Uri Levine: prediction

Transcript context

…I feel like Covid happened to a lot of companies. And it feels like that's kind of an impetus to this chapter. I think you even said that, it created so many crisis across so many companies you were involved with, helped you realize a lot of companies and founders are just not prepared. So by and large I would say end of the day, we look at the global crisises and we say, "Oh, this is going to impact an industry." But as an entrepreneur, you don't care about the industry, you care about your own startup, that's it. And if the rest of the world is suffering from the same problem, doesn't help you, not even a single bit. So your problem is your problem, that's it. And then you need to abstract that and basically realize, okay, wait a minute, I will define a crisis as something that you already had that is significant, disappears. So let's say that you already have millions of dollars in revenues and all of a sudden your biggest customer decide not to continue and you lose half of your revenues. All of a sudden you basically say, "Wait a minute, I have to adapt, something significant happened." And that something significant is that your revenues disappear or maybe your funding disappeared or maybe ... So in general, the first type of crisis will be around cash. All of a sudden your cash is not the same as you expected, something happened, maybe funding, maybe revenues, maybe projection, maybe you lost a big customers, a cash crisis. And then you need to adapt. The second one, which is even more significant, is that you lost product market fit. And that might happen, it might happen because of regulations, because of competition, because of something dramatic happened that there is no more value into your product. And we are going back to basic, product market fit is very simple. That means that you create value to your customers, this is what it is. And you never heard of a company that did not figure out product market fit. They simply died, that's it. And by the way, product market fit 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. And so in your startup journey, this is going to be the first phase, and it's going to require a lot of iterations and it's a journey of failures. So we're going to try something and it doesn't work, we're going to try something else. And we keep on trying until we find one thing that does work. But once you figure that out, you're ready to move to the next part of your journey. But what if it's all disappeared? What if all of a sudden someone changed their regulation? Someone you rely on, a very unique data, that you were able to build and all of a sudden someone create a way to access this data for everyone. What if there is a competitor that makes you irrelevant? I'm using iPhone, obviously a lot of people using iPhone and I'm using that for a long while. iPhone is born in 2007. Before that we used to have different phones with keypads. And when iPhone was introduced, Microsoft basically say this will never work. ne and I'm using that for a long while. iPhone is born in 2007. Before that we used to have different phones with keypads. And when iPhone was introduced, Microsoft basically say this will never work. They were in a position of a market leader, they own Windows mobile operating system that was running on pretty much all the phones in the world. All the smartphones in the world, from Nokia to Motorola, to Samsung, to pretty much everything. And they look at it and say this will never work. They haven't realized how impactful it is. So this is a competition coming out to the market with something that is completely different. And not only disrupt the market but actually create crisis for pretty much everyone else. And the result is that today Microsoft is not a player in the mobile operating system and Nokia disappeared or pretty much disappeared and Motorola disappeared and pretty much everyone that was really significant in this industry, they were not adapted fast enough to the change. And the change was that their product market fit disappeared. Now it's not that their product all of a sudden become irrelevant, people simply wanted something else. So when product market fit 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 one and restart? Because if you cannot, you will die. You're following your own solution and you believe that this solution is going to be marketed better than what the market wants. And what the market wants is different. It can be also a matter of regulation change. One of my startups called Fibo died because of change in regulation. So Fibo was doing tax returns, something that everyone hates, but we have to do that. And when we started we basically say wait a minute, when I speak with people and ask them how is tax returns being done in your country, what I heard was pretty consistent, it's either complex or expensive or both, that's it. And I said wait a minute, what if I can simplify that? What if we can make it really, really simple? And we define simplification by filing in less than five minutes. Whatever you do, if you can do that in less than five minutes, it's simple enough. And we ended up with building a platform in Israel that people were able to file in less than three minutes. And that was actually pretty amazing. Now the result was that in about ... In Israel filing is not mandatory. So we actually enable people that were not filing up until now to file because it's simple. And we increased the size of the market by 25% over one year.…

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