Uri Levine: Co-Founder of Waze & Author of Fall In Love With The Problem, Not The Solution

Episode 329

In this episode, Uri Levine, serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Waze shares some of his key learnings from the Waze startup journey; from starting from scratch to a successful exit. Uri has helped build more than a dozen startups and in doing so has seen everything ranging from failure to immense success. You'll also hear the processes that he applies when he starts or advises any company like figuring out product-market fit, his strategy behind building a team and how he allocates his time in each stage of the startup process. He also talks about something that is difficult for every business owner – when it’s time to let people go. We also hear about his new book, Fall In Love With The Problem, Not The Solution. Another inspiring episode that you won’t want to miss! On this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow.

Resources from
this episode:

Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone, it’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And I am so excited to have my next guest here, I was just sharing with him how I was doing a plenty of research on him. And I was so excited. It’s really nice to interview somebody, especially when you already use a product that they actually co founded and developed. We have arry Levine here who is the co founder of ways amongst other startup and he’s also the author of a brand new book called fallen in love with the problem, not the solution that you all need to go out and purchase. I got an early copy of it, and it is absolutely excellent. So hearing it from a serial entrepreneur and a developer, a founder is definitely very, very exciting and definitely up my alley. arry is probably best known for CO founding the world’s largest community based driving traffic and navigation app called Waze, which was acquired by Google and 2013 for 1.1 billion. And he has helped build more than a dozen startups. And in doing so has seen everything ranging from the ones that didn’t work out to mid level success and then obviously immense success. And as I mentioned, he just published his first book, very exciting. Fall in love with the problems not the solution, which is launching actually this week. So you’re learning about it right when it is coming out. I can’t wait to speak to arry about his journey and about his new book. So let’s get started. Welcome array.

Uri Levine 2:29
Thank you very,

Kara Goldin 2:30
very excited to have you here. So I’d love to hear a bit about you. I listened to another interview that you did where you said you were a nonconformist? Aren’t we all all the visionary entrepreneurs? Definitely. But where were you like growing up

Uri Levine 2:48
from nature? Today, most of the intrapreneurs they don’t accept anything for granted. Right? They will keep on challenge different things, they will go and investigate, they will go and research they will try to do things their own way. And when you look at or any other formal framework, then they would become a troublemaker. Uh huh. And I make your end. And at the end of the day turns out to be awesome. When you become an intrapreneur. Right? This is essentially a requirement. If you’re a troublemaker, then you already increased the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur. And as a result, you already increased the likelihood of being successful because if you don’t try it, then you will definitely not going to be successful. I love it.

Kara Goldin 3:34
And I bet you have people coming back to you telling you the ones that actually reprimanded you for being a troublemaker saying, I always knew you would do something great, I bet Yes, of course. Right?

Uri Levine 3:47
First grade teacher, she reached out to me after the Waze acquisition, and she say, I knew that you’re gonna do something, right?

Kara Goldin 3:54
Those are the most fun when people actually realize they remember you for something. And it’s always the ones that maybe didn’t see the bonus of you being a outside of the box kind of thinker. It’s a lot of fun. And obviously, you’ve done amazing, amazing, great things. So many startups, and probably the most famous one that you’ve done is Waze, which you ultimately sold to Google in 2013 for 1.1 billion crazy. What was the problem that you were solving? I would imagine it was around traffic. I mean, did you sit there and like think about it for a while

