Levine, a two-time unicorn builder and co-founder of Waze, explains why entrepreneurs should start by thinking of a 'big' problem worth solving
Uri Levine is a two-time unicorn builder and co-founder of Waze is also a former investor and board member in Moovit. He has authored Fall In Love With The Problem, Not The Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs. In an interview with Forbes India, he touches upon multiple aspects of the entrepreneurial journey—identifying consumers’ biggest problems, failing fast, raising funds, finding product-market fit, disrupting inefficient markets, and so on. Edited excerpts:
Q. Why should we fall in love with a ‘problem’?
The entrepreneurial journey is about value creation, and the simplest way to create value is to solve a problem. But there is so much more to it. When you fall in love with the problem, it serves as the North Star of your journey and when you have a North Star, you make fewer deviations from your course and are more likely to be successful.
The last part, which is occasionally the most significant one, is that the story you tell about your startup to investors, users and other stakeholders will be much more compelling. Just imagine that, in 2007, I would have told people “I’m going to build an AI crowd-source-based navigation system”, everyone would say “Oh yeah, very interesting, but no one cares”. If I had said “I’m going to help you to avoid traffic jams” then people would care (as they did).
When your users or customers care about your journey, they want you to be successful and will help you get there. This is also why I called my book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution.
Q. How can we identify a problem worth pursuing?
Before embarking on an entrepreneurial journey, your pre-journey phase will be to validate the problem. A true problem worth solving will resonate immediately, and people will start telling you about their experience with that problem. If your audience can't grasp the issue within seconds of your explanation, it's likely not their problem to begin with. Therefore, speak with 100 people to get their perception of the problem.
Q. How crucial is it to figure out product-market fit?
Product Market Fit (PMF) means that you create value to your users or customers. If you don’t figure out PMF, you will die.
I want you to think of all the apps you are using every day, from using Waze, through searching Google, or WhatsApp, and ask yourself, what’s the difference between any of those today and the first time you have used it. The answer is simple: There is no difference. So, once a company figures out PMF, which is the value that they create to their customers, they don’t change that anymore. What we don’t know is how long it took them to get there, because before they have reached PMF, we never heard of them. The answer is years. It is a long journey to figure out thevalue creation.
PMF has one metric—retention. It is very simple, if you create value, they will come back. If they are not coming back, you are not creating value.
Q. What makes Israel a haven for entrepreneurs?
The journey of building a startup is a journey of failures. When you are trying to build something new, and even though you have the conviction that you know exactly what you are doing, the reality is that you don’t. So you keep on trying different things until you find one thing that does work. So, the reality is that if you are afraid to fail, you already failed. Albert Einstein used to say that if you haven’t failed, it is because you haven't tried anything new before. If you are going to try new things, you will fail. The other immediate conclusion of that is that you need to fail fast.
I think failure is received differently in Israel. We are encouraged to try things and fail. The media, government, and tech ecosystem, all accept failure and see it as a lesson.
Q. What’s your perception of India’s startup ecosystem?
There are four cornerstones for a successful startup ecosystem: