Uri Levine: prediction

Transcript context

…You got to fall in with the problem. You got to power through that. Just change the government. Just kidding. The story you told of Waze and iterating is a really good example of falling in love with the problem. You're really passionate about. I want to solve traffic, I hate traffic. By the way, what it made me think about a little bit is Elon, when he hated traffic, he built the boring company and built tunnels underground, and your solution to hate traffic is I'm going to build Waze in a soft wrap. We start Waze with the vision that we are going to help people to avoid traffic jams. Now the reality is that there are more traffic jams today than there were in 2007. Obviously, number one, I'm not done. And number two, if you ask people what is the value of Waze, 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. And by the way, we learned that in the U.S. market when we spoke with people. They told us, "If I am living in Cupertino and I need to drive up to San Francisco and I can take 101 or 280, I don't really want to change my route unless there is something dramatic, but what I really want to know is how long it's going to take me. So I'm going to stay on the 101. I'm not going to get into service road. I'm not going to take El Camino Real. I'm not going to try something else. I'm going to stay on the 101. Just let me know how long it's going to take." So certainty creates way more value than saving time. I want to talk through a couple other of the chapters in your book. So chapter four is around the different phases of a startup journey and your core advice is that it's important to focus on one thing at a time in each of these phases, and the first phase, you call it the all over the place phase, I think, or yeah, the all over phase, and the idea is you need to get out of that as soon as you can and then focus. Can you just kind of talk through these different phases and what you think people do wrong along the phases? Maybe they get them wrong or they focus on the wrong things in each phase.…

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