Uri Levine 4:36
essentially what triggers my mind. I would say creative thought process is frustration. Frustration situation and I keep on asking myself these ways, there is no way that we can change that. And then we’ll end up with thinking about it and allowing that frustrations to last longer so I can keep on thinking of whether or not it can be changed right now based on traffic, I hate trust. And it’s always something that is a is a very strong emotion that triggers you to do something, you run into something that you really like, or you run into something that you really hate. And it hurt us if this is something that I have changed it in. And it was only in 2006. Where when when I had a eureka moment, the aha moment that I needed. And this is where we were on a family vacation up north, the northern part of Israel and Israel, into the same size of Massachusetts. And at the end of the day, if you spend the time in the mountains in Massachusetts, and at the end of the weekend, you need to go back to Boston, then you will end up on the Mass Pike. In Israel, there are two alternative routes and and I was thinking which one should I take? And we were like, 10 families there and everyone left to before we did. And so I call them in. And the one that are those that were on one route told me though this is a nightmare traffic jams. You don’t have to go here, in the other one told me, you know, it’s actually not that bad. And I realized that the only thing that I need is someone ahead of me on the road. Tell me what’s going on in that was in 2016, was only created in 2007, when I met my Eric co founder, Amir and a hood, that they saw the other part of the equation, right? And because if you will tell yourself, okay, you know, if I have other people ahead of me on the road, they will tell me what’s traffic light is, and I can actually avoid traffic jams. So essentially, the magic of ways to be the drivers are sharing the information in order to avoid traffic jams. Right. So So Alex Martin graphics to get in. That was the tagline for ways for for many years,

Kara Goldin 6:47
you were in an office in Tel Aviv with these two other founders, I always think like that would be a great reality show, get in there early for these successful startups and go back and sort of hear their thinking back in those early days. So when you were thinking about how do we make this thing work, or how does Waze work.

Uri Levine 7:09
So what is is a magical journey, because Waze probably tours everything, right? Not just traffic information, which is obvious or speed, which is obvious, the map itself. And so when we started, there was a blank page, there was no map at all. And the first driver actually created the first road as they drive. And so we collect the GPS data from the drivers device. And if we take this data, and convert that into computer representation, then we end up with sort of drawing in this blank page, the first road and the intersection, and so forth. And when you collect that, from a lot of drivers, you’re starting to get something that looks like a map and, and ways crowd tools, the map data itself. Now, we needed that, because in order to have traffic information, we need to have a lot of drivers. And you can only get a lot of drivers, if your application is free. If this is going to be paid application, you’re not going to get a lot of drivers, you’re going to get them out of mine, maybe but not loved. And so in order to have traffic information, we needed a lot of drivers. The problem was that the map, the map data at the time was extremely expensive to license. And so if you’re going to license something that is really expensive, and you’re going to offer a free application, this is not a good business model, this is going to fail. And so we had to create their own maps. And we figured out that we can do that through proud pros. And this is the genius idea of of a human chalk tie. That was later the CTO Well, one of the co founders and the CTO of yc. And he actually was the one to to figure that out. Now, this is a 2007 when we met and decided that this is what we’re going to build. The first version of Waze was running on a PDA. Wow, remember? Yeah, a long, long time ago, there were dinosaurs. Yeah. And then. And then Nokia phones. And today, we all have iPhones and Android, right? This long time ago, is 15 years. That’s it. This is how fast things are changing.

Kara Goldin 9:08
Yeah, well, fast or slow. I mean, it’s funny, I always tell my own story of being at a product that was a spin out of apple that was doing direct to consumer shopping back in 1994. Called to market that was a Steve Jobs idea. And we were still using the fax machine for orders. Like we’d get really excited when the phone rang. And we had some of us had a very large phone that we were able to use when we were out traveling. And I mean, it’s it’s crazy to think back on those days, but I’m glad that we have at least progressed significantly, including to be able to do great things like Waze. So how did you get the word out? You said you needed users obviously to be able to crowdsource but how did To get the word out about this.

