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
20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness
Carlos Delatorre is one of the legendary go-to-market leaders of the last 20 years. Today, Carlos is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Harness, where he oversees global sales and go-to-market (GTM) operations. Before Harness, Carlos was the CRO @ MongoDB and Navan. Carlos is also an investor with a portfolio including the likes of Modern Treasury and Starburst to name a few.
In Today's Sales Masterclass We Discuss:
03:48 The Art and Science of Sales
04:42 How to Hire Sales Talent
06:26 How to Build a Sales Team
15:28 Why Every Sales Rep Should do Pipeline Generation
19:45 How the Best Reps to Pipeline Generation
21:34 Biggest challenges of Pipeline Generation
22:44 Pipeline Generation Success Stories
34:59 Sales Metrics and Conversion Rates
35:32 Customer Acquisition Strategies
37:17 Evaluating Sales Performance
39:14 Effective Sales Training
43:10 Pipeline Generation and Deal Reviews
45:05 Maintaining Sales Team Morale
46:20 Verticalized Sales Playbooks
48:37 Addressing SaaS Churn Rates
49:49 Discounting and Deal Slippage
52:02 Transitioning to CEO Role
54:15 Hiring Mistakes and Sales Rep Evolution
57:03 In-Person vs. Remote Sales Teams
57:55 Account Management Strategies
01:02:47 Creative Sales Tactics
01:04:12 Final Advice for Sales Leaders
01:04:46 Adapting Sales Strategies During Crisis
#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?
SaaStr 522: Scaling Your Startup 10x From $20M to $200M with Sapphire, Lightspeed, TripActions, and 6Sense
When you think of scaling up, many things may come to mind, like hiring, culture, marketing, and sales. But what are the essentials of scaling up, and how do you navigate obstacles along the way to function as a high-impact organization?
Cathy Gao, Partner at Sapphire Ventures, and Anoushka Vaswani, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, moderated a panel with Carlos Delatorre, CRO at TripActions, and Latané Conant, CMO at 6sense to discuss how you can scale your startup from $20 million ARR to $200 million ARR through go-to-market execution, talent, and culture.
CMO TripActions, Meagen Eisenberg: The Joy of Living in Awkward
There is a litany of analogies for marketing. An art, a technique, a skill. Yet few strive to combine a multitude of approaches. For Meagen Eisenberg, Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions, she synthesizes a combination of art, science, and the essential ingredient–joy–to form a unique marketing strategy.
Meagen is a no BS go-getter who demonstrates an encompassing approach to how she conducts business. She hones in on her own efficiency and ability to think quickly and adapt, and expresses how cultivating that skill has made her a fast decision-maker. To reinforce that speed is a desire to always learn, which is the underlying motivation for her own professional progress. Meagen offers her perspectives on organizational structure, the highly valuable takeaways from mistakes and failures, and how her work at TripActions has adapted, through her own love and joy of the flux of marketing, to the changes of COVID-19. Meagen’s straightforward approach carries a lot of weight and is a force we all can consider.
In this episode, we cover:
Why TripActions’ CRO, Carlos Delatorre, calls Meagen a superhuman - and why she believes in treating her sales team as a customer. (03:56)
‘The key for executives is to keep learning’: Meagen discusses her favorite mediums for learning, her love of books, and the various ways she stays on the pulse. (11:58)
A discussion about preparing for and executing board meetings - and a look at PG Tuesday. (19:31)
Meagen’s perspective on company alignment from the top down and how it sets the stage for success. (25:44)
The silver lining in failure and Meagen’s attitude towards not giving up - and what it means to “live in awkward.” (34:55)
The art and science of marketing - and the impact of COVID-19 on TripActions and how that differed from its competitors. (44:46)
Meagen reflects on the worst day in her career during the pandemic. (55:14)
A walkthrough of Meagen’s hiring process during her first six weeks at TripActions, her take on hiring people who solve problems, and why she loves marketing. (01:01:52)
Links:
Connect with MeagenLinkedIn
TripActions
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
Links Referenced:
Dan Druker
Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
MOVE: The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Andre Agassi: Open: An Autobiography
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
SaaStr 472: 5 Tips to Reduce the Enterprise Sales Cycle with TripActions' General Manager, Michael Sindicich
In just 5 years, TripActions has grown to be a leader in the travel management space. Michael Sindicich, GM of TripActions Liquid, a new expense management platform, that serves companies including Lyft, Toast, and Zoom will explore sales tips, tricks, and his lessons learned.
