Waze founder Uri Levine : Create value and you will be successful
In his debut article for Jewish News' new business and tech section, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the popular navigation app explains why solving big problems — not chasing ideas — is the surest route to growth
As the founder of Waze and a dozen other startups (including 2 unicorns so far) when you look at me, you see an entrepreneur, 100% entrepreneur, maybe even 1000%, and a one with philosophy of value creation, but I’m also a teacher so I would feel equally rewarded if I build stuff myself, or guiding some to build it.
Photo by Orel Cohen
Writing my book, Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution – the book that Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, called the bible for entrepreneurs – was fulfilling my destiny as a teacher and my destiny of value creation. I’ve tried to share my know-how which is very unique on building unicorns. The book is a cookbook for building successful companies, from before the beginning throughout the entire journey.
Fall in love with the problem
Building a startup, or for that matter, any business in the world, is about value creation, if you create value, you will be successful. If you create a lot of value, you will be very successful. The simplest way to create value is to solve a problem and therefore – start with the problem.
Think of a problem, a big problem, a problem worth solving and then ask yourself who has this problem? If you happened to be the only person on earth with this problem, you may be better off by getting a therapist, but if a lot of people experience the same problem, what you really want to do next, is go and speak with this people to understand their perception of the problem.
Then and ONLY then start to think about the solution. If you follow this path and your solution works it is guaranteed that you are creating value, if you start with the solution, you might be building something that no-one cares, and that it going to be really frustrating. Albert Einstein said that if he would have an hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes thinking of the problem and only then start to think about a solution.
Qualifying the problem is the first step, in general I would say, you need to speak (face to face, really speak and watch for body language) with a 100 people, the results will be dramatic, if people don’t perceive the problem as something that is major issue for them, the disqualification probably saved you many years of frustration. However, if people share the same problem and start to tell you their version of it, you will fall in love with the problem.
Then the problem will serve as the north star of your journey and when you have one, you are simply more likely to be successful.
The Waze journey was about traffic jams, I hate traffic jams, and most people do.
Let me try one more way to convince you to focus on the problem, your story is going to be way more compelling. Just imagine that I would be here in 2007, just before we started Waze, telling you that I’m going to build “an AI, crowd source-based navigation system”, which is essentially exactly what we did. You would most likely say: “very interesting”, but you don’t really care, but if I were say: “I’m going to help you avoid traffic jams…” then you do care and when your customers care about what you are doing, they want you to be successful and they will help you to become successful.
At the end of the day, people don’t care about what you are doing, they care about what you are doing for THEM.
Start with the problem and think of value creation, and in particular for who.
Uri Levine is the founder of Waze and author of the book Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution
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