I recently interviewed Noam Bardin on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the CEO of a business that helps more than 100 40 million people around the world or effectively get to where they're trying to go. Noam Bardin has been the CEO of Waze since 2009, leading the company through its acquisition for over a billion dollars by Google in 2013 and all the way through today. Noam, I'm thank you for joining us.

Noam: Glad you're having me.

Adam: Noam, you have a really interesting background that predates your time and Waze. Growing up in Israel, starting a company, and ultimately taking it public. Can you take listeners back to your early days and share the key experiences that ultimately prepared you to build and run a billion dollar business?

Noam: So I got into tech by mistake. And my original plan was to go into economic development and go save Africa. But I studied that in school and I was going to work on it. But then during my second year of university, I got a part time job at a startup, and really got hooked on this new technology called the internet, it was just emerging. It was a different world, right? Very few people have computers at home, no one had access to the internet, everything was changing. And it was fascinating, because you could literally do anything. There was no history, there were no experts. And I got really involved in the technology side. We founded a company called Delta Three, which became a global IP provider. But I meant doing everything from actually building the hardware, to setting up private links and a private internet network because the public internet couldn't carry voice going public, like doing all these different things. And to me, that's what I find fascinating about technology companies. They're really interesting when the world goes through significant shifts of behavior, because suddenly, anyone can do everything, and the experts have no value. And it obviously changes as we get more and more mature. So the same thing happened around the move to mobile. Right. As mobile began, we started Waze. One of the first decisions I had to make was do we build a version for blackberry or for the iPhone, and at the time, all logic said, to do the Blackberry, because that was a dominant platform. That and Windows Mobile, and iPhone was this new thing, you have to jailbreak and you weren't allowed to run navigation apps. You didn't even have an app store in the beginning. So all that was another really fundamental change. And I think when these fundamental shifts of technology and consumer behavioral technology happen, that's where startups and smaller companies can have massive impact. And when you come in today into the mobile ecosystem, it is very mature. Right? When we started, you couldn't get analytics on everything, right? You couldn't build things that you could do today, many API's didn't exist, we actually built a keyboard generator in the beginning, because there was no standard keyboard for mobile phones. So that's what I found so fascinating and what still drives me, when it comes to new technology. I think the third thing really is the impact, when there are these massive changes. And if you're doing something that's important, you have an opportunity to have a disproportionate impact on the world and users, and how people in our case now, travel and mobility, but it changes in different areas. And so those are kind of the three things that really got me into tech and got me hooked on it.

Adam: Something really interesting about Waze is that- I don't know how many listeners know this- is that it was born out of a traffic congestion crisis in Israel. Can you talk about how the idea emerged and the lessons you learned from finding opportunity, and ultimately building such a highly successful business amid a crisis?

Noam: The traffic crisis in Israel is the same as everywhere, right? Any major city you go to in the world today has terrible traffic and every city thinks it has the worst traffic. And that's another interesting thing; in a way everyone's right. Everyone has terrible traffic, right? It doesn't matter if Jakarta is worse than Los Angeles. They're both terrible.

Adam: I'm pretty sure L.A. has the worst traffic. I can tell you that as a L.A. native there isn’t any traffic worse than the traffic in L.A..

Noam: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, go to Jakarta to go to Sao Paolo, you know, all around the world, even Washington D.C., which, by the way, has worse traffic than L.A.. But it doesn't matter, you live in L.A., you don't really care what happens in Washington D.C., your traffic is terrible for you. And that's kind of the unifying thing. And traffic is an interesting sort of enemy to work against because usually when you have technological changes and shifts, and you get into new areas, there are winners and losers. And so you need to convince people to adopt the disruptors view, at the expense of income. When it comes to traffic, there are no winners, right? We're all losing from it and that's what makes traffic, to me, such an interesting challenge. I mean, traffic has a huge impact on all of us. It destroys our health on many different metrics. The longer your commute is, the worse your blood pressure, the worse your weight, the worst, your back pain, you know, tension, depression, divorce, huge economic ramifications for all of us, right? We're paying, in the U.S., over 1,300 dollars a year, the cost of lost productivity, and being in traffic. And it's just the worst part of our day, you know? You're helpless. And that, to me is what makes this problem so interesting. At the same time, we look at the problems the world is facing, and traffic being one of them, we're kind of moving away from single issue problems into global, macro, a bottom up community. Think about COVID. COVID is not a problem that one country or one city or one organization can solve. It has to be have all of us working together. Think about a climate change. Right? It doesn't help that your country is adhering to the Paris Accord if no one else does. And so traffic is not going to be solved by one technology, by one person, by one company, one government. We need cooperation of people on a massive scale. And we need coordination. And that's very much how Waze sees itself. We see ourselves as the platform that can help coordinate. But we need everyone to work together. And I say everyone. Every time you use Waze to drive, you're actually helping teach us about the traffic conditions and help the Wazer behind you. It's our community members who actually build the map and add local restrictions and know everything that's happening locally. It's our partners like cities, and the Department of Transportation that work together with us to try and plan and change, you know, how they're managing traffic. And so that's what I find so fascinating. And if people ask me, why are you still at Waze, you know, you sold the company. It’s not about the company, it's about the mission. The mission here lives on. And we're far from solving it. And what's in common with the new kind of global problems that our globalized world has? They all require cooperation on a different level and participation on a different level that we've ever had before.

