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The key to building a successful startup is simple, says Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze and author of Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: “Always 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, and then ask yourself, so who has this problem?” Levine told ILTV during the recent “Breaking the Code” virtual event, hosted in partnership with Afeka Academic College of Engineering in Tel Aviv.
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ILTV Breaking The Code - Uri Levine
If you’re the only person struggling with that problem, Levine joked, “go to a therapist”—it's cheaper and faster than launching a startup. But if many people share the problem, the next step is clear: talk to them.
“What you really want to do next is go and speak with those people and understand their perception of the product, and only then go and build a solution,” he said.
By following this path, Levine said, you ensure that your solution creates real value.
“This is the essence of the journey of building a startup," he said.
Levine knows the journey well. A serial entrepreneur and disruptor, he co-founded Waze, the world’s largest traffic and navigation app, in 2007. Today, it’s used by more than 750 million drivers globally. Google acquired the app in 2013 for $1.1 billion.
But the road to success, Levine cautioned, is long and filled with failures.
“Building a company is a very long journey and it is a roller coaster filled with failures,” he said. That’s why it must be a problem worth solving—and why the CEO and team must be right for the task.
“I would say the most important behavior of successful CEO of a startup is number one, never give up, no matter what happens,” Levine added. “The second one is, make your decisions with conviction, because it turns out to be that in many cases, we are trying to do everything we need to focus. And focus is not about what we are doing. It's actually about what we are not doing.”
For Levine, entrepreneurship begins when the desire to make change outweighs the fear of failure or the opportunity cost.
“The good news is that the fear of failure in Israel is relatively low,” he quipped.
So what’s the next big industry ready for disruption? It could be anything, Levine said.
“Ask yourself,” he concluded, “what is the thing that we are doing in the same way that our parents did? That is ready for disruption.”