A CLEAR CAPSTONE STRATEGY: INTERVIEW WITH URI LEVINE
Conducted with the London Technology Club, March 2020
Uri Levine is an Israeli serial entrepreneur. During the cornerstone (i.e. early) phase of his career, Uri completed military service in Unit 8200, Israel’s cyber spy agency, part of the high-tech military that is famous for incubating tech talent.
In 2007 he co-founded traffic navigation company Waze with Ehud Shabtai and Amir Shinhar. He served as CEO between 2008-2009 and later president of the company. Waze has 230m active monthly users in 185 countries. The company was sold to Google in 2013 for a reported $1.1bn. At the time it was the largest price paid for an app (just weeks before Facebook acquired Whatsapp for $16bn – something now Uri admits may have pushed the price up if he had sold a bit later….). But one can tell Uri is not driven by money. The day after the company was sold, Uri left. His keystone phase was complete, at the age of 48 he had financial sovereignty from the sale.
What’s most interesting to us is what Uri did next. His Capstone project. The most impressive thing about Uri is his awareness of his purpose, strategy for action and focused amplification. Acting immediately after the sale to Google, his path has been the following:
1) CLARITY OF PURPOSE
“Doing a lot of good for a lot of people is the only thing I care about”
Uri clearly prefers working with small teams and at the early stages of creating and building companies.
He is fuelled by falling in love with problems. He is fuelled by mentoring CEOs that also love a problem and want to provide the solutions. Building on his own experience and passion for creating the core DNA early in a company, he can help entrepreneurs navigate and succeed with their companies but this time, from an advisory point of view rather than being ‘in the weeds’.
Uri Levine focuses mostly on consumer services, the common denominator: those which create a lot of value to a lot of users, like saving money, time and empower them– in other words, doing good and doing well.
Lastly, he is fuelled by the purpose of sharing his wisdom with many others with his talks and presentations.
2) STRATEGY FOR ACTION
Uri is focused on funding and mentoring startups (13 at present but adding approx. 1-2 new per year). Many are going very well. Moovit (the Waze equivalent for public transport vehicles) he mentioned has been acquiring over 1m new users per day.
Uri pre-seeds personally himself, his seed round is with co-investors, then has a vehicle (called The Founders Kitchen) to invest as gets traction and scale.
Uri helps define and embrace the entrepreneur’s journey and the process of fuelling startups.
The strategy focuses on PCM: Problem, CEO, Mentorship. Within the mentorships, Uri is about getting the CEOs to focus, make mistakes fast, go through the journey of failures, make hard decisions and ultimately provide value creation for users. He focuses on the CEO as the buck ultimately stops with them. The CEO hires the team around them and if Uri can find A-list CEOs, they will hire other A-listers for their executive team.
3) FOCUSED AUDIENCES AND MESSAGING
Uri wants to speak to and make an impact for as many people about effective start-up cultures, trip falls and entrepreneurship.
3 audiences Uri is impacting:
1) Close mentorships: The 13 or so CEOs he works directly with. Uri explained he usually regularly meets with the CEOs he is mentoring in his kitchen at home (hence the name for his company The Founders Kitchen)
2) Audiences at conferences/ mass events: He presents as a keynote speaker and at many large-scale conferences allowing him to present his thinking and advice at scale. Spreading the word to more people about being entrepreneurial.
3) Mass consumers: that use the solutions (i.e. the companies that he is helping to build) of the problems identified.
He picks and chooses the forums to present at as well as always wearing his signature t-shirts with his messaging on, these messages are his ‘first principles’ that he has consistently referred to in his talks. Pearls of wisdom from his t-shirts and presentations include:
“Fall in love with the problem not the solution”
“Startup = a journey of failures”
“Find the product-market fit”
“Often free and good enough wins”
“The DNA and mission define the journey”
“Solutions might change over time but as long as the problem exists it’s worth solving it”
“Essentially as a CEO you need to say no to everything that isn’t solving the problem”
“Create value for the users. Make it easy to get to the value”
“The biggest enemy of ‘good enough’ is perfect, trying to achieve perfection could kill your startup”
“Many people will tell you it won’t work. Listen and hear why they say so, but it doesn’t mean it won’t fail”
Uri and his Capstone project is clearly keeping him motivated and will probably keep doing so for many many years to come...
“People don’t stop dreaming when they get old, they get old when they stop dreaming”
“We are doing more and more” he says. “I am not finished with the revolutions I want to start – there are so many.”
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For additional information please also see Wingman client and their Venture Capstone, the London Technology Club (www.londontechnologyclub.com)