Uri Levine
General Partner, The Founders Kitchen. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderauthorinvestoracademic@urilevine1 ↗LinkedIn ↗urilevine.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Uri Levine is an Israeli entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of Waze, which was acquired by Google. He is also the author of the book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution.
1shows
2appearances
39statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Uri Levine said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Levine: Founders should shut down and restart if investors reject pivot funding
“If you are unable to convince your existing investors to re to reinvest in the company in order to build the new part of the journey, the new the new journey, then you know what? Shut down the company and restart a new company that is doing exactly that. And t…”
Levine: Companies stop fundamentally changing their product once they reach PMF
“So once a company figure out product market feed, they don't change their product anymore. Because this is the value that they create to the customers, and you don't want to change that.”
Levine: Product-market fit is measured by only one metric—retention
“Product market feed in general have only one metric. Only one metric. Retention. Look, it's really simple. If you create value, they will come back. That's it. If they are not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.”
Levine: Founders should only quit if the problem vanishes or board breaks
“There are only two reasons that you would like to give up. One is that your mission is wrong, right? So, so the problem disappears. And if the problem disappears, your mission is no longer relevant or no longer valid, then you might want to consider to give. T…”
Levine: Retention is the only metric that defines product-market fit
“Product market feed have one metric. One metric. That's it. Retention. That's really simple. If you create value, they will come back. If they are not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.”
Levine: Navigation apps create far more value through certainty than time-savings
“If you ask people, what is the value of ways? Then it's not about avoiding traffic. It's about creating certainty. And certainty is way higher value than saving time. So, you know, exactly when you're going to get there. And this is a way higher value.”
Levine: Low-frequency products must figure out monetization before scaling
“If you have high frequency of use, you will end up with growth coming by itself, right? Word of mouth. And therefore you should do that at the beginning. If you don't have high frequency of use, you are sentenced to acquire users or customers all of your lifet…”
Levine: Founders should pitch early-stage investors completely alone
“The first one is that the CEO goes alone to the meeting. I need the headlight on me. I don't need any distractions. I don't need my team members. I don't need anything else in the room, just me.”
Levine: Managers should ask if they would rehire employees at 30 days
“Every time that you hire someone new, what I really want you to do is mark your calendars for 30 days down the road, and ask yourself one question.
Knowing what I know today, would I hire this person?
At the end of the day, I'd like to nail that into
Yes or no…”
Levine: Google paid out TomTom's $18M annual contract upon launching proprietary maps
“TomTom was the provider of the maps for Google to do navigation, and they basically say, no, we have our own maps, we are going to terminate the contract, and TomTom said, wait a minute, you are paying us eighteen million dollars a year, and we have five years…”
Levine: Waze investors advised selling for $20M–$30M following Google Maps navigation
“Our own investors told us that, look, if we can sell the company for 20 or thirty million dollars today, do it, because you are not going to be successful.”
Levine: Companies die solely because they run out of cash for bills
“That's the only way that they die. Okay. By the way, all the companies in the world, right, they are unable to pay their bills and therefore they die.”
Levine: Diluted all shareholders during cash crises to give staff 5x equity
“In many cases we had to engage the employees, right? No, we don't have cash. So what we did is that we diluted all shareholders in order to give employees way more equity, right? So five times more equity than they had before.”
Levine: Layoffs are probably better than broad salary cuts
“I, in general, I would say letting people go is is probably better than reducing salary for everyone, right?”
Levine: Venture investors prefer startups pivot rather than return capital
“The interesting part is that investors don't want their money back. They did not invest in order to have their money back. They invest in order to make a significant impact, and obviously they don't want to go back to their investors and tell them, guess what?”
Levine: Let customer validation build your passion instead of starting with it
“When you validate the problem and the value proposition, even if you don't have the passion, if it's being validated, your passion will be built up... And so don't start with the passion. Let the passion be built.”
Levine: Interviewing 20 strangers validates whether a startup problem is real
“So if you speak with a hundred people, but if you actually speak with 20 people that you don't know, you will get validated whether or not this problem is real or not.”
Levine: Waze's crowdsourcing model will never work in Japan
“Japan is a very good example where it didn't work, and it will never work, right?”
Levine: High-frequency apps need 30%-50% 3-month retention for PMF
“In general speaking if you look at something that have high frequency of use, then you will be looking at Three months retentions of 30, 40, 50% is actually pretty good indication, but usually what would happen is that you would know when they convert, and tha…”
Levine: A pitch deck's title slide is the most important
“The most important slide of your presentation is the first slide. Not the one that you think about it, the first slide, the one that says company XYZ intro. This slide is going to be presented for the longest period of time.”
Levine: Top performers always leave when startup CEOs avoid hard firing decisions
“In a small place like a startup,
The hard decisions will always go to the top.
Now, if the CEO does not make that hard decisions, the result is always the same.
The top performing people would leave.
They would leave because they don't want to be in a place th…”
Levine: Startups losing product-market fit must restart from square one or die
“When product market feed disappeared, you actually need to go back to square one. And the faster that you realize, and you basically say everything that I know so far, everything that I knew so far is irrelevant anymore. Can I restart? Can I go back to square …”
Uri Levine vows never to build startups subject to regulatory approval
“What I decided on a personal level is that I'm not going to deal with the regulation anymore. I don't want to rely on a regulator to allow me or not allow me to do what I want to do.”
The other half of the tape: Uri Levine's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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Lenny's Podcast 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Uri's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | General Partner, The Founders Kitchen | 2 | 39 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |