Uri Levine
Most companies fall in love with their solution before they have proved the problem is worth solving. The result is launched products no one needs, growth plans that stall at the pilot stage, and innovation portfolios that consume capital without producing category leaders. Senior teams need a discipline for finding problems large enough to justify the work, and the conviction to abandon the rest.
Uri Levine is the co-founder of Waze and Moovit, two consumer-tech unicorns acquired by Google and Intel, and the entrepreneur who teaches leaders how to find problems worth solving and build companies around them.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Uri Levine
- Two billion-dollar exits in the same category give him a working method, not a single-case story. Waze and Moovit were sold to Google and Intel using the same problem-first discipline he now teaches.
- His handbook Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution sets out a usable operating system for early-stage product, fundraising and hiring decisions. Steve Wozniak called it a bible for entrepreneurs.
- An active portfolio of 20-plus board seats and 50-plus advisory roles keeps his perspective current. He is reading live cap tables and product roadmaps, not recycling a 2013 exit.
- Levine teaches inside corporates as well as startups. The framing translates for innovation leaders trying to make corporate venturing and intrapreneurship behave more like founder-led businesses.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder of Waze, acquired by Google in 2013 for approximately $1.1 billion.
- Early investor and board member at Moovit, acquired by Intel in 2020 for approximately $1 billion.
- Author of Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs (BenBella, 2023).
- Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Practice at IE University.
- Founder, chairman or board member at Pontera, FairFly, Refundit, SeeTree, Fibo and others; former Chairman of Zoomcar; independent board member at Infosys.
- Forbes contributor; interviewed in The New York Times, CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox News.
Biography
Waze and Moovit were built on the same wager. Drivers and commuters were the source of the data, the product, and the network effect, and the problem worth solving was the daily friction of getting somewhere. Google paid roughly $1.1 billion for the first company in 2013. Intel paid roughly another billion for the second in 2020.
The method behind both exits is what Uri Levine now teaches. Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, published by BenBella in 2023, is the operating handbook he wrote for founders and the executives funding them. Steve Wozniak called it a bible for entrepreneurs. It covers product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, scaling internationally and exit decisions, treated as a sequence of choices a founder can get right or wrong.
The portfolio behind the writing keeps the material current. Levine has founded nine companies, sat on roughly twenty boards including Infosys and HERE, and advised more than fifty startups. He chaired Zoomcar through its public listing in 2023 and returned as strategic and financial advisor in 2024. He teaches the same approach as Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at IE University and runs a workshop on building unicorns.
For corporate audiences the value is structural. Innovation pipelines stall when teams pick solutions before they have stress-tested the problem. Levine’s argument, and the discipline behind it, gives senior leaders a way to challenge that habit inside their own organisations, whether they are running a venture arm, a transformation programme or a category business losing ground to insurgents.
Key speaking topics
- Disruptive innovation and category creation
- Problem discovery and product-market fit
- Entrepreneurship and scaling to unicorn status
- Fundraising and investor strategy
- Corporate innovation and intrapreneurship
- Mobility and the future of transportation
- Founder leadership through hypergrowth
Ideal for
- Founders and CEOs of growth-stage and scale-up businesses
- Corporate innovation, venture and transformation leaders
- Investors, LPs and board directors evaluating early-stage portfolios
- Senior leadership teams in incumbent categories under disruption pressure
Audience outcomes
- A working test for whether a problem is large enough and clear enough to build a company around.
- Specific lessons from inside two unicorn exits on hiring, fundraising, international expansion and timing the sale.
- The mistakes Levine has watched founders and corporate innovators repeat across fifty advisory engagements, and how to spot them earlier.
- A sharper frame for board-level conversations about which bets to back, which to kill, and when to pivot.
Talks
The core argument from the book applied to founders and corporate innovators: how to identify problems worth solving and build companies that compete with incumbents.
Key takeaways:
- Why most startups and corporate ventures fail at the problem-definition stage
- The Waze and Moovit case studies as repeatable method, not anecdote
- How to know when to pivot, persevere or fail fast
The inside account of building Waze from a small Israeli startup to a $1.1 billion exit to Google, told as a sequence of decisions.
Key takeaways:
- The fundraising rounds that nearly failed and what changed them
- How a community-driven product model outpaced incumbent navigation businesses
- Founder lessons on hiring, scaling and selling
A direct address to senior leaders in established businesses on why corporate innovation programmes underperform, and what would have to change.
Key takeaways:
- Why most corporate ventures get killed by their own parent
- Structural conditions that allow internal teams to behave like founders
- A test for whether a corporate innovation portfolio is real or theatre