Book Brief: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

A Handbook for Entrepreneurs

Brief Summary

Title: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs
Author: Uri Levine
Published: 2023 by Matt Holt
What It Teaches: Fall in Love with the Problem shares the author’s experiences in launching Waze and other successful startups. It covers a very broad cross-section of decisions that entrepreneurs face on the startup journey.
When To Use It: Fall in Love with the Problem comes across almost like a running transcript of Uri Levine’s mentoring conversations with various entrepreneurs he is helping. There is some level of editing to collect the wisdom into chapters based on the specific areas of advice being given, so readers may benefit from reading a specific chapter at a specific stage in their journey (e.g. the chapters on fundraising and selling the company), but entrepreneurs would generally benefit from reading the entire book cover-to-cover once and then referring back to it when specific issues come up in their business.

Brief Review

I received a free copy of this book from the publicists promoting it in exchange for an honest review.

Uri Levine was one of the co-founders of Waze, which Google acquired for over $1B. He has also participated in several other successful startups. He has learned a lot along the way and Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution is his attempt to most efficiently share those lessons with other entrepreneurs.

I was impressed by the insights that Levine shared from the very first pages of the book. However, by the time I finished the book, I had a picture in my mind of how the book might have been developed. I envisioned Levine in meeting after meeting with entrepreneurs he was mentoring, while someone captured the wisdom being shared. Later, perhaps editors generalized the advice and organized it into chapters on specific aspects of the startup journey. That’s probably not how the book was created, but maybe that picture gives you a sense of what to expect.

The writing style is very conversational and informal. Levine can be direct, perhaps even course, just as he might be with a mentee. He does a good job of providing guidance and then backing it up with specific examples from Waze and other companies to validate the guidance. Sometimes he walks step by step through a particular process, or how a given topic evolves throughout the startup journey.

The challenge with this approach is very similar to the challenge in general with receiving input from advisors. You need to take the advice for what it is — one person’s opinion. Founders often get input from multiple advisors and that input may be contradictory. That’s the case with Fall in Love with the Problem as well. At times it seems like guidance Levine provides in one place contradicts advice he gives in another place in the book. The reality is that every startup is different, the context in which they are operating is unique to them, and what makes sense at one point in the journey may not be the right choice later in the journey. Therefore, just as wise founders take advisors’ input for what it is and then make the best decision they can, so should readers take the guidance provided in this book.

To give a sense for the topics covered in the book, here are the chapter titles:

• Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
• A Start-up Is a Journey of Failures
• Embrace Disruption
• Operate in Phases
• Ride the Fundraising Roller Coaster
• Manage Your Investors
• Firing and Hiring
• Understand the User — You Are Only a Sample of One
• Figure Out Product-Market Fit or Die
• Making Money
• How to Get to a Billion Users
• Go Global
• The Exit

Let me also quote a brief section of the book to give you a sense for the writing style and the value of the content:

We ended up saying no — no to truckers, no to bike riders, no to pedestrians, no to public transportation, no to anything that wasn’t commuters. The one-million-dollar-a-year deal that we could have in 2009 [with a trucking company] was higher than the revenues of Waze in 2009, 2010, and 2011, and was about the same order of magnitude of revenues we made in 2012 and 2013.

Over the years I have told this story to people, and I am always asked, “Why not both?” And the answer is very simple: focus.

A start-up, in order to be successful, needs to do one and only one thing right, and to increase the likelihood of doing so, it needs to say no to everything else. Focus is not only about what we are doing; it is about what we are not doing! These are the hard decisions to say no to.

Bottom Line: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution is full of insights and advice for entrepreneurs based on one man’s experience at some very successful startups. There’s a lot in it that I agree with and would probably give the same advice to companies I was advising. There are some things I disagree with and I would give counter-advice. As long as the reader takes the content for what it is — one man’s opinion — this can be a very valuable book for entrepreneurs. Especially compared to the cost of a highly qualified advisor, this book is well worth the price and time investment.