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To quote the man himself, there are many entrepreneurs around. And there are many teachers around. However, there are very few entrepreneurs who are willing to teach and are truly capable and gifted as teachers.
You can, perhaps, build a unicorn by just getting lucky, but it takes some serious skill to do it twice. As a co-founder of Waze and Moovit, which both were sold for more than USD 1 billion each, Uri Levine has proven that he has it. Now he is willing to help others on their journey by teaching and sharing his experience.
There are no earth-shattering revelations in what Uri is telling. He just talks about well-known things while referring them to his personal story. His delivery is very thoughtful, precise and clear. This makes his messages even more impactful.
Here are my three takeaways after watching a podcast interview with Uri Levine on YouTube:
Lesson #1
Businesses are about value creation. The simplest way to create value is to solve a problem. Then you have to figure out your product-market fit. If you don’t, your company dies.
When you have identified the problem you should start asking around – who else has the same problem? (If you turn out to be the only one, it is much cheaper and faster just to go to see a therapist!) You probably will not need to speak to as many as a hundred people but it is important to get outside the bubble of your relatives and close friends to validate the problem.
You don’t need to have a perfect product to start with – you go to the market with a not-perfect product and iterate. There is only one metric that counts – retention. If you create value the clients will come back, if not – continue to iterate until they do.
For Waze, it took 4 years to find the right product-market fit (the initial idea was to sell traffic data to municipalities and developers), for Microsoft – 5 years, for Netflix – 10 years. ChatGPT has been around for 7.5 years; they were already 6 years old when we first learned about their existence.
Lesson #2
In Uri’s experience there are 2 main reasons why startups fail:
- they do not create value (which usually happens if the founders start with a solution, not the problem);
- teams are not strong enough, especially the CEOs.
As a good and strong CEO, you should never give up and make your decisions with conviction. Your gut feeling is right in about 80% of the time.
Potential team and ego management problems usually become apparent during the first month. It is for the CEO to ask himself the question: “With the knowledge and experience I have today would I hire this person?” If the answer is “no”, you should go on and fire the employee. If “yes”, express your appreciation of his work and give him more equity.
Lesson #3
There are 4 cornerstones for a sustainable startup ecosystem:
- a sufficient number of entrepreneurs (people who are not afraid to fail);
- investors (who like to understand how easy it is to make money in your geography);
- engineers (you can’t create new things without them);
- experience (it is significantly easier to build your second startup and to raise funds for that).
And, as a final note, you should embrace the failure. If you are afraid of failure you have already failed because you will not even try. You should be prepared to fail (failing is inevitable) and you have to want to fail fast.
For those willing to try and pick top lessons of their own here is a link to the video and here – to Uri’s book “Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook For Entrepreneurs”. And yes, I may receive a commission if you decide to buy it using this link.
* from anything that you are reading, watching or hearing you can realistically expect to remember only a limited number of things. My solution is to pick just 3 items or ideas from any material. This number is non-negotiable. Even the most extraordinary experience gets compressed into 3 things to remember. This approach has worked well for me.
This note was first published on medium.com on 10 November 2024.
Aivars Jurcans has more than 20 years of corporate finance and investment banking experience. His services are currently available through Murinus Advisers. More of his writings can be found on his page Corporate Financier’s Notes.
