Solutions Are Disposable

This is the title of Uri Levine’s 2023 book, “Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs,” and the mantra he carried through building Waze, the crowdsourced navigation app Google bought in 2013, and Moovit after it.

Levine’s method is to ship a product before it is good enough and iterate until it is, treating each failure as information about what to drop. The solution he starts with rarely survives that churn; the problem he set out to solve does. That is why he makes the problem the fixed point: “the problem becomes the north star of your journey, keeping you focused.” A founder who falls for the solution instead keeps refining it long after the evidence says no one wants that particular thing. The working discipline is to keep checking whether a real, widely shared problem is still being solved, not whether today’s build is getting better.