Uri Levine 10:01
And so for a second, I would say him for outsourcing. The first users are always going to be enthusiastic amateurs, they’re people that work, right? So you will find them on today on Facebook groups, or maybe they are reading a specific magazine, it’s easy to find the enthusiastic amateurs the data of ways the and this is general rule of crowdsource, right. So so if you have data that their longevity is long, like map data, then it’s enough that you have few and active participations to create it, if you want to hear transient data like traffic information that is valid now, and then in 15 minutes is going to be irrelevant, then you actually need a lot of users. And you need to collect that automatically. Because you cannot rely on active participation of all the audience, you can rely on half the participation of various percentage of the audience, usually it’s going to be a fraction of percent. And waste is crowdsourcing both of them in the same way by automatically the traffic information in automatically sort of the map data here and this thing that requires additional information like street names and house numbers, and so forth. This is through active participation. And at the beginning, we basically said okay, the map evolved over time until it became good enough in ways is free, and free wins. That’s it, no one can compete with something that is free and Boudin upfront. And so just imagine that we think of Gmail and everyone’s using the cheap, I don’t even know a person that doesn’t. Yeah, but you might my personal email is still on Yahoo, because this is from 1994 9095, or something like that. I love it. And when I shared that with someone, he told me, you know, there are only two people in the world that I know that they’re using yet, you and my grandma and suddenly realized that, that I’m ready to become a grant. But I’m raised. Anyhow. So as it turns out, and you think of Gmail, Gmail is 17 years old. Like before that we actually used to pay money. In order to have a mailbox, we have the internet service provider, we pay like to have access, and we paid additional money to have a mail. And then Google introduced Gmail in at the beginning, it was not good enough it when it became good enough through integrations and iterations and iterations in then it became good enough and free and no, okay. So good enough and free is going to win to win the market. And no one can compete with that later on as well. Because there is no better offer, right? If it’s good enough, that you’re not going to burn the switch, you don’t care about it anymore. It’s good enough. That’s it? You know, because probably good enough, when we launched that in Israel in 2009. We also had GPS data coming from fleet management company that share their data with us, which helps us to accelerate this fly with all this magical way out there, that more data, it makes the application better, more application better, it’s easier to bring more users and so forth. So this wave will actually work beautifully in Israel. And in end of 2009, we tried to launch that in the rest of the world. And it was not good enough. Interesting, was actually really bad.

Kara Goldin 13:19
So how did you know it wasn’t good enough? What was the point when you really saw that it wasn’t getting the traction? Or was it making mistakes,

