From $300M to $1B in Revenue: How Navan Scaled Travel Tech to 50+ Countries (Ariel Cohen)

27:51100%. You are there. because it's, in a way, the field at HP was removed from the technology and from engineering and from the product team, and even from product marketing. So it's very hard eventually for an enterprise sales team to sit inside JPMorgan and to understand what exactly a provisioning software is doing to a data center. So it will bring you in, there are sales engineers. It's a very technical sale. the sales guy is kind of overseeing the process and a lot of techies are kind of running around. So being in products, it actually means that these people needed you to be there and to kind of explain what your product is doing.

28:33Yeah, it's kind of like people call it sales engineer sometimes. There's some version of it. So it is kind of, so they had sales engineers, but if you are talking about like data center kind of projects could be 100 to 200 million dollars projects. So when you are running this, including the servers and everything, obviously including hardware, but when you are running something like that, you need to show to the buyer that everybody at HP exactly cares about that. It's like when you go to an investment banking meeting, they bring like 17 different people to the meeting. Yeah, it's actually exactly the same.

29:09It's actually a really good analogy. If you deal with bankers and like, I don't know, I'm sometimes looking at these Zooms and there are 50 people there and I don't know why there are so many people. Exactly the same thing. Exactly, that's awesome. And then you went to Jive. How big was Jive? Jive was, I think we IPO'd on a$200 million revenue. But like how many people when you got there? I think probably in the hundreds, probably it got to 500, 600. In which role were you? I was doing product. I started there. Yeah, and I was there twice, by the way. I was there after I left HP. Spent, I think, 18 months there.

29:43We went through an IPO. I left, started my previous startup, and then we got acquired by Jive. We had a partnership with Jive, Box, Salesforce, and then got acquired extremely quickly after nine months since we started. Yeah, it was a really, really quick story. And okay, so at Jive, you were doing products. What did you learn there? What were the main learnings from that experience? What I've learned there? You know, I think if I'm thinking about lessons and what I've learned, I think you sometimes in a startup live in kind of your own world, especially if you use your own software. So we use the software there to really, we used it like you Slack today, but we were the only ones.

30:22Our customers really didn't use it like that. And it was a learning exercise because we looked at this and we assumed that we are basically changing collaboration in the enterprise, we are killing email. That was kind of the idea. What customers were doing with the product, they do a lot of document management, they were writing some internal blogs, They were kind of almost using it as a portal. And you can run products for a very long time, be so removed from what your users and customers are actually doing, and then you're wrong. And I think I remember that when I came to Jive on the second time, I was in charge of developing like the next kind of generation of Jive, very cloudy, very mobile, very light.

31:05And I remember that I've put monitoring on realizing, on trying to understand what the users are actually doing. And it was a huge discovery for Jive that actually the users are using this system to write blogs and to know the contacts of the people in the enterprise. And that's it. And then we said, okay, we need to do something. And actually, we've developed something that is very similar to WhatsApp for organizations. And some organizational kind of blog on mobile and stuff like that. So it was kind of a good learning of like, you really need to know what your users are doing. And which year did you get Silicon Valley?

31:44What? Which year did you get Silicon Valley? I got in 2009. 2009? And I got to jive in 2010. 2010, okay. Like a year after, yeah. Yeah, so you've been here for a little while. Yeah, yes, yes. So then you left, and at this point you were like, okay, I want to start my own startup. Yes. Where you have high conviction, you got your visa set up. Yes, so my visa was set up after I left HP, but then set a job. I knew Ilan from Mercury. We both worked together. So Ilan is my co-founder in a van, but was also my co-founder with StreamYans. What? He's technical. He's technical. He's the CTO. He's very technical.

