Micha Kaufman, CEO of the freelance marketplace Fiverr, sent his entire staff an unusually blunt internal message about AI in spring 2025. It went on to circulate widely, and it is worth reading as a document of how one platform CEO reads the moment.
What the letter says
Kaufman opens by saying he believes in radical candour and dislikes sugar-coating reality. Then he delivers the line the message became known for: AI is coming for your job — and, he adds, for his own.
His argument runs roughly as follows.
No role is exempt. Kaufman lists programmers, designers, product and project managers, data scientists, lawyers, customer support, sales, and finance people, and says AI is coming for every one of those patches.
The easy work disappears. Tasks that felt hard become easy, and tasks that felt impossible become possible. His warning to staff is that unless they become exceptional at what they do, they may find themselves changing fields — and that this is about their ability to stay in the industry at all, not just their job at Fiverr.
Panic is not a plan. He tells people to take a moment, then calm down, and concentrate on becoming genuinely excellent.
His concrete advice to employees:
Study and master the newest AI tools in your own field. Try several and work out which give you “superpowers” — more output in the same time, at better quality. He names examples by function: coding tools for developers, ticketing tools for support, contract tools for lawyers.
Find the sharpest AI users on the team and learn from them.
Treat time as the most valuable resource. Working the way you worked in 2024 is, in his framing, doing it wrong.
Learn to prompt. He argues LLM and generative AI skills are the new baseline competence, and that without them your value drops quickly.
Take part in making the organisation more efficient with AI, rather than assuming the answer is hiring more people.
Internalise the company strategy and pitch your ideas on your own initiative instead of waiting to be invited into a meeting.
Stop waiting for the world or your employer to hand you chances to learn and grow — create them yourself.
He closes by acknowledging that some readers will think he is simply trying to frighten them, and invites those who agree to come and talk about where the company is heading. The journey ahead, he writes, will be the hardest they have taken — and a rewarding one.
The original message as screenshots
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