Uri Levine 13:27
when you are building a new carpet or you want to launch a new product, there is a general rule that basically say the following if you do not figure out product market fit, you will that product market fit means that you creating value to your users. And there is only one way to measure it, that they’re coming back. So retention is going to be the only indications that you have reached product market fit. Now the chair boundary is the way that we learned that is that retention was very low. So people had this story we the drivers are going to fight traffic jams together. And essentially what happened is that they download that they wanted it to work they really wanted it to work because everyone extra features, right? And then what happened didn’t it was not good enough. There was not even not the basic navigation going back home didn’t. And so what we did is we we call the drivers, we spoke with them and they told us what doesn’t go back into one of the critical understanding of building a skirt. This is about the journey in between the startup is a journey to it’s it’s a complex journey. Right and it’s a roller coaster journey with ups and downs and ups and downs. And look feel tell me all the businesses in the world have ups and downs. I agree. But the frequency of those when building a startup aren’t be few times I think that I need the best, the best quote to Ben Horowitz from recent Horowitz that he discussed earlier and he used to be a CEO of a startup before he found that recent Horowitz and and he was asking turned out, he was sleeping well at night as a co star couldn’t say no, yeah, I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and cried. And that’s really the reality of building startups are a roller coaster journey is one thing, a journey of failures. Because, you know, we want to believe that we know exactly what we’re doing. But we’re trying to create something new that no one did before. And if this is the case, then we are taking our thesis and trying to make it work. And usually it doesn’t, right. And so we try another thing. And another thing and another thing, you ended up with a journey of failures for each one of the phases of the stone, and the hub and journey of failure of their two conclusions that are critical part of it, right. So one of them is that if you’re afraid to fail, then in reality, you already failed, because you’re not going to try it. And so perhaps the most important thing that we would like to encourage you to cooperate that we’d like to embrace innovation is reduced the fear of failure, because otherwise people are not going to try it. If you know that you can try something new. And if it doesn’t work, you will get fired, or something. And so fear of failure is critical. If there is one thing that we would like our kids to learn is don’t bring a plus fail, and fail and fail again and again. And again, because this is what makes you successful, and essentially is going to establish the preserve ference that you will need to go through challenging periods of time. And we usually teach them something completely different. Like don’t bring them bring a classroom. Yeah. And so you’re required them to exhale. But in order to actually accept them, you need to learn how to recover from failures. The one thing is that if you’re afraid to fail, you’re gonna fail. The other conclusion is fail fast. Because when you fail fast, you actually have enough time to make another experimental renewal attempt and so forth. In that, essentially, if you make multiple attempts to do to do something, then you essentially increase the likelihood of being successful. And to that extent, I would say, look, the biggest enemy of good enough, isn’t perfect, you don’t need to be perfect. In order to be successful, you need to be good enough. And this is really critical to understand going back into the waste journey. 2010, we launched that globally, and it didn’t work. We speak with the drivers, they told us what doesn’t, right. So okay, you know, what this rap doesn’t work, and so forth. And we fixed everything, we build the next version, we know that we fixed everything, we know that this is it. And so we go over. So we are speaking with the drivers we understand. But that’s important. We build the next version, we know that this is it. And it’s and this is really that was the whole year of iterations after iteration after iteration. And this is essentially what is required in order to become successful, you need the perseverance, you need the conviction that every time that you go, this time, it’s going to work. And just imagine that you are a basketball player, right? You’re Steph Kara and Steph Curry believe that he is going to hit 100% of the shots that he takes Otherwise, you wouldn’t take them. But throughout the event, he’s doing less than that right now, he is still absolutely amazing, right? Michael Jordan used to say that, you know, I failed so many times, and because of that I’m successful. So this journey of failure is critical to understand. And and I think that this is really one of the of things, your understanding of building a startup, to be rollercoaster journey. So if you don’t like extreme sports, maybe startup is not for you. And haven’t is going to be a journey of failures. In the last part, which is the most critical part is that it’s going to be very long. And there is a longest part of it with no traction that your product simply not good enough. And you don’t see any interactions. Because you bring users in the chair, you bring users and the chair up or you build the product, and it doesn’t work, you build the next version, and it doesn’t work. And each one of these parts is critical to understand because if you do not figure out product market fit, you will die. As simple as that.

Kara Goldin 18:59
I love that as you’re speaking, we’ve had a number of people on this podcast who are from all different industries, and it’s very consistent that it takes a lot longer. You have to try things constantly and keep trying. And I think that the other thing that you have that you know, definitely I think I heard about it through other people. So when consumers are actually talking to their friends about your product, and getting people to try it, you know, you’re onto something. And I think that is exactly what happened with Waze for sure. I’m curious though, did you the subnet tactical but did you launch it outside of Israel? Did you go into any different countries? Or did you just you know, just because it was

Uri Levine 19:50
magic can work everywhere. And we basically made it available everywhere. We put some marketing efforts in the US and then the additional markets get frozen places that it started to take off. But it was longer, way longer wait later, actually, we’re excited to take off by the end of the day. And this is really important. You know, everyone wants to that their product will become buyer, we define that for a second viable means that I cannot use the product. If you don’t have that fax machine is vital, because I can send a fax to myself, and I need someone else to have a fax machine. Obviously today, no one cares, right. But then messenger WhatsApp, SMS text messaging, and fire, I need someone else to be able to receive that. And I would go ahead and convince them. In order for me to have it all what most people refer to is word of mouth. What they say via they actually meant war if mouth word of mouth is, is look, if you will ask 100 people on the street, how did you hear about ways most of them are going to tell you something. And that’s usually that’s more than word of mouth works on. When you have high frequency of use product. If your product is not being used on a regular basis, word of mouth is not. And the reason is very simple. Every time that you use the product, it’s an opportunity for you to tell us right there, maybe 10% of the cases, he will tell him that he’s going to use that once a year, it’s not going to exponentially grow. But if you’re going to use that every day, then during the month, you’re going to tell three people and if you’re going to use that twice a day, then given the month, you’re going to tell six people, and this is where word of mouth is actually the word of mouth, we’d be working for high frequency of use product only after you figure out market fit.