32:24That's why actually we get along so well, because he's the techie. I always think about stuff from a go-to-market perspective and what the product needs to do. and both of us can be very critique of stuff. So we look at stuff and we know like, does it work, does it not? Like people want it or not. We always have these fights, are we in product market fit or not? Like always, always, always, even up until today. But anyway, I knew Elon and we talked of why we won't start kind of our own thing and kind of went and we're kind of nobodies in Silicon Valley back then. So we needed to kind of go and do a lot of cold kind of equivalent of calling into VCs to eventually get funded.

33:05Back then, it was in 2012. Was it hard to raise money? It was extremely hard. It was really easy to raise money for Navan, extremely hard to raise money for that startup. Why, do you think? It was a combination. I think we had an idea that was very hard to explain. We basically had an integration platform in the cloud. The idea was that end users will be able to connect to systems, box and draw box and share files between the two, or a jive in your email. I don't know what OAuth does today a little bit. It allowed communication. So it's exactly what you see in Slack today. And by the way, once you have Slack, you totally get it.

33:51Because when you share a Gdoc in Slack, you immediately see the document, right? And think about what Slack is doing extremely well. They are managing the permissions around that, right? Because you cannot just share a document and everybody sees it. So think about doing that on every enterprise system, including the complex ones, SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce, and kind of connecting system like this to collaboration systems. So a lot of things around how do you do the mapping? How do you do the back and forth, but also how do you do the permissions? super, it could have been super valuable in the Slack days or even today, by the way, in the AI days.

34:31I was actually joking about it with Mike, with Elon and Michael, you know Michael, recently. And I said, wow, we actually need that startup now because of data management kind of thing. Totally, totally. Yeah, that actually is like a startup idea that today would be like super relevant. Today it would be extremely relevant. But try to explain that startup in 2012. In 2012, yeah. And I still remember how complex it was. I'll not mention which VC, but we needed to explain what Jive is doing. And Jive was calling itself back then Facebook for the enterprise. That's kind of how they tag themselves.

35:09And it did look a little bit like Facebook, right? Kind of you have this wall, and it actually looks very similar to this activity. They had a workplace after. Exactly, exactly. So I remember that we met some investors and we needed to explain Jive and we say, okay, but they didn't know what Jive is or what Yammer is. Yammer was also one of these systems. So we told them that we use Facebook. So it's so hard to kind of, when you have a lot of, you need to explain what you are doing to other processes or companies. It is very, very hard to explain it. And then nobody really needs it right now, but we think that people will need it.

35:47so that was one reason that was hard to raise money for that. The other is that we didn't have a lot of connections. If you do, I think if you - Yeah, you're an immigrant, right? You just showed up. Exactly. So if you come with an idea like that, that is kind of still far off, but people know you, you will get funded because people will think, oh, wow, but if it happens, it's amazing. But when nobody knows you, you don't have a lot of credibility and you're also going on a startup, it's very hard to explain. It's hard to raise money. But we did. We've actually ended up managing, raising money.

36:19How much did you raise? What were the first terms you got? Like nothing. Like in today's terms, it was like we raised$1.5 million for a$3 million spree. Okay. That's kind of, you're talking about like. I'm telling you, being my first deal, my first was$300K for 60 % of the company. Okay. So you know the drill. Yeah, exactly. You know the drill. Like in today's, obviously, it's complete madness. But the good thing was that we've raised money from Lightspeed, and that's how we actually got to know Arif John Muhammad, who is actually a board member in Havan. We've managed to raise money from Oren Ziv, who is a fairly known Israeli angel, and he's a big investor.

36:59He was actually the first investor in Havan. So all of these connections kind of continued. The Israeli community was, you think, a part of the...? Of that thing? of we definitely used our Israeli connections. Part of our angels were Israelis, but Lightspeed, it was completely like a VC that is completely not related to this. Yeah, and one of the things I always, you know, kind of keep thinking about is, obviously there's a lot of opportunity in the world, right? But sometimes there's a set of opportunities that are only available to some people and another set that are available to other people because of the time that they're available, the experience, et cetera.

