How Navan Built a $7Bn Fintech Inside a Travel Company, with President Michael Sindicich

0:00In March of 2020, Navan had just launched a brand new payments product. Some of the biggest companies in the country were signing up on day one. A week later, COVID happened and the world shut down.

0:15Michael Sindicich: Then a week after we launched it, the pandemic hit. All of our revenue went to zero. The next day we had a board meeting and we were basically like, okay, we can do a couple of things. we can kind of shutter the company and just wait this thing out. The other option was essentially, what if we actually use the time when we know that our people-heavy, cost-heavy competition would actually do that to turn it into an advantage to go on the offense? I sat down with Michael Sindicic, president of Navan, the AI-powered travel, expense, and payments for enterprises. Today, their clients include 50 firms of the S &P 500, and they're on track for almost a billion dollars in revenue in 2026.

1:08Michael Sindicich: I think that decision was more company-defining than anything else. Five years later, the floor fell out again. Navan became the first company to go public during a U.S. government shutdown. It priced at$25 a share, and then the market and their stock started to slide. It went down and down and down in the$8 range. And we're sitting here thinking, like, man, we built a good business. We think that everything's working. We're growing fast. We're really excited about our numbers. And then the price reflected in the stock is, like, so low. what's going on. We had Ben Horowitz come talk at the all hands with his experience.

1:55Michael Sindicich: And he was like, guys, keep doing your thing. And they did. The stock recovered within months. Michael has been in the room for all of it. From first salesperson to now president of the company. Let's get into it.

2:15You were a pre-med student. in a parallel life, you would be operating in a surgeon table, right? What happened? Why did you decide to pursue a different path?

2:29Michael Sindicich: Yeah, it's a good question. I thought that I was going to be a doctor since I was in junior high. And so I remember I went to go watch one of my friend's dad's was an orthopedic surgeon. So we went and we went and saw three live surgeries in the OR. and it was an awesome experience. It was like, you know, he was like first things first and he plugged in his iPod and he started playing ABC by Michael Jackson and, you know, the people in the room were dancing and by the way, the guy was like asleep and, you know, ready to get his knee operated on. But it just looked like such a fun job. And so ever since watching those surgeries, then, you know, I was studying really hard in school.

3:12Michael Sindicich: I was getting great grades and things like that. And I was also, when I got to high school, was working in a lab at the Keck Graduate Institute nearby in the Claremont Colleges. Ended up publishing some research as well on protein assays. Went to UCLA on the pre-med track. And I was also a track and a cross-country athlete as well. And was going through, you know, kind of the track. And I found myself my senior year, the summer, me and some friends ended up starting an insurance brokerage to make some money. And my mom was an insurance agent. And we thought it'd be cool to, you know, build an insurance brokerage and do something to generate some income.

3:55Michael Sindicich: And that ended up turning into like 50 licensed agents, like our friends and people from school. Were you managing them? We were managing. There was about six of us who started the company. We had an office in Beverly Hills. We were like sleeping on yoga mats. We were showering at the gym next door. And at the same time, I was doing my honors thesis and I was a psychology biology major. And I would go scooter back from, you know, the Beverly Hills office to school to do labs. And then I'd work in a basement doing brain surgery on rats. So I was essentially implanting cannula into the brain and we were testing out different drugs and how they can help solve PTSD and depression and build more resilience.

4:35Michael Sindicich: and between doing that and then building a company, I was like, wow, this is actually really fun to build a company and to employ a bunch of people and really drive toward a mission. And so a lot of people actually take a year off before they go to med school, they study for the MCATs, the big tests before you go commit to another four years of schooling or so and then into the medical track. And so that's what I did. My friend and I, we decided, let's actually move up to Silicon Valley for the year. He was telling me, trust me, my brother, he's in startups. It's amazing. Look at this thing. And so we came up and we called his brother on the way up and said, hey, we're going to come up here.

5:16Michael Sindicich: And do you have a place for us to stay? Know anyone who has anything available? And my mom was like, yeah, I'll see you guys next weekend. She thought we were going to go up and come back real quick. But he ended up connecting us with a friend at a house that he was living in that said that we could rent the shed in the backyard in Palo Alto for$600 a month, by the way, which is really expensive, you know, as a new grad college kid. But at the same time, I was always kind of hustling. So I had a drop shipping company where I would sell iPhone cases or gym workout tanks and ship them from Amazon or Alibaba and sell them for a pretty good profit.

5:53Michael Sindicich: So we could kind of get by for a while. And we were still doing the insurance company at the time. So there's, it works as like residuals. Once you have sold someone, if they stay on the policy, it keeps going. And so we came, we got to Target, we rented air mattresses, little twin size air mattresses. We put them in the shed. And the same on the way up, I reached out to a Craigslist opportunity to basically teach chess after school to students. And the guy would meet me, he met me in San Jose. I interviewed with him on the drive up and ended up getting the job, which is like$50 an hour, which is pretty good.

6:30Michael Sindicich: People will pay in the Bay Area a lot of money to teach their kids chess. And so that's what we were doing while we were, you know, kind of figuring out what to do and applying to different jobs. And it was just incredible. It was like this insane hacker house. So, like, there wasn't a TV. There was a projector. What was the name of the house? There was no name. No name of the house. It was on Greer Street. So we just called it, you know, the Greer House. But I wrote a LinkedIn post about this, actually. So my friend's brother who lived in the house, he started a company called Socket. My friend is now the head of sales there.

7:04Michael Sindicich: They just raised for a billion dollars. The guy that was living in the garage sold his startup to Box, took some time off, and then ended up being one of the founding engineers of Ramp. And then he went to go help his brother start his company called Cognition. You know Devin, the software engineer? So him and his brother were building that. Now he's gone and started his own company and Cognition is, you know, taking off. It's actually where Art went to go work now. Absolutely. Yeah. And I was very early, ended up interviewing at Navon. And at the time we were about six people and like nobody.

7:40Michael Sindicich: But, you know, now it's grown to a lot bigger. So this house was like just really incredible. It was an incubator of like startup-y tech kind of things. And it was so much fun. And after, you know, after about a year, I kind of made the decision of like, wow, I just really love, you know, the whole startup scene, Silicon Valley, building companies and riding the Nirvan rocket ship, you know, hopefully to the moon one day. And that's when I decided that I probably won't go back to med school. Sometimes I think about it maybe like in a couple of years and like, you know, a decade or something. If I ended up, you know, wanting to do something else, then I could explore it.