Kara Goldin 21:40
Interesting. There’s a lot there. So the transaction with Google was considered one of the largest transactions in Israeli history. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that you put Israeli technology on the Global Map that must have been very, very cool to hear that coming from the kid who was always getting in trouble. But you have a book out, as I mentioned, called fall in love with the problem, not the solution, which is so good. Very spot on for me as a fellow startup founder, what do you hope people gain from the book? And why did you decide to write it now?

Uri Levine 22:20
So two things right. So most people would know me as an enterpreneur. Right? I build startups, I have dozens of them, some of them are more successful as successful. But there is another very strong personality of me of being a teacher. And and I like to share my know, my knowledge, my experience with other people into certain extent, I would say, today, I’m not running to any of the companies, mentoring the CEOs and guiding them and helping them. And I feel equally rewarded when I build stuff myself, or I help someone to build it in. And when I realized that, and I was teaching some classes of intrapreneurship, I basically say, wait a minute, the board is going to be changed for the good bye intrapreneurs. These are the people that actually have enough grit to go and change the world in and I want to help them, I want to increase their likelihood of being successful. And this book is about that. Steve Wozniak, co founder of Apple, he told me Look, I wish I had that when I started. And then he called up to buy belts for intrapreneurs, which is amazing

Kara Goldin 23:25
to get him to say that is pretty powerful. So he does not do that. Very often. I always share with entrepreneurs that ideas are a dime a dozen, but it’s really the execution that is going to separate the ideas from the companies, I guess is the best way to to look at it. But when should your idea become a startup, you talked about market fit, but are there any other key variables.

Uri Levine 23:53
So the first thing is that you need to fall in love with this journey, you need to have enough passion to decide that this is what you’re gonna do, you need to be in love. And I would say you’re in love with the problem to the level that you’re willing to sacrifice because you need this being in love in order to cross the challenging period, everyone is going to tell you, this will never work in the hands, and you will have no traction. And this is going to be a nightmare journey that that you might face. And you need to be in love in order to go into this journey. And the best would be that you solve a problem. And so I would say start with a problem take on being probably think that the world will become a better place if you saw and then go and speak with other people that you want to think that they have the product and understand their perception of that problem in home, then go and start to build a solution. Now if you follow this path and your solution works, it’s guaranteed that you’re creating value because you’re solving a problem. If you start with the solution, you might be building something that no one cares, right? If you want to qualify your idea, then think of a two dimensional matrix right one matrix is the size of the addressable market. So So my solution is going to create value for how many people or how many companies. And so one dimension will be addressable market in the other dimensions will be so in how much value do I create for those users or customers. And value can be measured by time, money and so forth, or can be measured by frequency of use. And until obviously, if you’re going to solve a big problem, that means the addressable market is large and the frequency of use or the value is luck is high. And the result is that you’re going to be a winner. And it’s also obvious that if you have the single market, and you don’t create any value, that this is going to be a loser area. Most of the companies are actually on either either small addressable market and very high value, and those would be nice solutions. Now these could be very user selling to businesses means that you’re going to be very large and very successful. This is where the addressable market is large, but the frequency of use or the value that you create is is low, and then there is no way for you to actually reach out to the addressable market, because you don’t read enough value. So you are not going to expect to hear word of mouth or you don’t create enough value. And so people are not going to pay your customers are not going to pay you enough so you can serve. So you can actually acquire new users, and you will end up with her with that nightmare rather than angry. And so I’m usually would be using this qualification metrics, looking at how big the problem is, right? Can I quantify the size of the problem? And if the problem is big, then I’m already liking it. And if I feel personal frustrations, then I like it more thing that I would say is that if I find the right team, I probably we’ll start,

Kara Goldin 27:07
do you always recommend having co founders, I know that you had two other co founders for ways, but what are your thoughts on on that?

