Fall in love with the problem, not the solution says Waze co-founder, Uri Levine

In the third edition of Face2Face with Innovators session hosted by Global Entrepreneur Xchange(GEX) in collaboration with Entrepreneur Insight, co-founder of Waze, Uri Levine, took the stage as keynote speaker for an inspiring and informative presentation on How Entrepreneurs can Create and Scale a Global Brand. 

GEX is an independent and private coalition for entrepreneurs created to address reasons why 83% of businesses fail within 18 months. Comprised of CEOs, experts and professionals, GEX seeks to be a go-to global platform, portal and partner that empowers, equips and educates other CEOs, business leaders and entrepreneurs through the creation, curation and delivery of actionable and high quality knowledge via a range of its services. 

Face2Face with innovators is a platform and forum that enables entrepreneurs and CEOs in SEA to come up close with some of the world’s most renowned, iconic and game changing innovators. 

In the session with Uri which was held this afternoon, attendees received first-hand insight on Waze’s journey of being a startup to eventually becoming one of the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app acquired by Google in 2013 for US1.1billion. 

Here are some key takeaways from Uri’s presentation and Q&A session:

• Contrary to popular advice, Uri believes entrepreneurs must fall in love with the problem they are looking to solve, rather than the solution.
• Failing and failing fast is critical as the mistakes take you closer to a success 
• The startup journey is a long one starting from initial enthusiasm to eventually finding the path to sustainability, it’s a nonlinear journey filled with downs such as opportunity cost and crash of ineptitude
• The first part of your business’s journey before it achieves monetisation (in Uri’s case it was 7 years), starts with figuring out your product market fit
• Finding your product market fit, only one measurement metric matters: retention 
• How to acquire and keep customers – by speaking and listening to them and taking actions based on their feedback
• How to create a billion dollar business – create a lot of value after finding a big problem

To find out more about Face2Face with Innovators and other services offered by GEX, visit www.globalentrepreneur.com