Waze
Est. 2012Uri Levine and his co-founders launched Waze with a near-empty map — and let the users pave the roads themselves, one drive at a time.
▶ WAZE · 2012
WAZE · 2026 ◀Drag the handle — Waze, 2012 → 2026.
“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”— Uri Levine, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
The ugly part. Waze grew out of Ehud Shabtai's FreeMap Israel project, and when Uri Levine, Shabtai, and Amir Shinar founded the company in 2008, the first product shipped with almost no base map. Open it somewhere new and you got a blank canvas.
What they did that didn't scale. There was no fleet of survey cars. The map was crowdsourced: as you drove with the app running, your GPS trace literally drew the roads, and users fixed names, junctions, and hazards by hand. The users were the mapping team — 'the more you drive, the better it gets.'
Now. Waze became one of the most-used navigation apps in the world, and Google acquired it in 2013 for about $1.1 billion — a map built, mile by mile, by the people using it.