37:35At that moment in time, How would you describe the set of opportunities that, like when you're thinking about ideas, like which ones you could actually go after? Like, how do you think about that? You know, it's so, we sometimes, I'm thinking about starting a van, back then Trip Actions as a travel company. And we, both Ilan and I, didn't know anything about travel, really anything. I didn't know what GDS is, which I've never heard of somebody that wants to build a startup business, a travel business that doesn't know what a GDS. And we started it and we got to do that, first of all, because it was a second startup.

38:09So investors will bet on you, kind of the point that I was making earlier. But it was way harder because we were not connected at all into the travel industry. So we needed to connect to start to create the connections. And this industry is highly, highly operating based on connections. So I think it's the same with investments. you always need to tap into some network. There are always some mafias and you need to realize that you are part of this mafia. So by the way, the Mercury mafia, Mercury Interactive eventually got acquired and a lot of people went to a lot of different places. It was a very important one actually to start the first startup.

38:50But you always need to ask yourself whether you should tap into the Israeli mafia, to the Mercury mafia. How do you get into the travel kind of business and get yourself part of this industry? I think it's important to be part of some network or a few networks, but you can do it by, at the beginning, knocking on the doors. And that's kind of what we did when we were not part of that network or another network. But you know that if you knocked on the door of the Israeli mafia, you had a higher chance than the Palo Alto mafia, right? 100%. And you have to, so you know, obviously you will always use, you know, you talked about these things as an opportunity.

39:27You are always part of something, right? And if you are not shy about it, then if you can. And I remember I was for me to first time to raise money to go and ask people for money was like, what the fuck? Like how, you know, this is so strange. And I remember that it was really, really hard for me to bring myself to actually send an email to somebody or to call somebody. But then, you know, I remember the switch. I remember that I was thinking to myself, hey, I wanted to start a startup. and part of doing that means that you will need to knock on people's door and to hear a lot of no's. And it's fine.

40:03And it's okay. And eventually you'll make it. So I think it's a lot of habits that you need to kind of maybe change or do when you want to go for it. And when you went to start your first startup, did you have kids yet? Or not yet? I did. I had two kids, twins, a boy and a girl. And they were fairly young back then. Wow. So it didn't feel too risky to just... It felt completely risky. I still remember. I know exactly how I thought about it. Because you need to leave, right? Nobody will invest in you if you're still employed by somebody. Today, maybe yes. Today, if you're employed by OpenAI, maybe you get five terms.

40:40Yeah, maybe you can make money while you're there. You need to work there. Yeah, that's what I said. Bubbles are always unique. Definitely, there's AI bubble. But back then, you really need to show that you left. So basically, no safety. and you are kind of unemployed and you're doing it. And I remember two kind of interesting stories from back then. One is that I thought about it as how much money I have in the bank in savings and therefore how long can we survive, you know, paying COBRA, paying, you know, in the US you have no safety net, right? So paying COBRA, paying for rent, paying for all of these things.

41:15So I thought about this in terms of months, almost like runway of a startup. It was like six months or something. It was actually exactly six months. I remember that I said in six months, I will need to start to look for a job. Let's assume that it takes me three months to find a job. So that's what I have. And I remember we actually closed around in month, I think, four. I remember in month three, it was kind of already working. So you were like basically two kids at home, jobless, trying to raise money for a startup that like no one understood. That's stressful. And to make it even worse, we were renting a place here in Palo Alto.

41:53and the owners wanted to sell the place. So we needed to find a new place. Now try to find a place here to rent if you're unemployed. Like, so, and I remember that was, we got the term sheet from Lightspeed exactly when we needed to find the place. So I would show, I actually showed to the owner the term sheet. And I think that's something you can only do in Silicon Valley. You can show term sheet without salary as a kind of, yeah. You know, it's funny, a friend of mine was saying that his nanny came and asked for stock in his company. That's actually a smart nanny. Only in Silicon Valley you would see that, right?

