Michael Eisenberg (00:00)

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Welcome to the best of Invested from 2025. This year, we covered everything from Gavin Baker’s contrarian take that climate is a solved problem—powered by solar, batteries, and maybe even fusion—to Nas Daily’s blunt claim that “followers are dead” and organic reach is over. We dug into big-league investing categories with Sender Cohen’s George Soros-vs.-Druckenmiller lessons, and went inside Big Tech culture with Noam Bardin’s post-Google letter and what it teaches founders after an acquisition. Along the way we hit brand reinvention, like Fiverr’s celebrity-powered repositioning, and the bold, sometimes uncomfortable decisions it takes to build for your next 10 million users. Here are the highlights. I hope you enjoy them.

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I am thrilled to have my old friend Gavin Baker. Welcome, Gavin.

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Gavin Baker (00:52)

Thank you, thank you, so excited to be here. 

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Michael Eisenberg (00:53)

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You mentioned that you think global warming and climate is actually a big issue, but you think it's solved.

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Gavin Baker:

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I agree. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Because of solar? 

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Gavin Baker: 

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Because of solar and batteries. God forbid one of these fusion companies works. And it seems like one of them might probably will. I don't know which one, but yeah, I think believing in global warming is a problem because it became part of an ideology. And if you just look at the facts in the data around what is happening with solar and batteries, like it’s very–the world is going to run on natural sunlight in my lifetime. I mean, in America–

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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That’s a big statement. The world is going to run on natural solar, fully in your lifetime.

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Gavin Baker: 

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Maybe my children's lifetime, if I want to hedge. But I mean, it's economics. It's just economics. Every year it gets cheaper, and essentially every other source of power gets more expensive. And definitionally, all power comes from the sun. Fossil fuels are just stored sunlight. Nuclear is just artificial sunlight. Actual sunlight plus batteries, it really can, and I think will get you there. I mean, in America, we are back to 1920 levels of emissions on a per capita basis. I think it's very hard to understand math, look at the charts of what's happening with solar from a cost perspective, and a deployment perspective, and be really worried about global warming.

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Michael Eisenberg:

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China was a big part of that, I think is fair to say, right? Because of economics.

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Gavin Baker: 

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100%, because of economics. Yeah, they needed–China does not have domestic fossil fuels. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Right. Absolutely. They needed a lot of oil. 

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Gavin Baker: 

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So yeah, that's why A. they went so hard on solar and batteries and B. they went so hard on EVs. Because for them, it was a national security issue, their dependence on oil shipments from other places. So yeah, I think the world's gonna run on sunlight. I'm a committed environmentalist. I love to be outdoors, but I genuinely believe global warming is a solved problem. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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In your lifetime, or your kids’, to hedge.

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Gavin Baker:

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The trend is it's just–it's the boulder has started rolling down the hill. It's rolling down the right path, and it's going to take you there. Just economics. Elon did more for this planet in decarbonizing it than all of the activists and the Greta Thunbergs combined. Those crazy people who are splashing paint on paintings–they make people you want to go buy a big rig. They don't do anything useful. Elon did something useful. If you care about the planet, and you care about global warming, you just have to be pro-Elon.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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I'm here with Sender Cohen. First podcast, welcome Sender. 

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Sender Cohen (03:59)

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Thank you. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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You spent years at George Soros. 

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Sender Cohen: 

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Yep. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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What's the big thing you took away from him?

Sender Cohen: 

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The great similarity that George and Stan have is, they're both able to distill things down to a very simple concept. The big difference between George and Stan, I think it was actually Scott Bessent who said this, to paraphrase him–

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Now nominated to be the–

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Sender Cohen: 

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Treasury Secretary–and I think you heard Scott at the last, we're about to host something together; at the last one, Scott and Stan started off the day for us, which was a lot of fun.

Scott once said that George can get into the mess. The market's a mess, and he knows to get out, right? And most people don't know how to get out of that mess. Stan never even gets in the mess in the first place. I daresay even on this podcast and I don't know, you know, on the public sphere–Stan is a better investor than George.

He just has a skill that I think is unique and second to none, but that's like comparing, you know, as I say that he's better than George, and I very much think he is a much better investor than George, certainly at size. He's shown an ability that few have shown.

If I knew sports, I'd compare it to when you realize the great nations–

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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LeBron James and Michael Jordan?

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Sender Cohen: 

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There you go. LeBron James and Michael Jordan. 

