Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedUri Levine: evaluation
9 Jun 2024 Lenny's Podcast Lessons from a two-time unicorn builder, 50-time startup advisor, and 20-time company board member | Uri Levine (co-founder of Waze)
“This is not the problem. The problem is," and they will give you their description of the problem.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Uri Levine
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 9 Jun 2024
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers and automate compliance For SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk, plus you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to Vanta.com/Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Mercury knows your financial operations are complex. It doesn't have to be this way. I've been a super happy customer of Mercury for over a year now and it's honestly hard to imagine a better online banking experience can exist. Most founders and finance teams have to couple together a patchwork of tools to reconcile transactions from different sources, work extra hard just to get a holistic view of cashflow and have maps to company priorities and struggle to get answers from platforms that all speak different languages. Mercury knows that there's an art to simplifying this complex patchwork. With new bill pay and accounting capabilities, you can pay bills faster, stay in control of company spend and speed up reconciliation. The end result is the precision control and focus that startups need to transform how they operate. Apply in minutes at Mercury.com and join over 200,000 ambitious startups like mine that trust Mercury to get them to perform at their best. Mercury, the art of simplified finances. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust. Members FDIC. I want to follow a couple threads here because I imagine there's certain problems people fall in love with. "Amazing. I want to solve this very obscure problem for my family or a friend of mine," and then they realize this is never going to be a huge venture scale business, if that's a goal of theirs. You talked about like, make sure enough people have this problem versus just getting a therapist that's going to help you with this problem. What are some signals and heuristics folks can use to help them understand this is a big enough problem that it's really worth their time? So people ask me, "So you send me to speak with users. How many?" And I will tell them a hundred. You don't need a hundred, but the hundred basically say you need to get out of your comfort zone. It's not just your close friends and family that you need to discuss that. You need to discuss that with people that you don't know. And usually what happen is, and the validation is in most cases is really clear, right? If you tell someone, "This is the problem I'm going to address," and they will tell you, "Oh, I know someone that has this problem," it's not a real problem. If they will tell you, "No, no, no, no, no. This is not the problem. The problem is," and they will give you their description of the problem. This is something that you really want to follow. 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. And look, it's not the only way to become successful, right? You look at one of the most successful products in the world, the iPhone, right? And you ask yourself, what was exactly the problem when they started? And the answer is that there was no problem when they started. There were smartphones and people were actually very happy with them. And so occasionally we need to invent something completely new, but solving a problem is simply the simplest way to create value. Another element of picking a problem to work on, so you say you fall in love with a problem. Is being excited to work on this problem. There's oftentimes problems you find that aren't that exciting to you or you're not excited to work on real estate software, but you find there's a big problem. How important is it that you're personally passionate and excited to work on this thing versus like, "Oh, wow. This is a huge business opportunity. I got to go after it. It doesn't matter if I'm not that passionate about it."…
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