8:16Michael Sindicich: But I'm having a lot of fun right now. Did you ever take the MCAT? I never took the MCAT. I took a lot of practice tests for the MCAT, but yeah, I never actually took it. You mentioned chess. I actually did not know that you were that good at chess that you could actually teach it. If you were going to teach me chess, how do you assess whether I have potential or not? And what's important? What do great chess players have in common? I would say, first of all, I'm not that good at chess. This was more of like an after-school program for little kids. But a really funny story. So six months into working at Nivan, I walk by Ariel's desk.

8:50Michael Sindicich: Ariel's the CEO and founder. And I look at a picture on his desk and I say, like, is that Sivan? and he was like, how the fuck do you know my son's name? And I was like, I taught him chess at Juan of Rionas. Yeah, so he was in kindergarten at the time. So imagine the students I'm teaching are more like, okay, it's an afterschool program. Parents are working. Let's corral everyone, try to teach them how to play chess, but also a little bit of daycare. But then all the way up to sixth grade or so and those chess players can actually get very competitive. I just think the most important thing about chess is one, having a strategy for the opening, but then two, kind of understanding every single move that your opponent can come back with.

9:31Michael Sindicich: And then how does that change the game of the future? And it's a lot of if-thens, right? So, and I think that that's actually, I find it pretty helpful in the company. And as we're thinking about strategy and growing the company, which is like, if someone does this, then we'll do that. If we do that, then we unlock this. If we don't do this, then this is the ramification of it. And to me, chess is one big like if-then kind of statement of like, how can you position yourself in the best way so that your opponent basically has less opportunities of if-thens and you have more opportunities of if-thens.

10:06So over the last decade or so, what are the roles you've had at the event?

10:12Michael Sindicich: Yeah, it's a good question. I started out as the first salesperson at the company. And so that was basically like, okay, we went and built something. Now, Michael, go and sell it. Go figure out how to bring it to the market. And that was kind of the, by the way, it's kind of how I still see my role, is basically like bringing what we're building to market and at the same time taking what the market's asking and taking it back to the teams to figure out how we can build it in our way. So that was the beginning was for a salesperson. I would go around, you know, build the infrastructure, figure out the technologies we should use, how to set up the go-to-market, you know, do all the calling, the emailing, etc.

10:52Michael Sindicich: Then ended up building out the SDR team and then the sales team. Was managing the sales team for a bit. And then every time I would kind of take the go-to-market to the next place. So like at first we were selling small companies. Then I went to go lead the mid-market. After that, then that was scaling. I went to go lead enterprise. So then I was kind of taking the company to larger and larger businesses. And then we saw this as I was doing enterprise, we saw this huge, huge opportunity around fintech, actually. So I guess that's relevant for the conversation today. But what would happen is in the beginning, we were selling a travel booking tool and we were selling a travel agency.

11:31Michael Sindicich: And so if you're familiar with like larger companies or legacy setups, you'll typically have like your travel, you book it on Concur. and then maybe work with like an Amex GBT or like a Carlson or a BCD as the agency. We brought those two things together because we figured, okay, we can have the best technology, but unless we own the support experience as well, it's never going to be perfectly seamless. So we built this entire travel agency, and that means getting licenses and, you know, being able to have agreements with all the airlines and different points of sales and all this stuff around the world.

12:03Michael Sindicich: but as we went to go sell to enterprises um one people were asking us from the beginning when are you going to build expense management so people see travel and expense really tied together but actually the the avenue into the fintech angle was a different story um big companies that were using us would put what's called a ghost card on file in the product and so what'll happen is when someone goes to check out for a flight let's say um you use the corporate card that's in the system to pay for that is one option. And then what happens is the finance team, the accounting team has a hell of a time trying to reconcile every single booking with every single transaction on the credit card.

12:45Michael Sindicich: And you play this game of like match at the end of the month, which wastes a lot of time, but you're basically reconciling. And it's nice of you to do because you're not pushing it onto the employees where the employees then do all the reconciliation in the form of an expense report. And so we saw that happening. If you don't have a card, then employees are busy, you know, chasing receipts and trying to get them and reconciling themselves. And if they bought a seat upgrade, or if they changed their flight, or if they went to the hotel and then collect the folio and then itemize it. And it's a really, really cumbersome process.

13:18Michael Sindicich: And we saw the Stripes, Adians, Marquettas, these guys coming out. And we said, actually, what if we could fully automate travel payments? And so what that would mean is us actually connecting into a modern kind of program manager, connecting to a network. In our case, it was Visa, and we started with Stripe early days. And we could actually issue, underwrite the customer, give kind of a short-term deferred debit or credit loan, and essentially underwrite the customer. And anytime someone, a traveler goes to book something in our system, we can generate a new 16 digit virtual card, even though it might say, you know, company payment method, it generates a new card and it perfectly reconciles in real time.

14:03Michael Sindicich: It is only applicable to that merchant. So there's no fraud. It cancels, you know, after the trip ends and it's it's basically follows along that journey. So if on the credit card statement, it says Priceline 1367, I know that I can match that to Michael's SKO Marriott Hotel. And that was a beautiful solution. I never saw something that we like just launched and every company was like, oh, my God, I need this. I want this. I want to use it. Like on day one when we launched it, we had very big enterprises already, you know, signing up for the for the solution. Then, by the way, a week after we launched it, the pandemic hit.

14:41Michael Sindicich: And so the pandemic, all of our revenue went to zero. We had just launched this new payment thing. And we said, okay, now is probably the right time to go into expense management, into creating purchase cards, being more of a spend management platform as teams were really distributed. And so to answer your question in the beginning, went from sales leader there to eventually the CEO of the payments and expense business. And that was cool. That was like my first time from leading sales people and, you know, having a number to actually leading like product design, engineering, operations, legal, HR, you know, all of the things that you would do.

15:19Michael Sindicich: And we really treated it as a startup within the startup as its own business. Like there was a time where we weren't going to the company all hands. We had our own all hands and things like that. And I think it was so important for us because if we were to build this fintech, you know, new products and treat it as, hey, here's a new business that is, you know, we're leading with, you know, a random like just a project on a PM's team with a few engineers. It never would have become like the big business that it is today. Definitely created a lot of headaches, right? We had multiple sales teams, different products, competing resources, like lots of duplication across the company.

