Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Lessons from a two-time unicorn builder, 50-time startup advisor, and 20-time company board member | Uri Levine (co-founder of Waze)

June 9, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze and nine other companies, shares principles from building startups, advising 50 founders, and serving on 20 boards. His framework emphasizes solving real problems passionately, iterating through failures, and making focused decisions across startup phases.

Falling in Love with the Problem

Startups begin by identifying a personal frustration worth solving that affects many others—validate by talking to at least 20 strangers (aim for 100 to push beyond comfort zones). If they deny the problem or redirect to another, pivot or abandon. This problem becomes the North Star, enabling a compelling story that engages users, team, and investors; for Waze, it shifted from avoiding traffic jams to providing certainty about arrival times, which users valued more. Passion is essential, as the journey demands internal drive through hardships.

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What you'll learn

1 *(02:17) **Career Overview & Fall in Love with the Problem**
2 *(04:56) **Validating Ideas & Passion Requirement**
3 *(12:13) **Pivots & Finding Startup Ideas**
4 *(19:11) **Product-Market Fit & Waze Launch Story**
5 *(30:17) **Startup Phases: Focus One at a Time**
6 *(40:37) **Fundraising Tactics**
7 *(54:14) **Hiring & Firing Ruthlessly**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Uri Levine is the co-founder of Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app, acquired by Google for over $1 billion. He’s also founded nine other companies, been on the board of 20 companies, and advised more than 50 companies. He’s most recently the author of Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs, hailed by Steve Wozniak as the “Bible for entrepreneurs.” Uri is dedicated to creating impactful startups that solve real-world problems and has seen everything from failure to moderate success to big success. In our conversation, we dig into:

• Why falling in love with the problem is key to startup success

• The phases of the startup journey and how to navigate them

• Why firing is more important than hiring

• How Waze iterated to achieve product-market fit

• Tactics for telling a compelling story when fundraising

• Much more

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