Uri Levine

The Cookbook for Entrepreneurs: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

How do you build a successful startup? You have to start with the problem, and you must fall in love with it. 

Uri shares the failures and successes of building a startup, providing tips and insights for entrepreneurs and anyone who has in the past or is building a product or a service for users. 

There are many reasons people blame the failure of a startup, from the wrong team to not getting enough funding. However, most startups, according to Levine, fail because they never found product-market fit (i.e., they couldn’t answer a big problem that is relevant to many people and bring value to users or customers).

Audiences will come away understanding the importance of focusing on the problem, finding product-market fit, and making hard decisions, which are all key to strong leadership and success.

The Waze Journey

Today, Waze is an app used by more than 750 million drivers worldwide to help them navigate and avoid traffic. However, in the early days, the company had to build its own maps from scratch, and most of the people who tried the app gave up using it because it was not good enough. Moreover, the company leaders found it very hard to persuade investors to invest in the company. It took “a dance of 100 noes” to get funded. With so much going against the company, how did it become so successful? 

In this story-filled talk based on his time at Waze, Uri will share the lessons he learned about how to build a successful startup. Audiences will discover the journey of startups, including fundraising, figuring out product-market fit, working in phases, and how to scale and grow.

Disruption and Innovation for Startups and Corporates

Why do some companies fail to innovate while others constantly reinvent themselves? How do you know which markets are “broken” and need disruption? And can corporates disrupt their own markets? 

The world is filled with stories of companies that failed to change and were disrupted, but some do succeed in reinventing themselves, survive, and flourish.

In this talk, Uri shares how disruption and innovation work for startups and corporates. Audiences will learn about building a culture of innovation and how to foster it in yourself and your company.

Understanding your users - the key to Product-Market fit (PMF)

Figure out Product-Market fit (PMF) or die. If you think hard, we do not know companies that did not reach PMF. The reason is they did not survive. For most companies, it may take ten years to reach it, and in many cases, the product will stay the same (think of how you used Google ten years ago and today, for example). In his talk, Levine explains the importance of understanding you are only a sample of one, the need to learn your different users, how you do it, and how this would help reach PMF, which is the key to success.

What can governments learn from entrepreneurs?

iPhone, Waze, WhatsApp, Uber, Netflix, Moovit, Tesla and Meta, and so many other products that we are using daily, were created by entrepreneurs who changed the world. In fact, if you look at the top ten companies in the world today, most of them were started by entrepreneurs not that long ago.

If it is all private initiative, what’s the role of governments in innovation? In his talk, Levine explains how governments should set the conditions for entrepreneurship and innovation: remove barriers; establish an ecosystem and remove itself. All this with the thought of What will make a better world for the next generations and understanding who their users are.

How to invest in tech startups?

While it is considered a high-risk investment. It is also considered one of the most exciting and high-profit investments. Yes, we are talking about investing in tech startups.

Uri, who has been not only an entrepreneur but also a mentor to startup CEOs, and an investor, has seen it all from all sides of the equation and unveils the secrets of how to tell if the startup, and more importantly, the founders and CEO are up to the rollercoaster journey of building a startup.