Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…[inaudible 00:21:32]. By the way, this is one thing that some businesses don't realize, whether or not their customers are going to be new customers or returning customers, and in many cases they simply fail to realize that upfront and the result is that they are not building the right go-to-market strategy. We covered a lot of ground there. That was amazing. I'm going to follow a number of threads of things you just touched on. You talked about product market fit briefly. What was the moment you felt product market fit with Waze? I don't know if I've ever heard that story. We started in Israel and Israel is a small place and we ended up with being very successful in Israel and then we said, "Wait a minute. Waze crowdsource all the data, right?" Not just the traffic information and speed cams and so forth, but also the map data itself, so we can start from a blank page. And the users while they drive, they create the map and they create traffic information and so forth. And so we figure out that we can start anywhere and we made Waze global at the end of 2009 and we expect that to work the same way that it did in Israel, but it didn't. It was not good enough. It was not good enough in the U.S. It was not good enough in Western Europe. It was not good enough in Latin America, it was not good enough in Asia. It was not good enough anywhere that matters, right? It was actually good enough in about four places. In the Czech Republic, in Slovakia, in Latvia and Ecuador, and that's about it. Rest of the world not good enough. So what we did is we spoke with the drivers. Look, they wanted us to be successful. We basically said the drivers are going to fight traffic jams together, so common enemy, togetherness, all goodness. Everyone wanted that to work, right? So people downloaded the app and it simply was not good enough. So they churned, right, because if it's not good enough, you're not coming back. We spoke with them. We asked them what didn't work for them. They told us because they wanted it to work, and we built the next version addressing everything that they've told us, and we know that this is it, and it's not. So we doing it all over again. We speak with the drivers. We ask them what didn't work for them, they tell us. Now we build the next version and now we have the conviction that it's going to work and it's not. Journey of failures. Iteration after iteration after iteration after iteration. More than a year of iterations until beginning of 2011 that we actually started to see that working, and then it's in multiple places. In the U.S., one metropolitan after the other, right? Los Angeles first and then San Francisco and then Washington D.C. and Chicago and New York and Atlanta and so forth. In Europe, one country after the other. Italy first and then France and Netherlands and Sweden and Spain and one country after the other. In Latin America, one country after the other. Colombia first and then Chile and then Brazil and then Mexico and then rest of Latin America. In Asia, multiple countries one after the other. Not all of them, by the way. Not all of them. Japan is a very good example where it didn't work and it will never work. Waze crowdsourced the information, right? Which basically says that as soon as we get to the level of good enough, then we are good enough. House numbering plan. In the U.S., it's really simple, right? Every block is a hundreth numbers, right?…

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