I recently went one-on-one with Uri Levine. Uri is the founder of Waze and the author of the book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution- A Handbook for Entrepreneurs.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Uri: Excited to be hosted here and thank you for the opportunity to share my know-how. 

Most people would know me as an entrepreneur, founder of Waze, and in fact another unicorn, Moovit (so far two and working on more), and a dozen other startups. I am an entrepreneur, no doubt, but I also have the personality of a teacher, so I feel equality rewarded if I build stuff myself, or guide someone to build it.

Writing my book Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution-A Handbook for Entrepreneurs, was fulfilling my destiny as a teacher – sharing my know-how with entrepreneurs and business people in order to help them to become more successful. 

I have a destiny and a purpose of creating value, and I’m lucky that I have multiple ways to achieve that. From building startups that create value through mentoring my CEOs, to teaching. Writing the book was another significant way of creating value.

It wasn’t always like that, I started my career as a software engineer, writing code, in Fortran, then C, and then becoming a product person, and marketing, and business. 

My last line of code was checked back in 1996 and my first line of code was done on a Sinclair Zx81 computer. Throughout my career, I was the troublemaker, the one who doesn’t take anything for granted and challenges assumptions. 

My entrepreneurship journey started formally at the age of 35, in the year 2000, with the first startup that dealt with mobile email and eventually failed. 

I started Waze when I was 42, and it was acquired when I was 48. Since then, I’ve started and helped more than a dozen startups. 

To learn sometimes from advice, and mostly from making those mistakes myself. Some of the most critical lessons in building a startup. Failing is painful, but getting up is empowering, one of the reasons for it is that you get up stronger, not only continuing your journey, but in particular knowing that if you fail you can always get up. 

One of the quotes that I like a lot is of Thomas Edison, who failed in his journey for electric light so many times, until one day someone came to him and said, “You’ve failed 1000 times, why don’t you give up” and he replied, “No, so far I’ve found a 1000 ways that it doesn’t work.”

Adam: What would you like readers to take away from your new book?

Uri: Not only understand the journey of building a startup and the different phases in its evolution but mainly some of the key lessons for building companies and creating value, starting with the name of the book

• Fall in love with the problem, not the solution – the reason it is important is very simple, the startup journey is about value creation, and the simplest way to create value is to solve a problem. 

So your journey should start with a problem, a problem worth solving, that many people would have and that should remain the north star of your journey. When you have a north star, you are going to make fewer deviations from your course and increase the likelihood of being successful.

• Building a startup is a journey of failures; we keep on trying different things until we find one thing that does work. If you realize this, there are two immediate conclusions.

• If you’re afraid to fail, in reality, you have already failed, because you are not going to try. Albert Einstein used to say “If you haven’t failed, that's because you haven’t tried new things before. If you are going to try new things you will fail”

• Fail fast, because then you still have resources and time to make another attempt, and therefore increase the likelihood of being successful.

The key to innovation – a low fear of failure, so people are willing to try something new.

• Making hard decisions with conviction and fast

• Never give up.

Adam: How did you come up with the idea for Waze? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?

Uri: Most of my ideas originated in frustration, something that I ran into and it upsets me enough to think about changing that, and I hate traffic jams. But it was only in 2006 that I had my Eureka moment, realizing that if there was someone ahead of me on the road that would tell me what was going on, only then I would be able to avoid traffic jams. Waze crowdsources everything, so people ahead of you on the road are the ones who de-facto tell you what’s going on ahead of you.

Adam: How did you know your idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?

Uri: That’s easy, start with the problem, think of a problem, a big problem, something that is worth solving, something that the world will become a better place if you solve it. 

Then ask yourself, who has this problem? If you happen to be the only person on the planet with this problem, I would recommend a therapist, which is way faster and cheaper than building a startup. If a lot of people have this problem – what you really want to do next is go and speak with 100 people and understand their perception of the problem. This is the most critical validation of the problem, or of the value proposition before you even think of starting your journey. Only then, start to think about the solution and how it is solving the problem.

Adam: What were the key steps you took to grow and scale Waze? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?

Uri: In a startup, the next level is actually the next phase of the journey. At the end of the day, in order for a startup to become a unicorn, it will need to figure out all journeys, the product market fit journey, the business model journey, the growth journey – then they are in a position to become a market leader. Out of all those journeys, achieving product market fit (PMF) is always going to be the first and the longest one. PMF means that you create value for your customers/users. If you don’t figure out PMF, you will die, as simple as that, in fact you never heard of a company that didn’t figure out product market fit, they simply died. 

There is only one metric for PMF – Retention, that’s really simple, if you create value they will come back. If they are not coming back, guess what? You’re not creating value and then you need to go back into making another attempt and another. A long roller coaster journey of failures. Once you do figure out PMF, then you switch gears into the next part of the journey which could be about business model or growth, and guess what, each one of them is going to be a long roller coaster journey of failures.

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Uri: Let me start with a story that I really like, about a very successful CEO, who shy away from the media, and never gave an interview, not even one. 

One day, a reporter from the New York Times called him up and asked for two minutes. The CEO was probably in a good mood and said OK. The reporter immediately asked the first question “How did you become such a successful CEO?” and the CEO said “Two words – right decisions!”. The reporter asked the follow-up question, “Ok, but how do you know to make the right decisions” and the CEO replied “One word – Experience”. Then the reporter asked the next question – “How do you gain the experience?”, to which the CEO replied “Two words – wrong decisions.”

You don’t have to make all of the mistakes yourself, bring the experience to help you avoid some of them, find a coach or a mentor to guide you, and still make all the hard decisions yourself.

Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?

Uri: Do you even care, do you care if Waze is the best AI crowdsource technology and that there's actually rocket science behind it, or that there are thousands of people watching in real-time satellite imaging and calculating your route and ETA manually? While it is the first one, as a user you don’t care, you only care about what’s in it for you – what the value for me.

I would recommend rather than focusing on technology and trends – focus on the value you create, and the value created for your users or customers.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Uri: 

Entrepreneurs;

• Don’t be afraid to fail and never give up

• Focus on value creation

• Make hard decisions with conviction

Execs;

• Ask yourself what will make you irrelevant in your market

• Employees are your most valuable asset

• Make hard decisions with conviction

Civic leaders;

• Embrace the following – my mission is to make this place better for our children

• Say what you do and do what you say

• Make hard decisions with conviction

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Uri: Don’t be afraid to fail.

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Uri: Yes… about the new chapter in my book: Crisis Management – Survival Mode.

Over the past five years, we've witnessed several of them, like COVID-19, an economic depression, and wars. I found myself dealing a significant part of my time with crisis management. The traditional startup journey is already tough and turbulent. It is the journey of failures but has become the journey of frequent crisis navigation. 

In the new edition of my book, I dedicated a new chapter to Crisis Management – Survival Mode for those coping with a major crisis, which we'll all experience at least once throughout our startup journey. In the chapter, I share my attitude to crisis management: "It doesn't matter what kind of crisis it is. The fact that the market is unfavorable for everyone, not just your company, doesn’t matter. 

The fact that other people also suffer from the same problems is of no importance. It is your responsibility to solve your problems, whether it is harder due to external reasons or not. Should this prevent you from building one? No. This is why I believe resilience has become an essential skill in today’s startup world.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one-on-one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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