Michael Eisenberg: 

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Each person will decide whether George is LeBron James or Michael Jordan, or whether Stan is LeBron James or Michael Jordan.

Sender Cohen: 

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Yeah. I like that. But yeah, Stan is a very unique talent. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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I sense also their politics are pretty different. 

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Sender Cohen: 

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They are quite different. They are quite different. But despite the difference in their politics, one thing that I always think about, especially in today's fractured times, is the way that they're both focused on helping people.

George comes from the far left. Stan, he's not by any stretch far right. I think he's classified, classifies himself as an independent. But he just stepped down as chairman of Blue Meridian, which is one of the most amazing organizations in helping underprivileged people in America that exists today. I mean, it's an absolute powerhouse. You look at the list of multi-cent of billionaires, whatever the term is these days, that are involved in this incredible–that was all Stan's doing, pulling them all together.

Michael Eisenberg: 

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Amazing. And how would you describe your investing style, having been both at Soros and with Stan?

Sender Cohen: 

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My investing style is a bit different. I'm not a really great investor, and I say that with complete sincerity. It's true. What I'm very good at is figuring out a trend or an area to be in, and finding the right people to do that. That's what I'm good at. I'm not good at underwriting a specific security; I am good at underwriting a person, and I'm good at underwriting a theme or a trend and putting that person together with the theme or the trend.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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You're like one of the OG content creators of all time.

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Nuseir Yassin: 

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Yes, sir. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Is that fair? 

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Nuseir Yassin: 

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I think that's fair.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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You're very humble too.

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Nuseir Yassin: 

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Organic content is dead. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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What does that mean? 

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Nuseir Yassin: 

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Followers are dead. I came here at the beginning of the show and I lied to you. I said I have 70 million followers. That is one giant lie, and I'm so comfortable saying it to everybody, because no one knows it's a lie. The concept of followers does not exist anymore. If you want to sell something on the internet, you cannot sell to your followers, because you cannot access them, because the algorithm blocks you. So you could have 100,000 followers as Aleph, VC, and then

one day you make a video saying, ‘Please buy my t-shirt.’ You'll get 2,000 views. 2%. And 98% will not see it. So do you have 100,000 followers or do you not? You do not.

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Michael Eisenberg:

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I am thrilled to have Noam Bardin with us. Welcome Noam. 

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Noam Bardin: 

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Thank you. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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So you left Google, and you penned a flame, a letter. What's the right way to describe it? Tell everyone what you did, what the letter said, basically. 

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Noam Bardin (08:05)

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So I left Google, and all kinds of people were asking me why I left, whatever. And I thought, let's put my thoughts down on paper. And I never had any idea what was going to happen.

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If I had, I would have ended it differently. I would have thought about what I'm saying, whatever, but I just wrote what I thought, and published it, and literally the world exploded the next day. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Because what did the letter say? 

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Noam Bardin: 

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So basically I was commenting about the culture at Google, and the mismatch of culture with a startup. And a lot of people read it the wrong way, but the way I looked at it–I naively felt that I wanted to make an impact on Google coming in. You know, we startup people think we can do everything, and we can change everything. And I thought I was going to make this big impact on Google.

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And I went out and basically fought some windmills around that, and realized at the end that it really is kind of the nature of the beast. It's not something that's fixable. That's what it is. That's your nature. A corporation has a certain nature to it. And, you know, today when, just a side note, a lot of entrepreneurs talk to me, they've just sold their company to the corporation and then they read my note, and they're like, “Wow, this is really something.”

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And what I tell them is, “What you need to do is to get out as fast as possible. What you're doing is actually damaging your team. When you're trying to fight to keep it separate, trying to preserve your values and your culture. You've sold your company. It's not yours. Now you've got to–the faster you come to terms with that, the better it's going to be for your team, for the acquiring company, et cetera.”

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I fought very, very hard to keep Waze independent. I also tried very hard to change things at Google, and ended up losing on all those battles. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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What was your description of the culture of Google? 

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Noam Bardin: 

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It's complicated. I think Google is an extreme case of a corporation, because it has literally unlimited amounts of money coming from a very small team in the company, a small percentage–

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Michael Eisenberg:

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The ads business. 

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Noam Bardin: 

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The ads business, search ads, that's where the money comes in at the end of the day, and everyone else can live this imaginary life that they matter. And frankly, they don't, from a financial perspective.

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Michael Eisenberg:

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The greatest business model of all time funds all of these great ventures. 