15:56Michael Sindicich: But I think it was very big and smart investment decisions to actually build something that can scale to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and really a good product that then we can sell. And after that journey, about a year and a half ago, both businesses were scaling really nicely. And what Ariel asked me to do is to be the president of the company, which is an ambiguous title, but essentially what it means is leading everything go to market. And so what I did was combined all the sales teams, combined the RevOps teams. We have a marketing CMO as well. And that's like kind of combining the messaging around travel expense and payments and meetings and events and VIP and a lot of the different businesses that we've built internally.

16:41Michael Sindicich: And then CorpDev and M &A and partnerships and field operations. So that's kind of what I oversee now. And it's, you know, one big, really aggressive, you know, kind of scaling go-to-market motion. When revenue goes to zero in March of 2020, was there a point where you doubted that you would actually make it as a company? Honestly, there was, yes, for sure. But it was also so busy that it was hard to think about that because we just, we're the kind of team that takes action really fast. So the pandemic hit and I think like the next day, you know, we sent everyone home and that was the whole like, see you in two weeks kind of thing.

17:22Michael Sindicich: but like send everyone home like the next day we had a board meeting and we were basically like okay we can do a couple things we can kind of shutter the company and just wait this thing out and you know put it on pause and furlough people and things like that was one option which by the way a lot of the other competition was doing in the travel management space just because they're so people heavy they had a lot of support agents and things like that and no one was traveling So that was option one. The other option was essentially, what if we actually use the time when we know that our people-heavy, cost-heavy competition would actually do that to turn it into an advantage to go on the offense?

18:07Michael Sindicich: And, you know, we kind of looked around the room. We're like, yeah, we're all startup people. Like, we take risks. We go for it. And what we actually did is we raised money fast. We then, and it was a convert and things like that. So there were different nuances, but we raised money. We actually doubled down on enterprise sales because we thought, okay, if we can go and convince, you know, an enterprise company, hey, nobody's traveling right now. You believe that travel will come back. The best time to change your travel solution and modernize it is actually when no one's traveling. And I remember sales were really hard.

18:42Michael Sindicich: Imagine selling travel to a travel manager during a pandemic when they're like not even sure about their own job and no one's traveling. but we pushed down that path. And then what we also did was we took it as an opportunity to really invest in the payments and expense business. So we sent a lot of our best engineers, we hired a lot of people, and we essentially built this product very fast and then started selling it into all of our install base and then also net new companies. And I think that decision was more company-defining than anything else. Once the pandemic started ending and travel came back, we just saw the volumes just growing like crazy because the install base of the companies we had sold that never traveled with us started traveling.

19:27Michael Sindicich: We built products like R-Factor dashboards, COVID dashboards, employee tracking and monitoring, all these types of things for admins to basically leverage our technology to help us or help them navigate through the pandemic. And I think people love that. We doubled down on support. So I don't know if you remember, but flights were getting canceled. Employees were like stuck in Europe or in the US and they couldn't get home. And so just really 24 seven hands-on support to help our customers. And yeah, I think it allowed us to basically scale fast. During that time, we also made some acquisitions.

20:03Michael Sindicich: So I think we've acquired, we probably acquired about three or four different travel agencies and companies during that time as well, which then helps us to scale globally, internationally, have licenses, better agreements, all these types of things with the suppliers. And yeah, we absolutely went for it. And I think it paid off big time. Michael, what does it take to build a world-class sales organization? Especially, obviously, here we're talking about B2B. Yeah. It's a good credit. It takes the right CRO. and we have a guy named Grant McGrail who is just phenomenal. He's an absolute killer.

20:44Michael Sindicich: But I think if I were to start it all over again or think about how to build world class, first thing starts with the people. And I think there's different schools of thoughts and playbooks around basically processes for sales. And so we use something called the MedPick process, But basically, we have different stages throughout the sales cycle. We have different qualification criteria. We have different ways to move from a sale from, you know, one stage to the next stage with gates that are actually measured. The important thing also is consistency. So everybody around the globe is actually speaking the same language.

21:25Michael Sindicich: so that if I know, you know, this company, I'm preparing for a big meeting with the, with the CPO of a company, and I know they're in, you know, CI stage champion identification, like I know where we exactly are in that deal. And everyone who's helping support that deal knows exactly where it is in the various stages. So it's kind of like this methodology and there's, you know, you could write a thousand page book on, you know, this like methodology and process and everything, but it's consistent and it works really good. And it's actually crazy watching the sales switch from an art sale to actually a science sale.

22:00Michael Sindicich: And I never really believed it. I thought good salespeople were good salespeople because they're likable. But actually good sales people don't need to necessarily be likable. They need to know the playbook and know what all the roadblocks are. And they're kind of orchestrating the entire deal behind the scenes. And it does feel like a science now. So I would say the people, the methodology, consistency is really important as you're building a sales organization. The next thing I would say is the tooling. So are you leveraging the best tooling, the best technology to be able to help through that sales process, whether that's, do I have the right email addresses and phone numbers for people?

22:36Michael Sindicich: Do I have the right technology to do call recording and to make sure, you know, we're following the demo process accurately to train the reps, to help them get enabled on all the different systems to track the deals, right? Do you have a Salesforce or HubSpot, like, or one of these systems? There's a lot of automation being built right now. So even in, you know, like the outreaches and these types, but there's a lot of new companies as well that will basically see, okay, somebody liked this random thing on LinkedIn that talked about operational efficiency, and this is how it ties back to what you're building at your company.

23:09Michael Sindicich: And then therefore, here's a handcrafted kind of email that you can use to prospect into them. So there's that process as well. And then I would say like the other pieces around the people, like the essentially like the type of people that you're hiring. Our sales force, more than 50 % of the closed one opportunities are actually self-sourced by the account executives. And so we put a lot of emphasis and hire a lot of SDRs. And these people are cold calling, cold emailing, being very strategic on how to break into accounts. But at the same time, one thing we measure very aggressively is how much is the account executive itself prospecting and doing what we call PG or pipeline generation.