Adam: Noam, along those lines, what advice do you have for entrepreneurs and for leaders, trying to figure out how to best identify opportunities within the crisis we're in now or within future crises, and how to ultimately do what Waze was able to do and turn a negative into a positive thing?

Noam: When you look at entrepreneurs setting out I think they're kind of two different types of entrepreneurs. The people who set out to build a startup, and now they're looking for a problem to solve. And to me, the odds of that working are very low. And even if you are successful in the beginning, startups today, or long haul things, right, the average exit today is more than 10 years, not like it was in the 90’s, a two year thing. And so you need to really find a mission that you connect to. And that's very much the second type of entrepreneur. And these are people that see a problem that bothers them and the world. And they think that the world is not doing something the right way. And they have an idea how to do something different. And it usually stems from either a really deep understanding of the problem, or a passion for solving the problem. And I think that's what it is when I think about really exceptional founders. It's usually around that passion. Because nothing is easy. No, the amount you work for a failed startup is the same as a different amount of work. There's obviously differences in outcome, but it doesn't really help so you need to be able to sign up for something that you think is important enough that you want to spend the next 10, 20 years of your life doing it, on the one hand and you're willing to go through terrible pains for clarifying a huge toll on you physically and on your family. You know all this work life balance stuff that's really in large corporations, that doesn't work in startups. Startups are not about work life balance. They're about going crazy to solve something you passionately believe in. And that really becomes your life. That's what you care about. And that, to me, is the number one thing. If there's something, if you don't have something you're that passionate about, don't start. And a lot of people look at startups as a way to make a lot of money. And that's a selection bias, right? You're looking at the few that succeeded. The reality is that most didn't succeed. And risk adjusted, going to work at one of the large technology companies will give you a much better payout to yourself, than going to a startup. So you go to a startup, because you're passionate about it, because you're willing to do it, even if you fail. And even if you're not successful, because the odds are, you're going to fail, and you're not going to be successful. And my second startup was like that. And, you know, I joined a company as CEO. And, you know, three months in, I realized I joined it for all the wrong reasons. I joined it because I wanted to join a company. I wanted a company that was venture backed, you know? I did minimal due diligence and due diligence from the perspective of, I want to take the job. And I had the worst two years of my life, because everything was wrong about it. The product was wrong. You know, once you're in you can't get out. In many ways, the 2008 crash was lucky for me because it forced me to shut down that company, which, by the way, is your most traumatic experience, you can go to shutting down a company firing the people that have been with with you on the mission, disappointing your investors that you've just burned through someone else's money, right? Everything that happens, around shutting down a startup is terrible, and nobody talks about it. All we hear is the wonderful successes. And to me, it was very lucky. Because through that startup that I shut down, I actually met the founders of Waze. And we ended up you know, all of Waze, it came out from that. I'd also say that I learned the most from the failed startup. Again, when things go well, it's very easy to think you're a genius. And when they don't go well is when you understand what you're really worth. And so to me, that's one of the things we're missing. We're missing a lot more discussion around failed startups; why they fail and the pain of failure. And so that people should be very careful when we start to make sure they're going on a mission that's worthwhile, on the one hand, but also knowing that it's worthwhile, even if they fail, because the odds are, they're going to fail.

