Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs

by Uri Levine

Overview

Unicorns—companies that reach a valuation of more than $1 billion—are rare. Uri Levine has built two.

And in Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, he shows you just how he did it.

As the cofounder of Waze—the world’s leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date, and which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion—Levine is committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking so that other founders, managers, and employees in the tech space can build their own highly valued companies.

Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and his second unicorn, Moovit, revealing the formula that drove those companies to compete with industry veterans and giants alike. He offers tips on:

Firing and hiring

Disrupting “broken” markets

Raising funding

Understanding your users

Reaching product market fit

Making scale-up decisions

Going global

Deciding when to sell

Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution offers mentorship in a book from one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, and empowers you to build a successful business by identifying your consumers’ biggest problems and disrupting the inefficient markets that currently serve them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637741986
Publisher:	BenBella Books, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	202,576
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Uri Levine is a passionate entrepreneur and disruptor, a two-time ‘unicorn’ builder (Duocorn). He is co-founder of Waze, the world's largest community-based driving traffic and navigation app, which was acquired by Google for $1.1 billion in 2013, and former investor and board member in Moovit, ‘Waze of public transportation’, which was acquired by Intel for $1 Billion in 2020. Levine has built more than a dozen startups, and has seen everything ranging from failure, middle success, to big success. He is also a world-class speaker on entrepreneurship & disruption. Motivated to encourage the next generation of thinkers and innovators, he also leads an academic workshop entitled “How to Build a Startup”, aimed at undergraduate and graduate-level business students.

Table of Contents

Foreword Steve Wozniak xi

Introduction 1

1 Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution 9

2 A Start-up Is a Journey of Failures 35

3 Embrace Disruption 71

4 Operate in Phases 89

5a Ride the Fundraising Roller Coaster 117

5b Manage Your Investors 153

6 Firing and Hiring 177

7 Understand the User-You Are Only a Sample of One 205

8 Figure Out Product-Market Fit or Die 229

9 Making Money 255

10 How to Get to a Billion Users 283

11 Go Global 311

12 The Exit 323

Happylogue 365

Acknowledgments 369

Index 373

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The best insider account about Waze you’ll ever get . . . Offers lessons in succeeding as an entrepreneur."
—Peter Coy, The New York Times

“Waze co-founder Uri Levine has one of the rarest of all entrepreneurial traits: he has the skills and persistence to have launched multiple successful companies, paired with the self-awareness to know how he did it. In Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, he shares these hard-won truths with the rest of us . . . It should be required reading for every aspiring entrepreneur.”
—Marc Randolph, Co-founder, Netflix
 
“A window into the entrepreneurial mind that through passion, perseverance, and accountability can change the world . . . Reading this book feels as if you’re a mentee sitting with Uri to understand the next step in your start-up adventure—practical considerations combined with memorable mantras that drive entrepreneurs to ask the right questions and optimize chances of success throughout their journey.”
—Jennifer Fleiss, Co-founder, Rent the Runway

“Uri Levine provides unique insights on what builds enduring entrepreneurial success. The entrepreneurial path is a journey through a labyrinth of challenges that requires a passion for problem-solving that delivers timely solutions—a must-read for every start-up that yearns to be a unicorn and beyond.”  
—Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Executive Chairperson and Founder, Biocon

“Waze was the first Israeli consumer app to blast through the entrepreneurial equivalent of the four-minute mile barrier: a billion-dollar exit. Since then, Israel has produced dozens of ‘unicorns,’ but it was Waze that paved the way. And Uri Levine just kept going, the quintessential serial entrepreneur. When he gives you advice, it’s time to sit back, listen, and learn.”
—Saul Singer, New York Times bestselling co-author of Start-Up Nation