42:29That's actually a really smart nanny. It's a very smart nanny, yeah. Yeah, that's funny. And so, okay, you got funded and you went through the journey. And then how was this first journey, like this first startup journey? The first startup journey? It was super strange. We kind of were sitting, we had two other developers that joined us. We were four people. sitting in a very small room, trying to develop this product as fast as possible. Because I don't know, we had this urgency. I don't even know why, because nobody in the market really needed it. But talking about channels earlier, we are smart enough to know that we cannot sell it directly because nobody understands it anyway, but it can create value to other companies and their customers.

43:14so if you connect this system to a drawbox or box or salesforce or jive or yammer they will get a lot of value out of it so our go-to-market was partnerships and actually deep partnerships oeming that technology to them so complete white label and and and we were like running after this thing developing it for these partnerships for people grinding grinding all day long i remember that we had some of the wives of the two developers coming over the weekends to do QA for us. That was the level of how Scrappy was. But it was also fun. I remember we had this habit to fly these drones inside, small drones inside the office and have these fights with drones and destroying the entire office by doing that.

44:09I remember eating endlessly there, like, you know, like in that, you know how it is, like four people. And I remember when we signed the first agreement, we hired two more people. That was like a big deal. We grew four. When we sold, we were seven people. That's how small. Seven employees. Oh, my God. Yeah. So that's how. So it was very, we were grinding a lot. It was like 24-7. But there was something very naive, very fun about it. That's awesome. That's awesome. And so then how do you sell it? How did we sell it? I think when you do an OEM business, you are immediately very much opening it up for sale because from the acquirer perspective, once they start to get value, once they start to be able to upsell your thing to their customers, they will immediately do the math.

44:59Hey, if I'm actually owning it, it will pay for itself if I'm basically buying it. So we got in the same time, pretty much on the same time, and offer from Box and from Jive to get acquired. And it was our first startup, and we looked at this, and we said we actually, this idea. It's from a recording of Aaron on Friday. It's what? Oh, you made me know. Okay, okay, yeah. So he probably will not even remember it, but we've spent kind of a long afternoon with him and his team together in a room. When together, it was actually the strangest process ever. I think he came from somewhere, I think from Europe or something.

45:35And then we had this big meeting, and it looked like they are still debating between themselves during the meeting if they should buy us or not. I remember it was very strange. I remember at the end I told them, you know, maybe you guys should meet for two hours and decide, and then maybe we can rejoin the process. But eventually they actually gave us an offer, but we've decided to go with Jive. Why? It's a really interesting story. the offer of Box was actually better financially from the offer of Jive but we wanted a very short vesting and Jive offered two years, Box offered three and it was important and Jive realized that that's what will make us kind of tick because Elon and I knew that we're going to do another startup and we didn't want to wait for a long time so actually it was even though this was hard, you were like I know I want to keep doing this Yeah, we knew.

46:36It's almost like once, I think once you were doing it once, it's very hard to think about let's get back to work somewhere for the long run. And I remember that we also wanted to do, we knew that we did something very small. And we talked about it. I remember that Ilan and I were having a lot of conversations during the time in Jive. and a lot of the discussions were actually less about what we're going to do, but more of why do we want to do it, why do we want to do it together, these kind of things. And one of the whys was we want to create an impact. We want to build something that is not like you sell it very quickly, but you're actually building an entire business.

47:17It affects a lot of people. It changes something. It's important for somebody, and it's something that we realize that we want to do. That's awesome. That's awesome. So then you sold the company. the first time you made a little bit of money, can you imagine? Yeah. How did that feel? It was great. It was... It has some more runaway. It's funny. Back then, it was a life-changing event. But today, I'm not going to say, yeah. But it was definitely fun to make, to kind of get out of like small saving to a number that makes sense. I can like spend a couple years without working and it's going to be okay.

