20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen
Ariel Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Navan (formerly TripActions), an AI-powered travel and expense platform. Last month, Ariel took the company public, since being a public company, they have faced a torrid time seeing stock price decline by 50%. The company is currently valued between $4BN-$5BN.
AGENDA:
0:00 The Truth About Going Public After 11 Years
5:50 Why We Couldn't Wait: The Real Reason for the IPO
8:15 Disrupting the Giants: Amex, Concur, and the $1T Opportunity
11:50 "If We Don't Build This, We're Dead": Seeing ChatGPT Early
18:35 Why Navan Built Their Own Customer Service AI
23:45 Why Infrastructure is Overrated (and What Actually Matters)
28:55 Vibe Coding: How We Rebuilt Our Product in 6 Hours
34:55 Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy?
38:50 Lessons from Robinhood: Energy, Ethics, and the Stock Price
45:10 The Cost of Success: $1B Mistakes and Parenting Regrets
#141 CEO Navan, Ariel Cohen: Be Naive!
Guest: Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan
As a business travel-focused startup, Navan (previously known as TripActions) was heavily impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020; after laying off 24% of the staff, CEO Ariel Cohen says he became a “wartime CEO,” spending three months in “complete denial and just executing.” By June, employees were leaving and he was depressed — but he still believed that business travel would come back. “You cannot just look at a moment and say that it will change everything,” he says. “... I disconnected from the news and from some of our investors and from ... negativity and started to lead the company again.” In a way, he explains, it was like a reset to the earliest days of the business, because the only people left were long-term believers like him.
In this episode, Ariel and Joubin discuss “tier one” VCs, developing goodwill, company money vs. employee money, wartime CEOs, putting handcuffs on founders, staying dynamic, returning to the office, scuba diving, shared values, Macallan whisky, believing in startups, losing employees, in-person connections, secondary liquidity, and “deposits and withdrawals.”
In this episode, we cover:
Picking the right investors (01:22)
Connecting to the Matrix (04:04)
Obsessing over failure (10:29)
Reflecting on an eight-year journey (14:56)
The benefits of naïveté (17:50)
Ariel’s entrepreneur father and early jobs (20:45)
Older startup founders (23:03)
Getting out of large companies (25:35)
Personal burn rate (28:03)
Becoming the big company (30:11)
Pivoting into AI (32:44)
Project Reset and personally resetting (34:12)
Making controversial decisions (39:55)
“What could I have done better?” (45:43)
Ariel’s co-founder Ilan Twig (47:04)
What makes a co-founder relationship work? (48:50)
Running out of cash (51:18)
Being a travel startup during COVID (55:53)
The depression quarter (01:00:12)
Long-term believers (01:02:54)
Why Navan would go public (01:07:55)
Startup advice and hard-charging CEOs (01:11:27)
What “grit” means to Ariel and who Navan is hiring (01:15:24)
Links:
Connect with ArielLinkedIn
Email: ariel@navan.com
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
20VC: Why Salesforce, SAP and Concur Will Die | Scaling 3x and Raising at a $9.2BN Valuation in COVID | How OpenAI is Changing the Travel Industry Forever | Never Before Revealed Margins on Travel and Expense Management with Ariel Cohen, Co-Founder & CEO
Ariel Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Navan (formerly TripActions), the #1 travel management super-app used by over 8,000 companies. Ariel has raised over $2BN for Navan from some of the best including a16z, Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed, Greenoaks, and Elad Gil. Prior to TripActions, Ariel co-founded streamOnce, a business multimedia integration platform that was successfully acquired by Jive Software, where Ariel had previously served in a senior position following his time at Hewlett-Packard.
In Today's Episode with Ariel Cohen We Discuss:
1.) Why Education is Outdated and Wisdom to People Entering the Working World:
Why did Ariel not really attend many classes when he was a student?
What would be his biggest advice to young people leaving school today? Where would he focus?
Why does Ariel believe that traditional education is more outdated now than ever before?
2.) Why SAP and Salesforce Will Die:
Why does Ariel believe that SAP and Salesforce have not innovated for a decade?
Why does Ariel believe that Slack is a disaster inside of Salesforce?
What are the single biggest advantages that startups have over these large incumbents?
What can startups do to retain innovation and speed as they scale into becoming an incumbent?
Why are the best founders willing to kill their own projects?
3.) Growing a Business 3x and Raising at a $9.2BN Valuation in COVID:
How did Ariel grow the business 3x with all travel being banned?
What were the tactics to blitz scaling during COVID?
How did Ariel approach his investors for a new round in the middle of COVID? How did he get such a high price in the midst of a global pandemic?
What is the bull case for how Navan can be a $40BN company?
4.) Margins Matter: Gaining Leverage Through Additional Margin:
With Navan's 80% margin, they have 30% higher margins than other competitors, how do they have such high margins?
With the additional 30%, how does Ariel plan to scale Navan's reach and use the margin to do so?
How does OpenAI play a role in helping Navan increase its margin even further?
20VC: TripActions CEO Ariel Cohen on The Future of Business and Personal Travel & Layoffs; How To Do Them The Right Way & Maintain Company Culture and Morale
Ariel Cohen is the Founder & CEO @ TripActions, the company trusted by more than 4,000 companies to manage their business travel and expenses. To date, Ariel has raised more than $980M with TripActions from the likes of Lightspeed, Oren Zeev and a16z to name a few. Prior to TripActions, Ariel co-founded StreamOnce, a business multimedia integration platform which was acquired by Jive Software. Prior to StreamOnce, Ariel led Product Management in a senior leadership role at Hewlett-Packard.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ariel made his way into the world of tech and came to change the way we think about business travel today with TripActions?
2.) What are TripActions doing in their business to be there for their partners, customers and suppliers in the long term? TripActions engaged in layoffs, how did Ariel approach the size of layoff required? What is the right way to do layoffs? How does this change in a remote world?
3.) Given the uncertainty, how does Ariel advise founders to assess and correct their burn and spending? What is a reasonable amount of runway to reserve for? For those hit hard on the demand side, what can they do to build durable defensibility when they can't scale demand?
4.) How does Ariel view the future of business travel? Does Zoom replace much of the business trips? What will the landscape look like in 3 years? What players will survive? Who will thrive?
5.) From a founder psychology perspective, what has Avi done to cope in these very challenging times? What has worked? What has not worked? What does Ariel advise founders struggling to cope psychologically? What can investors do to be there for their founders?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Ariel's Fave Book: Mr Vertigo
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.