23:52Michael Sindicich: And we hire the type of people that are just very hungry and owning their books of business and partnering with the SDRs and the marketing team, but really knowing that they're the CEOs of their book of business and they are the ones that are responsible for delivering the outcomes. So that's a very high level kind of thing. And there's a billion more things. But yeah, our CRO grant is just incredible and knows exactly what to do. So you started as an SDR? Yeah. AE, but both. You know, early days, yeah. Yeah, early days. I'm sure you did everything. Now you're president of the company, Public Traded.

24:26Was there a period, obviously linearity looks great, but was there a period, was there an instance where you thought you were going to get fired?

24:34Michael Sindicich: Oh, fired? Yeah, like, yeah, all the time. All the time. No, the for doing something morally bad. No. And I think that's important when you're building a startup is basically hiring people that are so mission driven that like if something feels off to the mission of what you're trying to do, like you will be insistent and just crazy until it gets fixed. like one of the you know our first value which anybody at nivon will be able to recite at any time if you ask them what's the values no one will know most of the values they're going to know the first one it's all about the user all the users all the time and so we wake up and go to sleep every day thinking about that there better not be any traveler that's stuck any admin that can't do something anyone who's having a bad experience with our platform we want to make it better.

25:32Michael Sindicich: We want to support them, even if it's not our platform, but your United fight gets canceled, right? We're there to support you. And that's the first one. Just for kicks, the second one is seriously fun. Those are the two that people will remember. And I think, you know, there's been times where that was tested at the user, and I was probably a little aggressive for, you know, trying to, you know, fix it. But I would say like nothing about nothing because something was like ethically or anything like that wrong. Like the one that comes to mind is early days, a customer messaged me and was like, Hey, Michael, like, your system's cool.

26:10Michael Sindicich: But you know, I run a company. And like, if I show up to the to the airport, and I thought I booked a flight and I and I don't have the ticket, like you're actually impacting my revenues, my customer relationships, my entire business is at risk if your thing doesn't work. And that was such a wake call. This is like probably first six months of the company. And what I did is I then, you know, started tracking and worked with the engineers to log every single action in the product. And I wrote on the whiteboard at the company one weekend, every single example of someone who tried to make a booking and whether it happened or failed.

26:46Michael Sindicich: And I wrote it big on the whiteboard. And then that Monday morning, I called our CEO and our co-founders into the room. And I said, what do you guys want me to do with this? Like, this is so messed up. People weren't able to book, they were having errors, they were having cancellations, like nothing was working in the system, or it was working like half of the time. And I remember I was like, like really aggressive. And it was a very aggressive conversation. And in the end, like they were both like, you're so right, like, we have to solve this, we have to fix this for our users. And we fixed it.

27:17Michael Sindicich: And one thing we monitor all the time now is booking errors and making sure that that ratio stays low. And to their credit, It's nothing to do with our solution. There's a lot of different players in the space and infrastructure and piping of systems and airline technology connected to GDS technology connected to us. But one thing that we're very, very insistent on is making sure that when people go to make a booking, the booking happens and actually they get ticketed. That's actually interesting that you track booking errors. I guess you can call it a KPI internally. What are some other KPIs that you track outside of revenue?

27:56Michael Sindicich: Well, actually, I was going to say that the two most important things we track ahead of revenue is NPS and CSAT. And so we are really, really happy and proud to say that our CSAT is a 96%. This happens anytime you contact our support team or our agent, Ava, our AI agent, Ava. And to have a 96 score, like think about when you call your travel agency. It's because your flight was canceled, delayed, you need to rebook, you need to collect an invoice from a hotel, you're not sure where your credit card is, whatever. And 96 % of people are saying that it's five-star service. And so we're very, very happy about that metric, and it's something we track all the time.

28:40Michael Sindicich: It's also a big part of our ethos is the orchestration between when can an AI agent handle these tasks and when does it need to go to a human agent. The last thing we want is for people to be on the phone screaming like, representative, representative. And so that kind of handoff is so seamless and so something that we focus on to deliver that really healthy score. The other one is NPS, so net promoter score. Our NPS is around 45. And if you think about traditional travel and expense management tools, typically they're around zero NPS score. Like no one likes to use your traditional travel system.

29:17Michael Sindicich: And so us focusing a lot on that is, I think, the two most important things that we do. And again, it ties back to our value of it's all about the user. Then comes, you know, the different things afterward, like revenue and gross booking volume and payment volume and some of these things. So when I hear travel and expense software, you think of SaaS revenues. But in reality, about 90 % of the company's revenue is transactional. Revenue, right? Call it reoccurring. Yeah. So help us understand a little bit of the structure of the company today, the main drivers. and yeah, maybe we'll start there and there's a lot to talk about about the company.

30:04Michael Sindicich: Yeah. So we make revenue in a few different ways, but to your point, the majority of it is usage-based. And we were never really a SaaS company and sometimes SaaS is dead, maybe that was good for us. Now SaaS is kind of coming back, maybe, I don't know. But the way we make revenue is by people using the solution And what we'll charge is, one, think about us as a marketplace with a lot of suppliers. You've got millions and millions of hotels and different airlines and car rental companies. And these companies pay what's called a commission back to the travel agent. What they're doing is basically paying a commission to be in the platform, in the marketplace, accessible.

30:48Michael Sindicich: But then, two, their support agents don't need to support it. So, for example, if a traveler books a flight on our platform, our travel agents support. They change that flight. They cancel the flight. They work with the traveler throughout that journey. And so that's a bigger part of our usage revenue is coming there, which is also nice because the customer is not paying for that. And it's revenue that we get to generate, which is cool. The suppliers are definitely customers of our platform, but I'm talking about like a B2B company. And then what we'll also charge is a trip fee. And so when someone on our platform books a trip, traditional agencies would charge like, you know, one fee if it's offline booking, like you called someone or emailed, a different fee if it's after hours, a different fee if you book just a hotel online.

31:37Michael Sindicich: And it was this big menu that when we came to the market, we said like, enough with that. Like we want to be very transparent and show you exactly what you're paying. So we charge you one trip fee per whole trip. So that means if you're doing, you know, five multi-city bookings and hotels and all that, but leaving, coming back, that's one trip. And you can call us as many times as you want. You can email us whatever you want to do. So that's another part of our revenue. And then the other parts are like the SaaS licenses for the expense management software. So we charge, you know, per active user per month a seat type transaction.