47:51Yeah, exactly. So it's something like that. It gives you a lot of freedom. The freedom from our kind of point of view was much more of like the freedom to do another startup without. I remember that Jai really wanted to keep us there for a longer term and gave us a pretty big offer to stay. It was actually an offer that was bigger than what we've made on the acquisition. And we still said no. And that's the freedom that probably five years before that I would take the offer and well sign myself up. So I think that kind of freedom of the first money that allows you to then later take more risks is super important, especially if you want to build something big.

48:35Totally, totally. No, I had the same experience when I sold my first company. It wasn't too much money, but I knew I didn't have to worry about a job or anything like that. And that allows you to take so much more risk. It definitely helps a lot. Yeah, the savings are way more than six months. But also, you know, that's the thing, you know, sometimes you get something that you no longer need because it was so easy to raise money for trip actions at that point that we actually didn't need that safety. But that's definitely, yes. Totally. But, you know, also the Bay Area is probably one of the few places where even though you may have a lot of money for the U.S.

49:14and the Bay Area, it always. Yeah, you're always poor. I know. And I think also something with money, and I think you probably went through this process, there's then something that you want. There is always something in you that you want, and it could be a thing, or it could be debt freedom, or debt flexibility, and so on. And when you didn't have it, you always thought you wouldn't want it, but then since you have it, you're like, oh, wait, I kind of do want it. Yeah, no, I remember that I always thought that a certain amount of money will make me, like I will never need to work again in my life and I'll be free and life will be great.

49:48I bet that number went up over the years. Exactly, that's my point. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Did you splurge on anything? Do you remember any splurge? Did a what? Did you splurge on anything? Meaning like, was there something like, oh, now that I sold, I went and bought something that you always wanted? It's better I did everything that I bought with this kind of thinking. Later I was saying, why the hell did I buy it? I bought this sports car that is actually ridiculous. It's an Aston Martin. Oh, it's a James Bond car. Yeah, exactly. And I still have it. Oh, really? Yeah. But it's something that you buy exactly because of kind of, I want to, you know, I made it.

50:31I want to reward myself. Exactly. exactly yeah that's funny man the funny thing is i think that what i've learned with money it's what you really get is the freedom it's like it's not that thing this thing another thing it's the freedom and i can see where i'm spending my money now it would be on stuff that i feel that makes me feel good that makes me free it will be much more on traveling to somewhere on spending really time at that place. Quality time for people you like. Yeah, exactly. Having the ability to buy gifts to people that you love, like having the ability to just, you know, live life in a really good way without limitations.

51:19And it's actually really not about owning something, at least for me. I think that's true for a lot of people, you know especially as the years go by you know the the world is definitely more experience-led than stuff-led yes compared to the past right like things are getting cheaper and cheaper and experiences as well and the experiences are like you know if you're having a good experience eventually what you know time is the only thing that you're kind of losing all the time and and and i think you want the experience to be like wow i'm there and that's amazing yeah so and how do you think that like kids kind of impacted your journey along the way because i think probably i think most founders probably start before they have kids yes what how do you think like did you think about them a lot it's like oh shit this can't fail because i have my kid like did what what layer of complexity did it yes but no so first of all i but i have three kids two of them today are 17 and one is 11 um and it's interesting my my uh younger um i kind of I've learned that she would be a girl on the day that I sold my previous startup.

52:27Oh, wow. And I really wanted another girl. So I still remember that I was selling the startup. And actually, what I really care about is the outcome of this ultrasound. But I think it's less about the money or the safety net because there is a point that you know, okay, I'm going to get a job, right? Or I'm going to, or as a second startup, you'll start another startup, right? So it's less about that. But I think you do want your kids to be proud of you. And I think especially with me and kind of going with my father through, you know, the process of going under, it was way more important for me that my kids will never kind of see.

53:06Exactly. Go through that or see me failing in that kind of aspect. So I think it's actually a factor that helps you to be even more successful because I don't think it changed dramatically the risk factor. It did on the first startup, but not on the second. but it definitely gave me a lot of motivation to not fuck it up. But again, less about the financials but more of like coming to my kids and telling them, hey, Navan is now, I know sometimes when we, I remember that when we won the Amazon gaming company, Twitch. So when we first had a contract with Twitch, I remember that back then my son loved to, I think it was Fortnite.

53:56Go on Twitch. I think he was actually playing Fortnite, but he totally knew what Twitch is. And telling him that they are a customer or telling my kids right now that TikTok is a very big customer of our, Biden's, a very big customer of ours. These are the things that you're proud to tell to your kids. Hey, you know that these guys are a customer of Navan and when they can relate to this, So these kind of things push you. You want to show them. That's actually a cool thing. Yeah, you know, one of our investors told me, I was like, hey, what do you think about investing in people with kids now with kids?

54:33And he's like, I actually like investing in people with kids. I'm like, why? I was like, well, because when you have kids in a family, that's the only thing that matters. Work and kids, kids and work. Work and kids, kids and work, right? And you're like focused. Sometimes you invest in single founders and they want to... The founder will go insane. Yeah, they want to have some fun. And, you know, like marriage of kids, that's the only thing in their life, you know, like very focused kind of thing. Yeah. In a way, it's so you are kind of and it's also the price that you pay. I'm better. I've divorced two years ago.

55:03And I think that's part of the price. You are kind of you live your life of like home, business trip, home, business trip, like really definitely on the early years when you are building and you're still grinding and you're still fighting with everybody. I remember COVID, which obviously impacted our business severely. I was just heads down on the business, not seeing the kids, not seeing the family. So definitely, I think he has a point. Founders with kids are probably very focused on making the startup successful. Totally. This episode of HD in HD is brought to you by a brand that's close to my heart, Brex.

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56:15Check it out and see why the world's most innovative startups like Anthropics, Scale AI, and Robinhood trust Brex. So we're going to get to Trip Action, Nivan. But there I want to start the story a little bit inverted. Instead of going, maybe talk a little bit about the industry, right? Like the travel industry. Like how did you, first, how did you get to it? Like why did you decide that this was a thing? But, you know, now with the benefit of hindsight, right, like how do you see the industry today? Like what are the main players? Like what matters in this industry, et cetera? Yeah. First of all, it's, you know, we went to this because you asked me how, why, as users.

56:53Like both Ilan and I were running really big teams at HP, then at Jive, like always global, always in different places. And we wanted something better. Like I remember that I was thinking, wow, I'm traveling all the time. I have these statuses everywhere and I'm still, you know, calling to somebody or emailing to somebody. And if I'm in an airport, I'm kind of with myself. And even, you know, I had the A's and stuff like this, but you're kind of sometimes in the airport kind of dealing with shit by yourself. And we looked at this and I said, it doesn't make any sense that like people need to book their trips with some old software or by calling a, you know, calling an agent.

57:36It didn't make any sense to us. And then when you need support, it's like you're kind of fighting with that. And later on, expense, you know, like you need to have all of this. So Elon and I kind of knew the problem as users. And being kind of techies, me and products in tech, we said, okay, it's very simple. We'll create an app that book your trips that, you know, that eventually expands. I remember we had a demo. It was a mock-up. But it was really easy on that mock-up to book trips and to expense your receipts, right? And then we got into the industry. And I remember us sitting after we raised money and we were there kind of alone, the first two employees.

58:14I think we just, we actually - What was the first round like? The first round was, we basically, it was, we closed it with Oren in kind of four hours. Like, you know, we shook hands. He convinced us to take the money. We took the money immediately. On the first day that we started the company, we had the money and we hired our first designer. that was our first employee, sitting there and kind of dreaming what we're going to do. And I remember Elon looking for an API to book your trip. So basically, it sounded like the logical thing to do. Where do you buy flights? And then it hit us. Turns out there's no API.

58:55Not only there is no API, even if there was, you cannot fulfill, you cannot buy a flight ticket if you're not licensed. and if you're not licensed, like just take California, you need an IATA license, an ARC license, a California license. And I say, okay, even if there was an API, I cannot do anything with it. And then we start to learn what Saber is and we're saying, so how do you connect to Saber? And you call them and they tell you, okay, you can get the developer license to kind of play with the system. But if you actually want to book a flight, you need to have an agreement with the airline.

59:33With the airline? So what? We need to, yeah. So now we need an agreement with every airline, and it's called a plate. You need basically, so you can fulfill stuff through Sabre if you have a Sabre agreement, but once you are licensed, if you actually also want to make money, you better have an agreement with United and Delta and American Airlines, and you can repeat the same process with everybody everywhere in the world, and then you repeat with hotels and so on. So you start to realize, wow, this is actually a supply chain issue. You know, if you want to be in this industry, you eventually need to find the APIs.

1:00:13And Sabre do have APIs. But you then need to have agreements with everybody. And I remember that we actually went and did license with ARC. And they told us that for 20 years, nobody did license with them. So that's how, you know. Oh, wow. You're the first new license after 20 years. Yeah, a lot of people to get licensed would go and buy some travel agency. The problem is that we realized quickly that we want to be in the enterprise segment. So maybe for the people who don't understand travel industry, can you just give a quick overview of what is Sabre, what is ARC, what is Zayada? So let's say that you want to build a company and you really want to, that this company will sell flight tickets.

1:00:57You need to find your way into booking a seat inside an airplane with an airline. To do that, you need to be licensed by this entity that is called ARC. And all of this was actually created when you did paper ticketing. And it was created because you were the customer. You'd go to, I don't know, the travel agency down the street. And you'd buy a flight ticket. You'll pay them. but how do you know that you got a flight ticket? You're getting some paper like that somebody gave you. So ARC was created to kind of allow the settlement to happen. The settlement between you, the customer that is paying, to the travel agency, to eventually, you know, eventually the airline.

1:01:45It was kind of protecting the consumers. This license kind of stayed, and that's the first thing that you need to get. Then you need the Nyata license, which is kind of the same thing, and you may have some local license because somebody decided to sell in that state, you also need a license, okay? There's no real reason for that, but it's part of the process. So now you have all the... Selling tickets is so regular. Yeah, no, it is, it is. But it's actually getting worse. So now you have that. And now to get to the airline, if you think about it, it's a fairly complex thing from an inventory or computer science perspective.

1:02:21You need to know that there is an open seat right now on this airplane, on that date, on that time, on that price, right? And GDS, a global distribution service, Sabre is one of them, is basically connected to the airlines and is capable of showing a travel agent, this is the seat, this is the airplane, these are the terms and conditions and all of this. If you ever went and watched a travel agent, they sit in front of this monitor with something that looks like a mainframe. It is a mainframe, by the way. It's connected to a mainframe And they can get all of this information. Luckily, you have web services into this, but very old school web services.

1:03:00So a lot of reverse engineering into eventually booking a flight. So you have the technical aspect and you have the licensing. And then if you want to actually get commission for that, you also need to have an agreement with the airline. So that's kind of the entire process. So you need an agreement with every airline or just the airlines you want to get commission for? It is very complex, and I will start to get to a very complex area in how airlines are paying you commission. When you run a company at scale, you want to have agreements with all of them. As a startup, you can actually have with few.

1:03:32What makes it more complicated, and this is something that we did earlier, I think very similar to Brex. You and I talked about it. you can get away by having few agreements or even having partnership with booking.com or Priceline that will fulfill stuff for you if you are only targeting the SMB space. So if you are basically targeting a company that will have an office down the street and they're only flying between, I don't know, Palo Alto to New York, you can actually build it fairly easily. Once you're think about enterprises and even mid-level enterprises that will have an office in London and in the U.S., now you start to get to everything that I've described earlier, multiply it.

