Adapt or exit 🚪 AI’s cull is already here

This is the new founder reality

Jun 13, 2025

When AI does your job better, that’s the new commute. *Illustration: ImageFX/MM*

Micha Kaufman didn’t bother dressing it up.

“If you’re not adapting to AI, f* you. You’re done.”

On Harry Stebbings’ 20VC podcast, the Fiverr founder and CEO said the quiet part out loud. No one is coming to save you.

No one is going to upskill you for free. If your value can be replaced, compressed, or automated, the market will not wait for you to catch up.

I heard the same thing on my Millennial Masters podcast with Oliver Yonchev, co-founder of cocreatd. We skipped the theory and talked about what this shift actually means when the hype dies down and the pressure gets real.

Here’s what the two conversations make clear: this is not about whether AI is coming. It is about whether you are becoming harder to replace. 👇🏻

Upskill or leave: The AI era is ruthless

1️⃣ No one will save you

Micha Kaufman’s reality check:

“Why do you think it’s my responsibility to make you better as professionals? … If you’re not going to take the time to make yourself valuable, to embrace reality, you’re doomed. I’m not going to help you if you don’t want to do this, you’re either going to be poor or a burden on society.”

The safety net is gone. If you’re waiting for corporate to upskill you, you’ve already lost.

Oliver Yonchev agreed:

“The fallacy of a stable long-term career has gone. The paths that myself and people that came before me had, the opportunities they had, they no longer exist and they certainly won’t exist in the future. So you can either complain about that… or you can do something about it.”

2️⃣ Automate yourself, or be automated

Micha told his staff bluntly:

“My expectation of you is that each and every one of you … is going to replace 100% of what you do with automation… If you can automate 100% of what you do, now you have 100% of your time free to figure out what you can do that cannot be automated.”

If you automate yourself, you’ll solve higher-value problems. If you don’t, the market will automate you.

The alternative? Oliver believes you’ll have to build your own thing:

“Large companies will get smaller, which means displacement, which means talented people will have to choose agency and have to build their own thing… Sometimes people need a jolt to send them in the right direction.”

3️⃣ Be more human, or get replaced

Micha says AI is a humanity filter:

“Maybe in a weird way what’s happening with AI is forcing us to rediscover our humanity… If functions that we do as robots can be automated, there’s no reason for a human being to do it. What makes you special is your ability to ideate, to think in a way that’s unconventional.”

When the bots take over the busywork, what’s left? Taste, judgement, unconventional problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and anything with nuance, ambiguity, and soul.

The new edge isn’t technical, it’s human. Mansoor Soomro, who leads Future of Work research at Teesside University (and whose book The Generalist Advantage I reviewed in a recent Booksmart edition), is blunt:

“If AI can take specialist roles, then there’s a new demand: generalists over specialists.”

Mansoor’s answer isn’t fighting the bots head-on, but learning to use AI as a tool, stretch your skills, and stay useful across more than one lane.

Generalists win by connecting dots, adapting fast, and building new value on top of what the algorithms automate away.

Your brand, your business, your team must lean into what makes you weird and original. The rest is for the LLMs.

4️⃣ The new market ruthlessness

Micha says you have to adapt or exit:

“If you don’t want to do this, you’re either going to be poor or a burden on society … wake the [__] up, grow up. If you don’t want to work, don’t work. The exit from the building is on ground floor, bye-bye.”

In Micha’s world, the future is binary:

No one is owed a living
Those who wait for a company to “find a place” for them will get swept out by market forces

For founders, the bar just got higher for hiring and retention. Build teams of owners, not passengers.

5️⃣ Marketing juniors, say goodbye

Micha’s warning:

“The area that is going through the most fundamental disruption is actually marketing… Entry-level juniors have been replaced the fastest, definitely faster than developers.”

Everyone obsesses about AI replacing coders, but Kaufman points to a faster cull:

Entry-level roles in marketing and customer support are already vanishing
If your skill is “junior” or easy to automate, it’s already at risk
The winners will be those who master context, nuance, and advanced creativity, which are traits bots don’t have (yet)

If you’re a founder or hiring manager: upgrade your expectations. The days of “hire and train” for entry roles are numbered.