32:13Michael Sindicich: And then we also charge, or we don't charge, we make interchange from our credit cards. And so we make interchange overall. We give a portion of that as a rebate back to the customer. And then we get to keep the difference of the interchange. And then we obviously pay for the cost of capital and funding the customer's accounts and things like that as well. But those are kind of the main ways that we would make money as a company. Related to that, you have a few channels driving your growth and your volume. you have the direct sales channel but you also have partnerships right and and i guess there's a little bit of tension with your partners because you in some way for spend management you offer competing products but also these partnerships have to make sense otherwise you wouldn't do them maybe talk about that why pursue these partnerships you know we've talked about Art Levy, our common friend, you were on the trenches with him working on the Brex Navant partnership.

33:18That's one, but there's others.

33:21Michael Sindicich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, partnerships in, I think, fintech or travel are endless. Like you can think of every supplier as a partner. So every hotel, airline, et cetera, you can think of, you know, the Stripes, the Adians, the Airwallex, like the fintech infrastructure, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, like these are partners. You can think about, you know, that reclaim services or OCR technology that's powering, you know, reading receipts. The whole thing is, in my mind, like one big partnership ecosystem that delivers a solution that powers, you know, a great experience for the end user. And so that's like a starting point of how we think about it.

34:05Michael Sindicich: The next piece is, you know, who do we choose to go in and partner with? And why would someone like a Brex make a make a good example? And for us, first and foremost, we want to deliver the best travel and experience experience to travelers. Sometimes that means we're building everything ourselves and selling what we're building. Sometimes it means that we're partnering with somebody else and delivering that solution together. And one thing that Brex was really good at is they were focused on really building infrastructure to be able to issue globally in different currencies. And for us, you know, we're thinking about the company, we're going to be, you know, the most global, most in-depth point of sales, legal agreements, everything travel.

34:50Michael Sindicich: And we're not going to build the world's biggest bank and we're not going to become a bank and we're not going to have the most capital out there. And we're not going to offer the best rebates and the best payment terms and all these types of things. And so Brex was, and we were continuing to go upmarket. And we built a solution called Connect, which allows our travel and expense solution to be paired with any other corporate card because we partnered with the networks. And so someone could use a different corporate card than Navan's. But when you swipe it, you immediately get feedback. Was it in policy?

35:23Michael Sindicich: Was it out of policy? Do you need a receipt? If you click the link, you can take a photo. If your admin requests, you need a photo for over$75 or something. So we built this really amazing technology to then be able to go and partner with every other bank and networks and not need to force larger companies to change out their credit cards, which they don't necessarily want to do. And using that technology, understanding Brex's massive scale with currencies and global issuing and really attractive rebates and payment terms, we said, hey, you know, you guys have something with travel. We have something with payments and expense.

36:00Michael Sindicich: But if we think about, you know, some of the customers that we have, probably the best solution would be a combination of, you know, our T &E and your payments or your payments and expense and our travel. and let's figure out a way to partner together to offer these solutions to the market. And that's what we did. And that's kind of how we approach all of the different partnerships that we do. We probably won't ever partner with like, you know, a travel management and booking tool system that's a little too close to our home. And I say that, but I would say that for countries where we operate in, because sometimes we sell a very large, you know, corporation and they might have a lot of employees and operations in a country that we don't operate in today.

36:42Michael Sindicich: And that is where we'll actually find a partner. We just acquired a company called Smart Trips in Brazil a couple of weeks ago, and they were our partner in Brazil for large companies who had operations there. It was working so well, the customers were really happy. And so we ended up acquiring Smart Trips. And we did the same playbook with a company called Trip Year in India as well. And so that's kind of one of our inorganic kind of growth strategies is to partner with global companies that we think it would take forever for ourselves to get licenses and be able to operate in that market. Did you lead or were you part of the team that was leading the most recent acquisition in Brazil?

37:23Michael Sindicich: Yeah. Yeah. So how do you pull off a successful N &A? Yeah. Yeah, most important is culture of the company and does it align? I do love the model of partnering with somebody first and then figuring out if it makes sense to acquire them just because things look really good on a piece of paper. But if you can actually partner first and see how they operate, see the solution, see if your customers, most important is does the customer have a really good NPS and a CSAT through the partner? And are they telling you, yes, this is an amazing solution. This works really well. I'm happy about this. If you can find someone to partner with first, see it in action, then it's a really simple formula on like, should you acquire them?

38:16Michael Sindicich: And does the return make sense for the price that you're going to pay for them? So I think like that one was relatively easy. And then I think some of the ones that we've done in the past that we hadn't partnered with before that we had a gap in our solution or in our global reach. those are a little bit more, you know, I would say like more science and a little bit more understanding of the solution and people. But I think we just spend a lot of time with the leadership team of the company that we're thinking about acquiring, really sharing our plans, understanding their plans, feeling who they are as a person, and are they going to mesh well when we ultimately join forces?

38:56Michael Sindicich: And I think that's like the most important thing because if people are, you know, kind of trying to go after the same mission, then it easily aligns things going forward. Let's talk a bit about the current state of the corporate travel industry. Yeah. I was just looking at some numbers. It's been growing at least dollar amount year over year. Volume, the growth has been less than dollar amount. Is that also because it's getting more expensive just in general to travel? that's one point but in general I'd love to hear your take on the state of the industry. Yeah inflation is increasing prices so I would say probably in my opinion you know this is not based on anything but I think that you know travel inflation is higher than the reported CPI inflation so that's one piece if you would agree I mean it's expensive to fly anywhere and stay somewhere these days.

40:00Michael Sindicich: So I think that's a baseline that travel prices are increasing, which by the way, makes our solution more important, because we help you save a lot of money. Our average customer saves about 15 % on their entire travel budget, which is not insignificant when you're thinking about, you know, a larger company. But prices are increasing there. I also think, and we released a study called the B2B, the Business Travel Benchmark. It's something that we do every six months. And what it does is it basically, first and foremost, compares business travel trends versus TSA line trends. And what the TSA lines or the personal travel trends will show is, you know, how personal travel affects, you know, travel.

