Uri Levine: prediction

Transcript context

…Yep. And then you need to decide, and then you need to decide on your action and your new plan and maybe it's a new strategy. If all of a sudden I would say if this is about product market fit disappeared, then this is a new strategy. And maybe it's about deciding on extending the run rate or keep on trying or whatever. And this is something that is really interesting. And we go back to Covid and I look at two of my startups that were in the travel space, one of them is WeSki, and it's essentially the booking.com of ski vacations. And guess what? Covid started. And there was no more ski trips to Europe. Europe were shut down completely. And all the ski areas were shut down. And you know that I'm an avid skier? For me that was a disaster on a personal level. And eventually by the way, what happened is that I was back in Tel Aviv and I was unable to travel to Europe, and it was only somewhere in 2022 that I was able to travel to the US after vaccination and so forth. And in March, 2022, I actually moved myself to Utah to Salt Lake City and I basically say, "No, I'm going to ski every day that I'm not busy." And I skied until the end of the season. So what happened is that Covid started and we realized that we have major problem. And the problem was actually, the first thing that you face is cancellation because all of a sudden out of very few cancellations per day, you ended up with hundreds of cancellations per day because this is it. And after you dealt with that, then the next question that we ask ourselves, okay, so how bad is it, how long it's going to last? Now that was supposed to be the first year that we were profitable. So we did not have a lot of cash in the bank because we expected to become profitable this year. And we basically told our ourself, okay, this season is over, next season is not going to happen. We don't know, but we need to plan for something that is going to last longer than that. And then we basically say, okay, how can we deal with it? Now, because of WeSki had a lot of strategic investors from the travel industry, in the travel industry, they didn't really care about WeSki, they care about their own product. If you are a hotel chain, then guess what? You have no travelers. If you're an airline, guess what? You have no flyers. So anyone in the travel industry suffered from the same problem. And the last thing on earth that they care about is a startup that they invested at. And we realized that, okay, wait a minute, we don't have enough cash to survive for two seasons without revenues, we need to raise additional capital. Now, no one, no new investor is going to speak with us, because there's no ski, so what are you talking about? And we approached the existing investor, and by the way I'm one of them, and we basically say, "Okay, you know what? We need your help." And everyone told us, "Oh, we are busy. We have other problems to deal with. We have our own problems. , and by the way I'm one of them, and we basically say, "Okay, you know what? We need your help." And everyone told us, "Oh, we are busy. We have other problems to deal with. We have our own problems. I don't see how is that going to become a good investment and so forth." And then we basically decided that, okay, wait a minute, we're going to do a pay to play. The pay to play is actually sort of forcing new investors at the expense of the existing one. So for example, doing a major down round is sort of pay to play, because if you're not participate your position in the company is going to be diluted severely. And this is what we decided to do. And that was way more complex, I describe that in the book, way more complex than that because we also had safe instruments that we need to convert before we can actually do something like that. And that was really complex. But we ended up doing that. And today the company is actually very successful. After Covid, we used the time of Covid to actually improve the product, and as soon as Covid was over then we started to grow rapidly. And the company is profitable, is growing rapidly, is actually providing very, very good service to its customers. To a certain extent I would say we ended up getting out of this crisis successfully. But if you are in the middle of it and you ask yourself, so what are the chances that we will end up being successful? It looks way smaller. Way smaller. So what happened here is that you realize that, okay, this is not forever, so ski is going to come back but we don't know how long and therefore we assume that it's going to be for two seasons until it's coming back, until 2022. And for that we need to adapt. And so we resized the company to be very, very lean and small and we raise just enough capital to survive those two years. And it ended up to be working very well. But in that sense now, if you would ask me how much luck was in there, luck is always good. I think that I heard ... maybe the most significant real estate developers in New York is Silverstein, and he built the World Trade Center and pretty much everything on the Hudson. And he was asked how he becomes such a successful developer and he said, "Tell you the truth, this is 85% luck and 15% skills and know-how and so forth." And then he was asked if he can change one thing, what exactly it's going to be, and he said, "You know what? I'm going to replace the 15% skills with additional 15% luck." So luck is good. For me luck, I will define luck as opportunity meets readiness. Readiness is up to you; opportunity, not always. Beautifully said. I also agree with luck being so core to most people's success, most company's success. But I feel like you're not giving people enough credit for the hard work that's also involved in the skills and timing and stuff.…

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