A founder’s guide to crisis management | Uri Levine (Waze co-founder, serial entrepreneur)
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What is the new chapter about crisis management that Uri Levine added to his book?
Let's talk about crisis. I think it might be helpful to do a quick taxonomy of the types of crisis founders face.
So two abstractively two types of crisis. One is I would call that a cash crisis. All of a sudden, your cash program or plan is being jeopardized. You know, losing a customer, disappearing investor. In the other one, is lose of product market feed. When product market feed disappeared, you actually need to go back to square one. Then you basically say, everything that I know so far is
You also talk along these lines of never give up in a crisis and throughout your journey.
Always keep on looking for ways to make it work. Never give up is the most important behavior of successful CEOs of startup. The second one, by the way, is making decisions with conviction. If you don't make them with conviction, then the team is not going to follow. If the team is not going to follow, then you're not going to be successful.
the core part of your advice on crisis, it's always the founder's fault if things don't work out.
At the end of the day, you cannot rely on someone else. You have only one company. You need to make sure that this company is successful. When you assume responsibility, you're basically saying, you know what, I control my own desktop.
Any advice for how to avoid falling into a crisis as a founder?
Number one answer is no. Don't worry, you will face crisis.
Today, my guest is Uri Lavine. Uri is the co-founder of Waze along with nine other companies. He's sold two companies for over a billion dollars. He's been on 20 different startup boards, has been an advisor to over 50 different startups, and even more impressively, this is his second time on the podcast. In our first conversation, we walk through the biggest lessons that he's learned over the course of working with all of these different startups that he chronicled in his beloved book. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. In this conversation, we go deep on one very specific topic: crisis. As Uri shares in his book, building a startup is a journey from one crisis to the next. And my goal with this conversation is to give you tools to handle the next crisis and the next crisis and the next crisis that you face as a founder.
This topic is so important that Uri decided to update and re-release his book with a whole new channel. chapter dedicated to managing crisis. And this new edition is actually gonna launch right around the time this episode launches. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Uri Levine. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app.
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It's a drop-in replacement for Auth Zero and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's work OS. Ask.com This episode is brought to you by Rippling, a single platform to build and scale your startup on. Rippling handles all the can't get it wrong admin work of payroll and benefits, giving you back hours every week.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the new chapter about crisis management that Uri Levine added to his book?
0:00–7:33
2
How does Uri define the two main types of startup crises?
7:33–24:30
3
What questions should founders ask when they face a cash‑flow crisis?
24:30–40:50
4
How can founders quickly decide whether to pivot, raise money, or shut down when product‑market fit disappears?
40:50–57:53
5
What practical steps can leaders take to keep their team motivated and engaged during a crisis?
57:53–1:08:33
6
Why is acting fast the most important factor in surviving a startup crisis?
1:08:33–1:21:07
7
What advice does Uri give for preparing for the next inevitable crisis?
1:21:07–1:23:41
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