Uri Levine 27:16
So it’s a tricky question, right? Because we started three founders, and we hired November Dean as a CEO about a year or something after we started. So essentially, we can say four. And we stayed all four of us until the acquisition, usually in when you look at startups, you will see that some of the co founders did not work out for them, and they left. But the same time, I would say this is very challenging journey, doing it by yourself, it’s going to be very hard. And you really want something that you will be able to share the the challenges and the pain, and the journey and the joy and the celebrations. And so you have I would say in general, yes, I would like to go into this journey with our co founders. But this is also, you know, personal preferences. I work very well with other people. But not everyone.

Kara Goldin 28:10
Yeah, definitely. I think the majority of people are sort of pro co founders, because I think you talked about the spikes. And I think having somebody else with you during times to be able to lift you on those days as well is really such a key thing, too. So you talked in the book, and I’ve heard you in interviews, talking about firing people, obviously not a fun thing that anyone likes to do. But you’ve heard the saying hire slow fire fast. But any suggestions or words of wisdom on that?

Uri Levine 28:46
I would start by saying, you know, after ways I met enterpreneurs, and many of them their startup failing and actually why what happened in about half say the team was not right. So I kept on asking, Okay, what do you mean, the team? And I hear not good enough as a major reason and not a reason that they heard quite often is that we had communication issues, I think that actually call the ego management issues. And then actually, the most interesting question, when did you know that the team is not right now all of them knew within the first month, all of them knew within the first month, there was one that told me before we even start. So you said wait a minute, if you knew within the first month, that team is not right. And you didn’t do well see, the problem was like that the teams. The problem was that the CEO did not make our decision. Making easy decisions is easy. making hard decisions is hard. This is why most people don’t like to make them because you need to leave with the consequences. And in smaller organization like startup, all those hard decisions will go all the way to the top to the CEO. I want you to think of a small organization whenever a team of 20 people or 30 people are stepping up or 30 or Whatever it is, and there is someone that shouldn’t be there, and that someone shouldn’t be there for whatever reason, well, maybe this person is way under delivering. And maybe this person is actively Jerrick that no one likes to work with. If there is someone like that everyone knows, everyone knows it looks more place. Everyone knows, and the CEO doesn’t do anything. That’s the nature of the beast. That’s the problem. Because what goes through the mind is the RP village that Okay, wait a minute, CEO doesn’t know that this person shouldn’t be here. That means that he is stupid, this is not good. The even worse, does know and steal anything, that’s even worse. That means that the CEO lacks the leadership of making the articles in the result, by the way is always the same. The top performing people would leave. Now I have a chapter in my book that is called firing and hiring in when I send that to the publisher, he returned that back and say it should be hiring and firing. I say no, no, no, firing is hard decision. Hiring is easy decision. This is why you need to learn to fire before you can even hire in my strongest recommendation in this chapter, if there’s two aspects, right. One is when you hire a new person, manicure calendar for 30 days down the road to ask yourself one question, knowing what I know, today, I hire this person. Now if the answer is no, I hired them immediately. Because you already set the trajectory for this person not to be successful. And it’s not about you not about the company, it’s about that person, person deserve an opportunity to become successful. And it’s not going to be here. Yeah, we’re letting that person succeed someplace else by doing that, because here, the person is not going to be successful.

