A founder's guide to crisis management | Uri Levine (Waze co-founder, serial entrepreneur)

If you have high frequency of use, you will end up with growth coming by itself, right, for word-of-mouth, and therefore you should do that at the beginning. If you don't have high frequency of use, you are sentenced to acquire users or customers all of your lifetime.

Focus is not about what we are doing, it's about what we are not doing. These are the hard decisions.

In order to improve, we need to speak with those that fail, those that were unsuccessful, those that did not register, or they did register and did not use, or they did use and did not come back, because they know something that we really need to know.

For everything in your life, ask yourself, 'Knowing what you know today, would you do something different?' If the answer is yes, then do something different today. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love, fall in love with the problem, and then actually what you're trying to do is engage everyone else to fall in love with the same problem, to go into this journey, into this path and follow your leadership there.

The biggest enemy of good enough is perfect. You don't need to be perfect. You need to be good enough in order to win the market.

If you fail fast, you still have plenty of time to try another attempt and build another version of the product. The more attempts that you have, you simply increase the likelihood of being successful.

Watch new users. Simply watch users and see what they're doing. And if they're not doing what you expect them to do, then ask them why, because this why is the one that is going to make your product successful.

Product market fit have one metric. One metric. That's it. Retention. If you create value, they will come back. If they're not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.

A venture capital partner is likely to see between a hundred and 200 companies a year and invest in one or two. 1%. So you're going to hear a hundred times no until you hear one yes.

Every time that you hire someone new, mark your calendars for 30 days down the road and ask yourself one question, knowing what I know today, would I hire this person? If the answer is no, fire them immediately.

"The answer" refers to the question "Would I hire this person again knowing what I know now?" asked 30 days after hiring.

If everyone knows within a month and every time that you hire someone new... If the answer is no, fire them immediately. They're already set on a trajectory of not being successful and they're creating damage to you, to the rest of the team and to themselves.

If you want to make it simple, in your journey of building a product, we basically say this is iteration to iteration to iteration. You add features and you add features until you add the features that people are using. What you really want to do next is remove the rest of the features that people are not using because they're adding complexity.

Good story is not about facts. It's about creating emotional engagement. It's about creating the sense that the listener would like to be part of this story.