Adam: Noam, I really appreciate that. And that's actually a consistent theme of my show. I really try to ask just about every guest I have on here, assuming there's enough time for it, about key failures that they've experienced in the course of their journeys- whether they were failures in their professional lives or failures in some other aspect of what they've done- that has been ultimately instrumental in the success that they've enjoyed. Because no, I agree with you completely, that we don't learn when we succeed. When you win a game, you go out and celebrate, you don't go back and study the tape. It's when you lose that you are extremely introspective, and you pour over everything that went wrong and try to understand what you can do differently the next time. And I do want to spend some time on this topic. I want to ask you, what are some of the challenges and mistakes early on in your days leading Waze that you had to overcome that ultimately set the business on the course for the kind of success that it's ultimately been able to enjoy.

Noam: So you know that the nice thing about failure is there's so many different ways you can screw up. If you use something differently every time, you'll be able to screw up multiple times without repeating the same problem. And that's the most important thing. You know, to fail once at something. It makes complete sense. It's going to happen to everyone. If you fail twice at the same thing you haven't learned your lesson. The Israeli Air Force has a culture of analyzing anything, any operation, any training, exercise, anything. There's a whole format of how you analyze and learn from it. And especially from things that went well, but had a lot of failure. And this is kind of the biggest challenge. The hardest thing, I think, about learning is that a lot of times you succeed, but on the way you made a lot of mistakes and these mistakes could have destroyed you, but you were lucky, you made it through. But if you don't learn from that, you will do it again. And next time you won't be solo. And so, you know, in most militaries, they do a lot of investigation when an accident happens. When someone got hurt Israeli Air Force, they do an accident investigation. When no one got hurt, but someone violated the rules, or two planes flew close to each other, or whatever it was. And those are the most important learning opportunities. And because when you completely screw up, it's easy, right? And when you're successful, it's very hard to look back and say, I made mistakes. So we had a lot of mistakes at Waze. I think one mistake I like to talk about is about a year into Waze, right? We just launched and our plan was- remember at the time it was 2009 and there were no real navigation apps for free. All navigation apps cost at least $10 a month. That was because the data itself, the map, were created by two companies, you know, NASA and Tele Atlas. And NASA got bought by Nokia for about a billion dollars and Tele Atlas got bought by a compound with four and a half billion dollars. And obviously, that's what helped us with our round. But more than that, in this duopoly, the common wisdom was, it's impossible to build maps any other way. You need thousands of trucks, thousands of employees to drive every road again and again and again. And no other company did because it was a natural duopoly that the cost of setting it up was so huge. And you have to keep doing this every year, or every day to keep up with the changes. And so we came along with the idea that you can build out the community and we assumed that you can do this with cell phones and like one of our big bets was that every cell phone will have a GPS chip. Today that seems obvious, but at the time it wasn’t. And so all these things lead to a situation where we managed to build the map. And the big distribution force we're going to have was to give things away for free. Because now if you offered a navigation service, the traditional map, you had to pay so much money for the license for the map that you had to charge, like $10 and $5 of those went to the maximum. And suddenly, we came along and gave a navigation app for free. And as you know, free is much more powerful than $10. And so that was our marketing plan. That was our plan of how we were going to distribute ourselves and how we're gonna change the world. And the logic following the Christiansen model was that the beginning our product would be inferior, right, but it will be free. So people would use it. And as more people use, it will get better and better and better to the point where it will be better than the traditional. Because again, we will have millions of people around the world participating in this project. And that was all wonderful and everything was going well. And then the small startup out of the bay, I don't know if you've heard of Google, came out with their own app. It was a navigator, right. And that was like the price crisis of the company. That was a classic. I had term sheets from fancy VCs that suddenly disappeared. It's over. My investors freaked out, we freaked out. And we freaked out, because we assumed that Google was going to do its usual, a plague, meaning they would open up all these API to distribute it for free. And they totally destroyed the whole industry in terms of making their map the default map of the world. And suddenly, we would be gone. They stole our thunder, they're giving it away for free. And so in a moment of panic, we actually decided to focus on Latin America. So in the United States, we said Google will start heavily in the U.S. and they'll go to the U.K. Don't go to Germany. This was us, negotiating with ourselves with all kinds of assumptions of what this company is going to do. And that is the worst thing you can do as a founder, trying to assume that one of these large companies you understand how they work. Today, you know, I see very differently, I'd never worked at a large company, but that moment of panic cost us a long time. We should stay the course in the U.S. and we should have kept going and not been afraid of what happened there. And we lost about a year to a year and a half of the focus going through that process. But the good thing out of it though, it made us focus deeper on our mission. It's like okay, now we're moving to a world where everyone's free. What do we have that's different? And a lot of the features and functionality that we built was really about optimizing for the everyday commute versus for the navigation to a place you don't know. And obviously things worked out pretty well for us but looking back I think one of the biggest challenges startups have is fearing the large company. And, you know, today we're part of a large company. We are much less dangerous than we were when we were starting. We move slower, we have a million different types of constraints on us now: privacy and legal and policy; all these different constraints, which large companies I have thought of don't have. And that's why startups and the very few major innovations that come out of large companies, they usually come out of startup. And you know, even if you look at TikTok, right, TikTok was created by a startup, and suddenly everyone's doing short form videos. But why didn't some of the video platforms invent that? Why did a new startup have to invent that, and this is really, I think, the most important lesson for me to give to a start up. When you're competing with a corporation, everyone's gonna freak out, investors are gonna freak out. But that corporation doesn't know who you are, they don't care about you, they're doing their own thing. And there's a very good chance that you have more engineers working on your specific problem than they do, because they're working on a million problems. And their engineers are now transferring two roles, and yours are committed to this one mission. And so I think the most important lesson, to me, is really, to focus on yourself. Your competition doesn't matter in the beginning because nobody cares about you, because you're nobody, you're a little startup. And frankly, don't try to pretend you understand what your competitor is going through because the constraints they're under are so different from what you're under, you just can't get there. Focus on your users, focus on your mission, focus on your product. And things will either happen or they won't happen. You can’t blame your competitor for your own failure.