40:46Michael Sindicich: And basically, what you'll see is like December, like it skyrockets. And in the summer holidays, it skyrockets. Business travel is very different. It tanks in the summer. It tanks in December and with the holidays and around Thanksgiving and things like that. And so we did that study first to show like here are the trends of business travel, not the trends of what you would normally see on consumer or just general TSA lines. The other thing it shows is as a same store sale, how people are prioritizing business travel. And before the pandemic, it was like sales and marketing and executives were traveling.

41:24Michael Sindicich: And then after the pandemic, or pandemic, no one traveled after the pandemic started coming back, we saw like, a big difference if the type of travel that was happening. So it was a lot of group travel, it was like engineers and product people and all the people that you had hired that were remote for a long time. Now you want to bring them back to quarterly offsites and to build the culture of the company and to meet each other. And so that was a big trend. And then we started to see, you know, sales and marketing coming back and meeting customers and things like that. And what I can say today is it just really feels like people are prioritizing in-person connections.

42:01Michael Sindicich: People are knowing that I need to be out there meeting my customer. If I'm not, then I'm going to miss the sale or my competition is going to meet my customer and I'm going to miss the sale. And like one of my friends was in San Francisco this weekend and I, you know, he was like, how well do you know the groom? He was there for a wedding. He was like, I know him pretty well, but also my competitor is at his wedding, too. so I feel like I also really need to go to the wedding. And so, you know, but I just think people know how powerful in-person connections, like doing this is for building relationships, saving the customer, closing the customer, hiring the person, you know what I mean?

42:39Michael Sindicich: And so travel just feels like it's more important and being prioritized higher than ever. And we don't see a slowdown in travel for companies, even though prices are increasing. So that's kind of how I think about it. And I believe that if the world moves more and more with AI helping to automate things, then what's kind of left besides in-person connections? And we think about it a lot when we're thinking about where we're going as a company and how in this world of technology and AI and all the automation, we actually think our mission becomes more important than ever, which is powering in-person connections.

43:19Michael Sindicich: And if we can do that, I think we're in a good spot. I think you're right. I was talking to a pretty significant leader in human resources in SF, and they were saying that some of the channels that you could rely on before for recruiting are kind of useless now. And relationships of the company's employees are more important than ever, right? And I guess that also cascades into travel and personal issues, exactly what you're talking about. But let's talk about AI, because I think this is an interesting topic about you guys. You've launched a few solutions, and I believe you build them in-house.

44:08You develop your own models. Does that mean you're also buying your own NVIDIA chips? So maybe tell us to what extent you're doing this in-house. And also, let's talk about the specific solutions.

44:20Michael Sindicich: Cool. Yeah, so first thing to know when I joined in 2016 was the first time I heard the word machine learning at Navon. It's the first time I heard it in my life, and it was at Navon. So the thing that I don't think people necessarily appreciated as much when we first IPO'd is the story that we told them. we were really focused on machine learning and AI from day one. And the way that that translated into the product is, think about this massive marketplace with all of these inventory sources. Now, 80 % plus of our bookings happen in the first three results that we show a user. And that relates to our average time to book is seven minutes in the platform to book a trip compared to, you know, with legacy systems, 45 minutes plus.

45:07Michael Sindicich: us. And so the way that we filter all this inventory is we learn who you are, what's your loyalty clubs, your past booking behavior, what your company policy is, where your co-workers are staying, what's your office locations. And what we were doing is we were basically saying, okay, like Michael always takes the United flight out of SFO into Newark at, you know, 9pm. He does the red eye and this is like, you know, his kind of thing. And so that's what it's going to show in the results. And that was how we started using machine learning early days. then we even started with chat support we called it Kati in the beginning it was Cohen, Ariel, Twig, Elon our co-founders names that we called it Kati and so that was us basically saying you know we were the first ones to launch chat as a travel agent and so people could chat into us instead of just call but what if we could use natural language processing and basically automate the answers to a lot of the questions that were happening and what if we could even connect it in so that it could basically manually like change or cancel a flight or push a hotel by a day or whatever.

46:12Michael Sindicich: And then when ChatGPT came out and this entire agentic thing happened, we were like, holy shit, like this is massive and we can do so many good things for our users. And that translated to a couple of the different products that you're talking about. You know, one thing that we're doing is we were always attacking the travel management space in a really efficient way. If you look at some of the other public players, there's not many anymore in the travel management space, but the gross margins are more like a 50, mid-50s percent or something like that. And we want to be, you know, really efficient and have tech multiples and tech margins and things like that.

46:51Michael Sindicich: And so we were leveraging AVA, which is the evolution of CATI, and it offsets more than 50 percent of all of our support interactions. And it's not that it offsets, it resolves. We say it's resolution. It's actually users are reaching out to it. It can respond in any language in seconds, 24-7, 365, and it can help you out. And it achieves human-level CSAT scores, and it continues to improve and grow. And so by doing that, our gross margins went from 50 % to 70-something. And I think that helps us a lot because then we can take that profit. We can invest it back into better solutions, products, and keep building.

47:32Michael Sindicich: So that's kind of the use case that a lot of people know. But then it's like throughout everything at the company. So if I swipe my card at a Starbucks, like I can now reconcile it automatically. I know that I'm on a trip. I know that it's a merchant for meals. I know, OK, here's the three policies and GL codes that have to do with meals. But because Michael's on a trip, this is probably the meals while traveling policy. And this is the, you know, this is the approval workflow. And if it's within this and all these realms, I can automatically expense that transaction without making the employee do anything.

48:03Michael Sindicich: So there's that. There's like an admin companion where I can go into the product. And if I'm a travel manager and I can say, you know, tell me the average hotel booking from directors of sales compared to directors of marketing in New York. And boom, it gives you like immediate like spit out and you can, you know, analyze your program or it can give you ideas and benchmark and figure out how to drive more savings. So it's really throughout our products. And then the biggest one is we have this enterprise product and we have this product-led growth product, but now we've launched Nivant Edge, which is an entire travel agent, like EA, dedicated to you for individual travelers.

48:41Michael Sindicich: So we always distributed our products by selling to a CFO or a company admin, and then they launch it to the company. But now what we've done is a fully agentic individual traveler product called Nivant Edge, where you can just fill out some information about who you are, how you like to travel. You can connect your email. It'll load all your loyalty programs and tell you how to optimize them and how far you are away from the next status and tier. and then you can chat with it and it can book your hotels, your restaurants, your airlines, your hotels, your car rentals, and even experiences. So you can say, hey, I'm in New York this weekend.