Kara Goldin 31:47
Yeah. And that’s what I was gonna say, I think it’s most fair to the other person to to let them go off and go be successful somewhere where they’re going to be able to shine. So I absolutely think you’re doing everybody a favor, if that’s what your perception is at 30 days. So that was a great chapter, right? I love that. So you’re a builder, you’re also a scalar, you prove that founders can actually scale because I think often we hear that founders are the crazy ones. They are the crazy ones. But there are a few of us that can actually scale companies too. So launching a company is not just about having an idea. As you’ve mentioned, market fit and solving problems for your consumers and raising money building boards building a team, what am I missing? Where are the other landmines that new entrepreneurs listening run into?

Uri Levine 32:49
So so to ask, one is, it’s a mountain phase journey building stuff, right, because in order to become successful, you will need to figure out product market fit we already established that you will need to figure out your business model how do you make money now in general, I would say look to create value, you will figure out a way to make money and he will need to figure out growth, right because if you really become one become a market leader, then you will need to be a market knowing that you will have you will need to have a sustainable business model you need to break valuing sustainable business more than the ability to grow in each one of there is going to be a separate journey. And the role of the CEO is to understand that when you are shifting gears for one year and into another journey, a whole new story and you start from scratch and this is going to be another journey of failures and annatto long journey of failures and another roller coaster journey and then you will need to switch gears again when you go to the next phase in only after a figure out those three phases. Only then you become on the path of taking golf right. I want us to think of large companies right like maybe Google and Amazon and and in Facebook and paceline companies of the world right many of those and Netflix and so forth in ask yourself and those you know, Amazon, Google and Netflix are about 25 years old 25 Each wall Tesla and Facebook and they are way less they are less than 20 Then ask yourself the following question much of their regained their value, so market capitalizations of all of those together, much of that value was created in the first decade of their existence versus the rest of the time. In some cases the rest of the times only seven years. And some time the rest of the time it’s 15 years. And I spent a lot of questions and and what most people told me most of it at the beginning only 4% at the beginning because what happened in the first decade is the rationalizations of okay I need to figure out product market fit. I need to figure out business model I need to figure out grow If and only then you are a path of becoming very successful. So most of the valley was great that after they become very successful, and this is something that people need to realize, right, and they need to realize for two reasons. Number one, it’s a long journey. If you’re not willing to commit yourself to a 10 years journey, the likelihood that you will be successful is slim. My most successful startup right now is Pantera, which is essentially helping Americans to retire richer through providing the service or providing the ability to manage their 401 K, right and 401k. For most of the people each day, the largest saving that they have in right now, most of the people haven’t done anything, right, is creating that significant value. And potential is 10 years old, we are in this journey. 10 years, it was a long while for us to figure out the right product market fit and then the business farther. And now we are on a path of becoming extremely success, right. But we are reaching this point is a long journey. And this is just an example. In many cases. And in for a second, I would say, Look, if we would have, please know that they’re telling you the same story. One of them is six months old, and another one is five years old. And you ask yourself, what is the likelihood of being successful for both of them, the one that is five years old, have way higher likelihood of being successful. Now it’s less sexiest, but it’s way higher likelihood, because in their journey of failures, they already learned what doesn’t work in many aspects in big learning, the most critical part of it. Now, historical data shows that second time enterpreneur increase their likelihood of being successful dramatically over the first time, regardless what happened on the first time, right. So if you go on this journey, and you have learned so much, you will dramatically increase the likelihood of being successful. And it doesn’t matter if you are successful on the first one. And so in that sense, I would encourage people to go into this journey. Because even if nothing else works, they experience we list forever,

Kara Goldin 37:04
such great wisdom that you are providing array for sure. And everybody needs to get this book. As I mentioned, it is so good. We’ll have all the information in the show notes but you can get it on Amazon again, it’s fall in love with the problem, not the solution. So thank you so much array. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. Please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my book on daunted which I share my journey including founding and building hint we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week and good bye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you like what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening