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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
Let's talk about crisis. I think it might be helpful to do a quick taxonomy of the types of crisis founders face.

**Uri Levine** (0:05)
So to abstract, you get 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. Losing a customer, disappearing investor. And the other one is lose of product market. When product market feed disappeared, you actually need to go back to square one. And you basically say, everything that I know so far is irrelevant anymore.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:31)
You also talk along these lines of never give up in a crisis and throughout your journey.

**Uri Levine** (0:35)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
The core part of your advice on crisis, it's always the founder's fault. If things don't work out.

**Uri Levine** (0:57)
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 destiny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:11)
Any advice for how to avoid falling into a crisis as a founder?

**Uri Levine** (1:14)
Number one answer is no. Don't worry, you will face crisis.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:21)
Today, my guest is Uri Levine. 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 walked 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 chapter dedicated to managing crisis. And this new edition is actually going to 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 Work OS. 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 Work OS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by Work OS, including ones you probably know, like Vercell, Webflow and Loom. Work OS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim or user management, you should consider Work OS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.
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