49:17Michael Sindicich: What's going on? You can actually see concerts or different events and things like that. And it monitors your entire trip for you. So if it knows I like window seats on the flight, but none are available, it can actually keep watching that flight and change me when a window seat becomes available. Or I can ask it to, hey, can I get a late checkout for the hotel? It'll email the hotel and ask on your behalf if you can do a late checkout. It's a really incredible experience. With Edge, is the goal to go after much smaller companies or actually are you targeting the consumer? Yeah. So we're targeting what we call frequent travelers.

49:54Michael Sindicich: It's not a play of like a booking.com or Expedia or a consumer travel platform by any means. it's really for that VP of sales or that VP of you know marketing that's on the road a lot that maybe doesn't have an EA and if we can deliver that and then to every traveler at any corporation that's a frequent traveler we think that that's a really interesting thing and so I'm sure that that experience will end up becoming the user interface as it keeps you know enhancing to the company travelers. But right now what it's targeting is not businesses, but actually individual travelers. And, you know, really savvy travelers, like, don't like to use legacy systems.

50:40Michael Sindicich: And so, you know, if we go to a company today that we're working on selling, you know, we'll ask them, what's your GL data? And then what's your data coming from your travel management company? and usually the data coming from the travel management company is a lot less than the GL data for the travel, really showing that a lot of people are what we call leaking. They're not using the system that you've deployed for your employees to use because they'd rather use something else and we want to capture that something else, which then also helps us capture the entire company. We use a combination of different models and we've started building our own models and the reason why is because if you think about we are in business for now 11 years, knowing everything about travel patterns, trends, users, delays, all the information that we have access to.

51:30Michael Sindicich: And if you ask, you know, a travel related question in the context of corporate travel to a traditional model, like one of the big models, they need to sift through trillions of data points. And so what that trillions of data points does is it makes it expensive, it makes it slower, and it makes it less contextualized. And so the reason why we've started building our own models and are leveraging more and more of our own models is because we can get answers much faster, much more relevant. And then lastly is for cheaper. Like I said, it's all about the user. And then comes the different revenues and profit points.

52:09Michael Sindicich: So by doing that, we upped up our own model usage by quite a bit, we continue to use our own models more and more and we'll use other models as well. And when it makes sense, but it's really interesting that our own models are very, very powerful. And so much so that we're so AI focused that our CTO and co-founder, he has an entire team of AI engineers and he works on AI projects full time. It's the only thing that he and his team do. And it's how they can distribute it throughout our products and our internal employees and our different sales motions and things like that. When it comes to the AI front and the consumer products, right, where are the limits?

52:54What is it that your models or just, I guess, the industry in general cannot do yet?

53:03Michael Sindicich: Well, first I'll tell you what it can do, and then it leads to what it can't do. So it is, you know, the way we deploy it, if a traveler is showing up to a hotel after midnight, sometimes that hotel will cancel the reservation because you didn't check in. AI, RAI will actually understand, oh, Michael's flight got delayed. He's now going to arrive likely near or past midnight. it can call the hotel and ensure that that hotel or it does and not it can it calls the hotel and emails the hotel to let them know that you're coming late can you verify that you'll hold the reservation then it sends me an email that I'm all taken care of I can remove that from my task list I don't have to worry about it because as a savvy traveler you know you're gonna get in late you better now you have to panic and call the hotel does that it can do things like, you know, cancel a United flight, book a Delta flight, and apply an unused credit that you have banked.

54:03Michael Sindicich: And like, that is such a hard thing, even for humans to be able to figure out how to do with all the infrastructure. And it can do that automatically. It can retrieve hotel folios for you. It can reach out to the hotel, get the folio, then itemize it. Okay, this is parking, this is minibar, this is, you know, hotel stay. So it is phenomenal at that. What it doesn't do today in a broad sense, I think, is it doesn't provide that human empathy and the human interaction that sometimes people are looking for. And I think that sometimes people are continuing to willing to pay for. Um, like there's a reason why AI music, you know, isn't, isn't as interesting for whatever reason, because a human didn't make it and you don't want to listen to AI music or an AI reader reading an audio book or an AI person on the phone.

54:53Michael Sindicich: That's like, you know, you're talking to versus you want to just talk to a real human. Um, and so for us, like we're able to monitor these different chats, understand, you know, the user sentiment, be able to orchestrate the handoff between AI and human. And I think that's like, if you boil it all down, it's really good at doing tasks fast when you don't want to actually have a human or talk to a human, or maybe you can't explain yourself perfectly and you need that human to be able to help you out. And that's what I think, you know, we leverage it for. I have a question. It's okay if you don't have an answer.

55:26Yeah. You serve Anthropic, OpenAI.

55:30Michael Sindicich: Cursor, Legora, Harvey. All those guys, right? Sierra. Do they, and you see their data, Do they behave differently than legacy companies? I think the difference in the context of when we're approaching a sale with them is it's just a common understanding that they want the best solution for their travelers. They don't want to wait for, you know, they don't want them to have to wait with support. They don't want them to have to wait for it to load and all these types of things. And so for us, it's just like if I if I know it's an AI company and we're walking into a sale, like there is a very common understanding that they want the best technology, the best service.

56:12Michael Sindicich: They don't want to deal with clunky solutions. And like that's why I think we serve all of them. It's less for them, I would say, about like saving money. You know, they're all really well funded. They don't they don't go after, you know, necessarily like negotiating unless the bigger ones they do. But like, you know, they might not have a travel manager. They might not have a procurement team that goes and negotiates hotel rates for their specific employees. They want something in, fast, automated, self-managing, integrated to the ERP, set up the policies and be done. And it's an amazing thing for us because it's exactly what we were built for.

56:51Amex GBT just got taken private.

56:53Michael Sindicich: Yeah. Does that become a more dangerous competitor now? No. No, I think it's so different, the solution that we provide versus what they're providing. And I think, you know, if you're being taken private into more of like a PE type thing, you're probably going to be focusing a lot on cost reduction. And, you know, you can either focus on cost reduction by leveraging AI and needing less people, or you can focus on keeping all your people, but scaling and growing faster. And I'm not nervous or worried about the solution that they have to be able to compete with us and where we're going. And I think it'll be interesting for the customers because if there's going to be an emphasis on cost reduction, then there's going to be a lot of focus from the customer on the service levels.