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Noam Bardin: 

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Of course. They would argue they're not a monopoly, and they're not dumping, and all these kinds of arguments. Bottom line is, we all know what's going on, right? They have this great monopoly, best monopoly ever, creating tremendous profits. They're using that to build all kinds of stuff, giving away for free, that nobody else can compete with. 

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The problem, from a culture perspective–what happens is that people begin believing in what they're saying. So this idea of OKRs, right? I make up some goals, which are not connected to sales, because there's no money.

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So there's no real external impetus. And I believe that until money transfers hands, nothing happened. So at that point, we're all just talking and loving each other, right? And then when you try to sell something is when you discover what your product's really worth, right? And so you can make up these OKRs and obviously hit 80 percent of them because you made them up, right? And feel really good about yourself doing it. And at the same time, it creates this culture of exceptionalism–without being exceptional. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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I am thrilled to be here with Gali Arnon. Welcome, Gali.

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Gali Arnon (11:19)

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Hi, I'm thrilled to be here. 

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We want people to know that you can actually buy good stuff on Fiverr. So we hired Rob Janoff. Do you know who Rob Janoff is? 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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I don't.

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Gali Arnon: 

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Alright. So he's the designer who designed the Apple logo. Do you know the Apple logo? I'm sure you do. So he worked with Steve Jobs to design the Apple logo. And then we said, “Let's bring him on the platform for a month to kind of offer a limited edition of his logos on Fiverr, for $10,000. But he will do it for a month, and we'll do a whole campaign around it. And people will actually say, ‘Well, we can buy a logo on Fiverr from the same guy who actually designed the Apple logo? Well, maybe it's not as low quality as I thought.’” 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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That's actually an amazing idea.

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Gali Arnon:

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Then we did a whole design event in New York around it, and we invited designers. He was on stage, he told his story on how he worked with Steve Jobs and all of it. That was the first move. And then we decided, well, it's working and let's do it in other categories.

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We brought Wyclef Jean for the music category, and we bought Eli Roth, which was a horror show, in the horror show business, film business in Hollywood, to do the video editing limited edition. And then we went on and on with different celebrities in different categories and it worked really, really well. And then we did so many other things. And as I said, it was climbing a mountain, but the vision was very clear. There was many different things we did in order to get there. And I think we actually did.

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Michael Eisenberg:

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You know what I need to ask you now, right? Who is the celebrity for the love potion?

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Gali Arnon: 

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Martha Stewart. 

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Michael Eisenberg (13:10)

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I’m super excited to be here today, back on Invested with Micha Kaufman, Founder and CEO of Fiverr. Micha, welcome. 

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Micha Kaufman (13:17)

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Thank you, thanks for having me. 

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This notion that your workplace is responsible for making you better–where on earth did you get that idea from? Who's responsible for making you a better person, a better spouse, a better parent? Why am I responsible for your professional capabilities? Fuck you. Seriously. Like, I'll help anyone who helps themselves. But if you look for me to educate you about AI, you're doomed. You're done. You're done. And your problem is, you're not done at Fiverr, you're done period. There will be no demand for lazy people that expect the world, or think that the world owes them anything.” 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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I think if you look at corporate America right now, particularly Howard Schulz's Starbucks, he's sending the baristas for college education, I think many of these companies have in-house training to try to make people better. I think your view is not popular.

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Micha Kaufman:

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How's that going?

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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I think your view is not popular. 

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Micha Kaufman: 

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I don’t care. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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I think it's related to the previous thing you said, which is freelancers are accelerating faster

than people in corporations, because they are expecting the corporate employer to train them. And you think, I think the point you're making very forcefully, and I wanna double click on it, is it's not working. That's a pipe dream. And so what should we do? Just tell people, figure it out on your own?

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Micha Kaufman:

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Absolutely, yes, it starts from that. Meaning, okay, so we had this meeting–

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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‘We’ is the company?

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Micha Kaufman;

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Yes. I sent this memo. It was very blunt. And I said, “Okay, it might come as a shock to you, and that's fine, but I'm here. If you wanna spend time with me, let's talk. And so I've asked my

my Chief of Staff to set up this space that could hold 70 people, whatever, 50 people. But I said, I'm just gonna take my laptop, and I'm just gonna work there for three hours. If someone wants to drop by, just sit with me, and let's have a chat. I went down to that room, there were 250 people cramping up. And I wasn't prepared to give a talk.