Adam: No, that's incredible advice. And that's a ton of information that I wish that I had the ability to write down with a pen and notepad. But fortunately, I go back and listen to these interviews afterwards because as an entrepreneur, you're giving me information that I didn't know about. I've not worked for Google. And it's really interesting for me to understand that perspective. And I'm sure for tons of listeners out there understanding that Google doesn't really know who you are. And if they do, they probably don't even care all that much, and not nearly to the extent that you think they do. And having that perspective allows you as a leader to focus a lot more on your productivity on your mission, on your end game and a lot less on being fearful of what Google, or whoever else, you’re afraid of. So I think that that's really, really valuable advice.

Noam: I think we use Google as an example because of Google Maps architecture, but I can look at Facebook, right? Facebook, theoretically, should have invented Instagram. But they didn't try their hardest. And at the end, they had to acquire Instagram, and arguably Instagram is worth more than Facebook today. Right? Every major company out there builds different types of messaging products, multiple messaging products. And then they were very small. 38 people in the company. They were acquired for $19 billion. I mean, put it that perspective; it's really about that focus, that clarity of mission, that commitment of your team, and your ability to focus only on one thing. I think one of the things that kills startups more than anything, is trying to do multiple things. Like we saw how hard it was, when we launched our carpool service it was extremely hard internally to begin building a second product for a whole company that was focused on one product. The complexity of launching multiple products is one of those under discussed things. And if you look at Apple today, Apple, one of the most valuable if not the most valuable company in the world, basically has one product; the iPhone. Yeah, it's got some little computers that itself, sell some earbuds and cut off the cable. Now, obviously, that's where their margin is, I believe that's where the margin is. But at the end of the day, it's all about their iPhone. They focus on it, they do it the best, they go deeper and deeper and deeper on it. And so it's easy to think about launching more and more products to solve your problem. But no, the problem is in your core product and your core mission, and there's unlimited things you can do, you know, whatever the mission is, because you know it better than anyone and you know what has to happen.

Adam: That's incredible advice and as you said, Noam, advice that is relevant to any entrepreneur in any leader in any industry you're in. It doesn't matter if you're competing with Google or Facebook or with a big player in literally any industry. I think that what you shared is so applicable, and I really appreciate it.

Noam: You know, it's even more the constraints and the thought process and the strategy of the large player are so different than yours and you can only understand that, but as you look at products, they look the same. They look at feature lists that look the same. But that's not their company. Like Facebook? Right? It has a million priorities, a million constraints. They're coming out with their dating service, right? That's a very different sector to be in. First match.com- that's all they do. Right? And so match.com has all its resources, that’s all it's focused on, all its learning. Facebook, it's going to be a project and you know, some person came in, and then he left and another person came in, some engineers came in. It's a live or die situation for match.com. It's live or die. And this is why I'm a big believer in companies that focus on one thing. So Spotify is a great example. Right? Spotify does audio. They could have gone into video, right, because there’s 2 million different directions. But no, they went only audio and they got deeper and deeper and deeper to audio, then podcasts, and recommendation engines and all these different things that they do. They are experts at it. They work with artists, you know? There are multiple music services out today that are offered for free, or for different price points and bundled with other things. And frankly, they all have the same content. Music today is available to everyone who wants to pay for it, right? But the actual experience you get and that connection that users have with it, and the focus on artists, and all these kinds of things are unique to Spotify. And it was always the same thing for us. It's not about music, obviously. It's about driving. We only do driving. We go deeper and deeper into driving, whether it's no tolls and lanes and local restrictions to carpooling, and sharing the planning, which is a new thing we're doing to try and help you plan when to leave the house. And all of these kinds of things are us going deeper into our problem and our mission. First expanding to bicycles and walking and public transit. Each one of these things is a world of challenges and is a world of understanding that seems easy when you don't do it, right? Because it's always the neighbors' grass is always greener. But when you let, you know, the complexities that you understand that your mission is really what makes you so you're going to a new mission. You have no value there.