57:49Michael Sindicich: And so I see it as an opportunity. Speaking of private and public markets, you are somewhat approaching your one-year anniversary from going public. And it's been an absolute roller coaster ride when it comes to the stock price. Yeah. Right? Yeah, maybe how have you managed this internally? Your stock coming out, I forget the example, maybe around 20, 25, and then going down to eight and now coming way back up. So how does this feel internally? First of all, I would say IPOs are so weird. We were the first ones to IPO during a government shutdown. So, you know, we had planned the IPO, all the billboards, the marketing, the parties, the employee travel, everything for one day.

58:46Michael Sindicich: Two weeks before, the government shut down and we needed to move it. And it was this moment that you're kind of, you know, like preparing for for a while. And then the government was shut down. It was ambiguous. And we thought, well, we already cleared comments. Like, could we still go public during a shutdown? down and we, you know, kind of reached an agreement and made an understanding and ended up now having a date. So then it was a scramble to go redo all of these things that we needed to do to make the IPO successful. The roadshow is daunting. It's like, you know, meetings all over the place.

59:19Michael Sindicich: You're just meeting after meeting after meeting and you're repitching the same thing over and over and over again. And so, and then really quickly, it ended up going out at like 20 or something, like really went down over the next couple weeks and months, it went down and down and down to in the$8 range. And we're sitting here thinking like, man, we built a good business. We think that everything's working. We're growing fast. We're really excited about our numbers. And then the price reflected in the stock is like so low. What's going on? And then your employees are asking a lot of questions.

59:59Michael Sindicich: Like, you know, where's this thing going? Is the business messed up? And, you know, you have to do a lot of things. Like we had Ben Horowitz come talk at the all hands with his experience. And he was like, guys, like, you know, keep doing your thing. Because he's a board member. Yeah, he's a board member. Exactly. You know, we basically were trying to be as transparent as we could, but also now you're a public company. So you can't communicate as much about like, here's how the sales was and here's how this thing was and how that thing was. And so it's this really interesting and tough balance to figure out.

1:00:34Michael Sindicich: But I think, you know, it's not that we saw a massive increase in attrition or anything like that. So people were really, really focused on, you know, OK, what we're doing and OK, this is standard. And by the way, look at every other, you know, tech company that's not AI, you know, formed within the last three years. Like they're also going down and it's the broader market and all this kind of stuff. um and luckily now you know we're up you know i don't know what it is today and within just a couple months which i actually think turned around faster than what we would have expected because i think once you're you know down as a newly public company it takes quite a while to get back up but for us it was a matter of of months luckily which is helpful and now it's like first of all it's like how do we how do we make sure that we still have this massive chip on our shoulder and keep growing and going as fast as we can and being super resilient.

1:01:24Michael Sindicich: But two, it's also really cool because the employees that were here or who joined us when we were low, think about the amount that they were able to gain within just a couple months because they did take a bet on us when we were low. And the employees who stayed that maybe were issued new shares because it's like it was at the beginning of the year and we did our merit increases, like that would have appreciated so quickly within just a couple of months. And so now it's validating, but it's also like, okay, but that's not anywhere near where we think we should be as a company and we need to keep pushing and growing from here.

1:01:58So before we run out of time, I just have a few rapid fire questions for you. Best advice you've gotten from the founders of the company, Ariel, Ilan.

1:02:15Michael Sindicich: that's interesting there's been a lot of advice over the years i think one thing that um that ariel told me we were on a walk in downtown palo alto one day i was super stressed this would have been like in 2017 and um and he told me he was like dude relax man we're we're building travel. Like, we're selling travel management. Like, relax. It's not so, like, serious. You don't have to be so stressed out about it, which, like, is the opposite of his personality. He's very, you know, hard driving, aggressive, all this stuff. But to hear him say that, like, I think about that all the time when I get, like, really stressed.

1:02:54Michael Sindicich: And I think it was cool. It was like, hey, look, we're building a startup. We're building a company. We're not curing cancer. But what we are doing is we're making the lives better of people who need to book and manage travel. And it's one of the more annoying solutions in your everyday life for work with legacy platforms. And if we can make it delightful, that's a great thing for the world. And that was very helpful. I think Elon, he generally puts our value of seriously fun. He definitely puts the fun in there. He's having a great time. He's so curious about new technologies and experiences.

1:03:32Michael Sindicich: and he gets really excited when a user has a positive NPS comment and things like that. And I think I've learned a lot from him there around like, hey, we should be having fun building this thing. It's not so serious to Ariel's advice as well. Favorite book or podcast that you go back to often? Favorite book or podcast, let's see. I think one, well, I saw your books here. I think one is definitely missing. It's the hard thing about hard things. Unless you, I didn't see it here. But you're looking like you have it here. Okay. I have a signed copy. It might be somewhere else. But I think that's a great book.

1:04:19Michael Sindicich: And I don't know if you know, but in that book, there's a guy he talks about named Shaka. And we actually hired Shaka. And he was at our company for a while, for a couple of years, and still a good mentor and friend of mine. And I just love that book. I think it's that. And Ben's other book about culture, I think they're spot on. So those are kind of books that I like to go back to or think about a lot. You've flown an absurd number of miles. Yeah. What's something about travel that no one speaks yet? I hope it's coming, but to me, it's the Wi-Fi. Like, you know, the Wi-Fi is just horrible. I think it is coming with Starlink.

1:05:08Michael Sindicich: We didn't talk about this, but I am a pilot as well. So I have my VFR license. Yeah, I'm working on my IFR now. I'm actually flying myself back home from Tennessee. I'm going to Tennessee now and then flying myself back home after this trip. And even I have Starlink on the planes that I'm flying, little single prop mini planes. So I hope, you know, it will come to the rest of the industry. But to me, it's Wi-Fi is specifically the thing that's broken right now on flight experiences. Michael, thank you for taking the time. a lot to learn from you from just an amazing decade and there's a lot more to learn you're a pilot chess master and a bunch of other things so thanks for stopping by thank you so much appreciate it thanks for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed this great episode with Michael from Navan if you want more interviews please subscribe follow and leave a review on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your shows.

1:06:15It helps and means a lot. And if you have any suggestions or thoughts about the show, just drop me a line on LinkedIn. See you next time.