Disruptive Entrepreneur & Two-Time 'Unicorn' Builder, Waze and Moovit
Uri Levine: Biography at a Glance
- Uri Levine is a disruptive entrepreneur & two-time 'unicorn' builder known for building Waze and Moovit.
- He is a co-founder of Waze, the world's largest driving traffic and navigation app with more than 200 million drivers around the globe which Google acquired for $1.1 billion.
- He was formerly an investor and board member in Moovit, the Waze of public transportation, which Intel acquired for $1 Billion.
- More recently, he Co-founded FeeX, which allows users to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in their retirement savings and long-term investment plans.
- Levine's first book, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, serves as a handbook for entrepreneurs with useful anecdotes and guidance for building a successful company.
- Levine has worked in all possible business areas from product development, marketing, business development, running startups, and coaching CEOs.
- He delivers highly engaging keynotes to entrepreneurs, colleges & universities, and large corporations on disruption and evolution.
Videos
Biography
Uri Levine is a passionate entrepreneur and disruptor, a two-time 'unicorn' builder (Duocorn). He is co-founder of Waze, the world's largest community-based driving traffic and navigation app, which Google acquired for $1.1 billion, and a former investor and board member in Moovit, the Waze of public transportation, which Intel acquired for $1 Billion. Levine heads The Founders Kitchen, a company-builder fund. Additional startups Levine is Co-Founder, Chairman, or Board Member, with the agenda of 'doing good and doing well,' include Pontera (formerly FeeX), FairFly, Refundit, SeeTree, Fibo, Dynamo, Kahun, Zoomcar, and Infosys.
Levine's first book, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, serves as a handbook for entrepreneurs with useful anecdotes and guidance for building a successful company.
Levine's vision in building startups is to disrupt inefficient markets and improve under-functioning services, focusing on solving "BIG problems" and saving consumers time and money while empowering them and changing the world for the better.
Uri has been in the high-tech business for the last 30 years, half of them in the startup scene, and has seen everything ranging from failure, moderate success, and big success.
He is also a world-class speaker on entrepreneurship, disruption, evolution vs. revolutions of markets, mobility, and startups. Motivated to encourage the next generation of thinkers and innovators, he also leads an academic workshop entitled "How to Build a Startup," aimed at undergraduate and graduate-level business students.
Levine is a BA graduate from Tel-Aviv University. Before attending University, he served in the Israeli army at special intelligence unit 8200. In his public activity, he serves on the board of trustees at Tel-Aviv University. He also mentors young entrepreneurs at the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at Reichman University (IDC Herzliya).
Topics
Fall in Love with the Problem: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs
Unicorns—companies that reach a valuation of more than $1 billion—are rare. Uri Levine has built two. In this talk, he shows audiences how he did it. Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and his second unicorn, Moovit, revealing the formula that drove those companies to compete with industry veterans and giants alike. He offers tips on:
- Firing and hiring
- Disrupting “broken” markets
- Raising funding
- Understanding your users
- Reaching product market fit
- Making scale-up decisions
- Going global
- Deciding when to sell
Audiences will walk away feeling empowered to build a successful business by identifying consumers’ biggest problems and disrupting the inefficient markets that currently serve them.
Disruption and Innovation for Startups and Corporates
Why do some companies fail to innovate while others constantly reinvent themselves? How do you know which markets are “broken” and need disruption? And can corporates disrupt their own markets?
In his talk, Uri will share how disruption and innovation work for startups and corporates. Audiences will learn about building a culture of innovation and how to foster it in yourself and your company.
What Can Governments Learn From Entrepreneurs?
iPhone, Waze, WhatsApp, Uber, Netflix, Moovit, Tesla and Meta, and so many other products that we are using daily, were created by entrepreneurs who changed the world. In fact, if you look at the top ten companies in the world today, most of them were started by entrepreneurs not that long ago.
If it is all private initiative, what’s the role of governments in innovation? In his talk, Levine explains how governments should set the conditions for entrepreneurship and innovation: remove barriers; establish an ecosystem and remove itself. All this with the thought of What will make a better world for the next generations and understanding who their users are.
Understanding Your Users - the key to Product-Market fit (PMF)
Figure out Product-Market fit (PMF) or die. If you think hard, we do not know companies that did not reach PMF. The reason is they did not survive. For most companies it may take ten years to reach it, and in many cases, the product will stay the same (think of how you used Google ten years ago and today, for example). In his talk, Levine explains the importance of understanding you are only a sample of one, the need to learn your different users, how you do it and how this would help reach PMF, which is the key to success.
How to Invest in Tech Startups
While it is considered a high-risk investment, it is also considered one of the most exciting and high-profit investments. Yes, we are talking about investing in tech startups.
Levine, who has been not only an entrepreneur but also a mentor to startup CEOs, and an investor, has seen it all from all sides of the equation and unveils the secrets of how to tell if the startup, and more importantly, the founders and CEO are up to the rollercoaster journey of building a startup.