Video + show notes: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-472-and-video-5-tips-to-reduce-the-enterprise-sales-cycle-with-tripactions/
CRO TripActions, Carlos Delatorre: The Science of Sales
In this episode of Go to Market Grit, TripActions CRO and Silicon Valley sales legend Carlos Delatorre opens up about what it takes to build powerful and effective sales teams and strategies. Joubin and Carlos discuss two key topics, including the value of relationship building, and making your go-to-market strategy a competitive differentiator.
In this episode of Go to Market Grit, we cover:
Carlos’s criteria when vetting new opportunities including the size of the market, whether the solution has genuine differentiation that delivers real value to customers, and the quality of the team.
How a healthy market and great sales execution can make up for a mediocre product.
Why people and execution are the most important aspects in sales, even more than product and market size.
The importance of relying on trusted experts when qualifying new technologies.
Analyzing differentiation at the architectural level versus the feature level.
An inside scoop on how TripActions has been dealing with the lack of travel during the pandemic, and why Carlos views the travel freeze as both a challenge and an opportunity.
Why Carlos places limited value on relationships when selling differentiated products — and why skilled and curious salespeople tend to be much more successful than people who rely on relationships. Carlos also discusses the value of internal relationships, and why working from home can be a challenge for productivity.
The impact that an optimized go-to-market strategy can have on sales, and the magic that can happen when a sales team is given a differentiated product that delivers real value, are expert at demand creation, and can convert demand into revenue.
Viewing the sales process as a science, as opposed to an art, and ensuring that the science is applied consistently — and why ideas should flow up and down between management and sales teams.
Carlos’s key go-to-market differentiators: Being able to recruit star talent, having a solid enablement program, and having a solid execution strategy.
Links:
Connect with Carlos on LinkedIn: LinkedIn
TripActions
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
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.
SaaStr 330: TripActions CMO Meagen Eisenberg on Making Trade-Offs In Marketing
The true test of marketers. Are you a revenue driver or a cost center? You cannot afford to be the latter. Marketing leaders must focus their teams on the areas that will drive revenue while they cut costs - the biggest impact for the business. Join TripActions CMO Meagen Eisenberg at SaaStr Summit as she highlights her approach to ensuring Marketing delivers on its mission-critical role even in times of uncertainty or crisis.
This podcast is an excerpt from Megan's session at SaaStr Summit. You can find the full video and transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/making-trade-offs-in-marketing-with-meagen-eisenberg-video-transcript/
SaaStr 047: How To Increase Leads & Conversion Through Optimising Your Marketing Funnel with Meagen Eisenberg, CMO @ MongoDB
Today's episode is taken from SaaStr Annual 2016, featuring Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at MongoDB and former VP Demand Gen at DocuSign, sharing her playbook for optimizing the funnel at every stage and converting leads into real, paying customers. If you want to join me and Jason @ SaaStr 2017 then head to saastr.com where you can buy tickets.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
Why you need to think about more than just pipeline? What are the other elements of the funnel you should focus on?
How to optimise your forms for data capture to allow your sales team to follow up successfully?
How marketing can provide support to sales to attract new customers?
How does nurturing align the buyer with your sales team?
How do you accurately measure success within email marketing?
How can startups on a tight budget maximise exposure through content and social media?
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
Saastr
Meagen Eisenberg