for Fiverr like how does Fiverr evolve along with AI so we're using AI extensively on our product to make it better right the the things that we can do for the benefit of our community and our community is both the freelancer and and the customers whatever we can remove in terms of friction repetitive work things that are unnecessary making the product simpler more efficient more accurate we do the very basic function of Fiverr is to do matching between between talent and and customers that has been tremendously influenced by AI in the past five or six years we used to call AI NL or machine learning that that that's kind of the earlier uh incarnations of of AI and now using the most sophisticated linguistical and mathematical tools to make matching better so this is one the other is just as soon as I log into the site for instance I'm already seeing things that your AI thinks is probably related to what I might want correct and it gets better and better over time this is something we've been doing for many many years in recent years we've been giving the superpower of doing this much more efficient than than we have before then it's about giving tools to our f meaning they they don't need to go out and experiment with AI or figure out what's the best AI for whatever there is a co-pilot uh agent on Fiverr that helps you through the process of ideation figuring out what you need helping you write a project spec send that project to the rights uh talents how them then contact you and so forth so we're using this technology to make everything simpler and more efficient we're trying to make these tools accessible for our entire community so that they can benefit from them instead of trying to go through tens of hundreds of different applications and tools just to figure out what's the best tool for something now let me ask you this Fiverr is a public company in the US I think the symbols fvrr is it worth it going public like it was that a drag no not at all this this was actually one of the most intellectually interesting things I've done as as a as as an entrepreneur and as a CEO and it's one that forces you to develop a discipline of running a business in a way that private companies do not have and sometimes it imposes thumb constraints over you and in many cases it just makes the organization so much more healthy and inefficient and so as we were gearing up to going public I decided that as an exercise about a year year and a half ahead of the I I started doing whatever public companies do which is having the right Cadence of quarterly earnings the board committees that come with it and the infrastructure that I needed within management legal Finance whatever it is and that created incredible discipline in the organization so for me this was this was great and then at the beginning when you are a young public company certainly in a in a in a space where you're pionering you invest a lot of time in just telling the story and having people understand what is it all about because it's a it's a new space it's not a space that is saturated and you're just another company and so you do that and that sharpens your storytelling in a great way and then it's about building confidence because you're a young public company and you need to create you know Rapport and in confidence with your shareholders these are all very teaching things I'm I'm not going to say that it's always easy or great but it's not always easy or great being a private company as well you know ahead of the IPO I I did a town hall with the team and I told them that we were going public and I wanted to educate them about the process a little bit I took graphs of you know the Magnificent Seven or Fortune 500 companies and I took graphs where you watch a graph and it's hectic it's all over the place it's going up and down it is hiking and then it's going to and and I asked the team which company is it and they they would try to guess and I said okay this is whatever this is Microsoft and he would say oh this is impossible this is all over the place and you said yes but this is one year let's zoom out let's do five let's do 10 years 20 years and those bumps up anded out you don't see them they become a line they just become good excise a straight line all the way you know and and this is kind of the summary of running a public company and sometimes you're super lucky and it's always Sunshine whatever I don't know a company that didn't go through a tough cycle where as long as you're still interested in playing a long game then you're fine if you're done or if you're in it for a short ride you're going to be miserable as a as a public company CEO or working for a public company it's it's very very tough well M Kaufman you know founder CEO of fiverr.com again I'm a fan of the site and I really love the story about how it went viral and your thoughts on AI and the gig economy thank you so much for coming on the podcast it's really an honor to have you thanks James thank you so much for Hing me [Music]