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So we started having this discussion, and in one of the first questions, I said–so we had a long weekend. It was one of the holidays and it connected with a weekend. I said, “How many of you, because you've seen my memo like 10 days ago, how many of you spent one night of that very, very long weekend vibe coding, trying to figure out how to do proper prompting, just using different AI solutions? If you haven't, I can't help you. Like, fuck you, seriously. Like, I'm not gonna help you. I'm not going to help you. But if you're making the effort, if you wanna become better, if you feel that you're responsible to making yourself worth...then in that case we have a lot to work on. And everything that we obviously discover as individuals within the team is gonna be shared. It's gonna be shared with those who want and are interested in doing that.” 

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And I think that this was a very important wake-up call for people. Because I've seen the transformation.

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Michael Eisenberg (17:22)

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I'm thrilled to be here with my friend, Omri Casspi.

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Omri Casspi (17:28)

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Good morning, thanks for having me. 

“You guys are gonna make a lot of money in the NBA. There's guys sitting courtside that make much more money than you. They're billionaires and multibillionaires, right? You play for the Warriors, you see Elon Musk, you see Mark Zuckerberg, right? Folks that are worth $200 billion. So try to get interactions with them, ask them questions, meet them for coffee.” 

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Essentially like you prepare for a game, you know, in many ways. You can't come to a game and play against LeBron James, and expect just to show up and perform at the highest level, right? Because if you don't do the work, if you don't lift weights, if you don't shoot, if you don't wake up in the morning, and you stretch, and you massage, and you eat properly, and you prepare for a game, he's gonna crush you. He's gonna crush you most times anyway, even if you do all these things, right? But at the same time, if you do all these different things–so if like, you box out to a rebound, one thing coach always says, is, “Don't look at the ball, you know, go out and do the early work. Box out, put your body in the position, and then go get the rebound.” And then you can put yourself in position to get the rebound. It's the same way for retirement. And it's even more drastic in basketball players and professional athletes, and many, many, many athletes, you know, retiring. They really find it hard to find themselves in life after basketball, right? So you have to do the work early.

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And one thing I tried to do at the time is to meet folks like yourself, and folks in real estate, and ask questions, and to pick their brain about different things, and strategies, and ask dumb questions. And while you're playing–I had a unique position, being the first basketball player from Israel, so folks were really nice, and I was fortunate to meet them even after basketball. 

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Adam Fisher (19:10)

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In the case of Wix, I saw two things that I really had not seen before in Israeli companies. The first was this marketing angle that they had. They were doing things that I'd never seen before, well in advance release of the product, of how to create–everything from buying their URL, a three letter URL back in 2007–but also various sites that were kind of building their SEO, and just already thinking about paid acquisition, which is something that again, I was not very familiar with. That was fresh. And that to me felt like somebody who was really thinking far ahead. 

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The second thing I saw, and this actually helped, that I'm not technological, is the whole proposition that it shouldn't be that to create content on the web, you need to be a developer, or that you had to learn a specific kind of software. That didn't make sense to me. And I've always been one to say that if it can be made for non developers, or non technical people, then that is what will succeed. Because most people will always be non-developers.

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So that's what I saw in it. It was admittedly a small investment. It was a two million dollar initial investment, with an option for another million. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Back then, you could still do those kinds of deals. 

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Adam Fisher: 

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I had to overcome a lot of doubt. My partners really didn't like it. Because again, there was no traction. I don't mind saying this. The company did not present well at the time. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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So I have a similar story, by the way, when they came to see me–it was right at this point, and older listeners will appreciate this, when Flash was about to become obsolete, and Wix was originally built on Flash, and they walked in and started telling me “Don't worry about it. Our current platform is going away, but there's a thing called HTML5 that we'll just reconstruct everything.” And you're going, “They didn't really just say that in the presentation right? That the whole thing is going obviously, but don't worry, it's going to be okay.” And I actually admired the honesty on it but it was a tough kind of–

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Adam Fisher (21:19)

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Oh, they were always very transparent, right? I mean, there are a lot of things I learned from Wix over the years. I mean they were a magnet for talent. Whenever they saw somebody who was talented, they would find a way to find a position for them. It just didn't matter what the titles were. It was a company that didn't care about titles. They just wanted talent.

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And so they became a magnet for all types–former founders, new ideas. I mean, Monday was spun out of Wix and all the different products. The second thing was being afraid to throw away what you've done. I mean that moved from Flash to HTML5–they literally said to 1 million users, “Fuck you, because we're not going to support you anymore.”

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Now, they didn't use that language of course, but they said, “Listen, we care about the next 10 million users, not the first million.”

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