Adam: There’s so many questions that I want to ask you and there's so many topics that I want your advice on, but because this is 30 Minute Mentors, and I tried to keep the interviews to around 30 minutes, I'm gonna ask you a question with one word that is a pretty broad word. But it covers a lot of different topics and it dovetails on what we just spoke about. And I think you have such an interesting seat at the table, given your background, building entrepreneurial companies and now serving as a senior executive at Google. My question is, how can leaders build a winning organizational culture? And what I really want to know is, I want to know your thoughts on how to build an organizational culture that fuels innovation. I want to know your thoughts on how leaders can most effectively hire the right people. How can we build winning teams, I know there's a lot here, but you've given such a wealth of information. And I would just love any thoughts you have given your experience on both sides of the table, working as a CEO for smaller organizational entities, leading Waze and not working for Google.

Noam: So I think the success of every organization really stems from the leadership of that organization; the leadership creates the culture. And culture eats strategy for breakfast, as we like to say. Culture is not a kind of a thing you can learn, not a process, Do ABCD to have a great culture. Personal culture is very different. And a great culture is a very different traditional mission and what you need is very different. So there isn't like one culture for all. And so I think that with leadership, hiring is the hardest problem. I've failed at it multiple times. I struggle with it. It's so hard. There's no easy way to do it. But I think the thing that really sets apart great leaders is that they're focused on the mission and not themselves. I think where things go wrong is when leaders begin really thinking that they're special, and begin focusing on how things help their career and their brand. And I'd like to say that if you see a founder speaking at a lot of different conferences, there's a problem. If he has the time to speak at a lot of conferences, he has those priorities. Right. So that’s the essence is that it all comes from the leader and everything is what you actually do. There's a problem with culture. When you go into a company you see in the world and all their mission statements are their seven, you know, ideals or whatever, that they're basically describing what they don't have. That's what they want to be. That's not what they are. And the fact he had to write it on the wall is the problem. And it doesn't matter what you say or what you write; it only matters what you do. And what you do, especially at night, when you're tired, when no one's watching. Those are the most important parts to the culture. You know, the leader that leaves before his team in the middle of a crisis sets the message. The leader who says hmm, we need to hire diversity, and then treats all different types of people differently. Or the leader who likes to talk about their users, but never actually met them, doesn't track what they do. I mean the reality is leadership is who you really are and what you really are and who you really are is what you really do. And, you know, Ben has a great book on it, that basically leadership is what you do, not who is not what you say. And it's a great book because it describes different cultures being built by different organizations, from the slave mutiny in Haiti, to, you know, all different types of organizations. But I think what connects the leaders really is their focus on the mission and what has to happen for the mission, and not on themselves, not on an individual person, and really setting the tone by what they do, and not what they say.

Adam: Noam, thank you very much, really appreciate all the great advice and wisdom and thanks so much for joining us.

Noam: Thank you for having me. And I guess my last point would be startup life, I think, is the best kind of life you can lead. But only if you choose the right mission that you are really passionate about. Not because you're trying to make money, not because you think this will give you a work life balance, not because this is what the cool kids are doing. You do it because you want to solve a problem that's been bothering you for a long time, or that you're connected to emotionally. It's not about deciding I want to start a company. Now let's figure out what to do.

Adam: Noam, I tell audiences that I speak to that you want to check three boxes. Number one, do what you're great at. Number two, do what you're passionate about. And number three, do what you can to make a difference in the lives of others. And if you can check all three of those boxes, you know, you found it. And if you can find that in the entrepreneurial world as you have, as I have as many others have, that's awesome, and it's awesome that you've shared all this great advice with us. And thanks again for being a part of 30 Minute Mentors.

Noam: Thank you for having me.


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also 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. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, 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. 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.

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