1:04:17So you need to have an agreement in the U.K., you need to have different licensing, and now you need to support different currency and different point-of-sale pricing. So prices are different. When you buy a flight ticket from here, it will have one price. When you buy the same flight ticket in the U.K., it will have a different price. Go to Singapore, different price, and so on. So when you go enterprise, building this system means to repeat what I've talked about earlier, everywhere, all over the world, again and again and again and again. So it's actually very, very complex and expensive thing to do.

1:04:50And there's also tech build out in every different country. So the technology would be similar. So once you've connected to a GDS, you'll be able to kind of reuse it. but then to make it a little bit more interesting but something that gives us a huge advantage today airlines over the years started to ask you to connect to them directly and if you do that you're actually giving better content to your users so better pricing better packaging of stuff better availability and you also get better commission from the airlines but now you are in the business of implementing APIs as of every airline.

1:05:34Today, we are the leaders in this of connecting directly to airlines. So we are completely multi-system. We connect to GDSs, to airlines, to everybody, which gives our customers really the best options. There is no travel infrastructure on this planet that is similar to ours or as wide as our system. But that was a lot of guiding in the early years. If I look at the kind of travel industry, you have i would say two companies that are really big in market cap it's booking and airbnb yeah and then it kind of falls off a cliff after that right even you know there's expedia in the mid 20 billion range which obviously is big you know it's the industry is so big but the market caps except for these two companies you know kind of like gbt i think is like four billion or something like why do you think that's the case like what's what's kind of happening is it just are so fragmented?

1:06:27Why do you think it's good? First of all, you should really think about it as two completely different industries. When the consumer travel kind of industry, which you've mentioned, booking Airbnb, by the way, Trip.com is also the channel. Yeah, Trip.com and MakeMyTrip in India are pretty big companies as well. But that's kind of the consumer kind of side, which really big companies, tech companies, were created there in the last 20 years. all of them were riding on this web kind of like I will move the travel agent down the street AAA or Thomas Cook and I will move it to the web and later to mobile to book hotel to book an entire package and I think booking.com were smart on doing two things first of all they avoided of actually getting into an Airbnb the same into the airlines side which is the most complex, most expensive kind of side.

1:07:23So I think that changes the entire dynamics around the cost and gross margins. But they also were extremely good. And that's the difference from Expedia on SEO, SEM. So that's what's so unique about booking. And that's why you see Airbnb obviously have their own unique inventory, which makes it very unique. And the ones in the far east kind of have their own market dynamics. When you take it all the way to corporate travel, or even what I'm calling frequent travel. So it could be consumers that are thinking about travel as more like this is my way of life. I really care about which flight I'm taking, which hotels I'm staying and so on.

1:07:59Then you see a long tail of companies. GBT is kind of one of them and then a lot of other travel agencies. And the reason is the tech never happened there. So you'd never seen the movement from I'm a travel agency, Amex GBT, or Carlson Wagenlit, or BCD, and I'm also a tech company that allows my users to come to me at scale and book their travels. So nobody has disrupted it. We were the first one to come and say, actually, people tried to do it, but because of everything that I've described earlier about the infrastructure, everybody failed. And we were the first one that came and said, we're going to actually take share from two kind of segments.

1:08:41One is the managed, with Amex as kind of the leader. And the other is the non-managed, companies that never manage travel or employees that are doing whatever they want to. And we're going to capture share from both of them. And that's why we are going so fast. We are basically capturing share by kind of introducing the browser, mobile app, and now AI into this industry in the corporate side that completely didn't use this technology. So if you look to the business now with the lens that you have today, what do you think were the things that you got right in the beginning of the thesis? And what do you think you got wrong or underestimated?

1:09:20At the beginning, we never, we really underestimated the importance of having the connections and understanding our business to the airlines and to the main hotel chains. And even to the aggregators, whether you talk about today, we know we have partnerships with every airline and good ones. We have partnerships with the OTAs, you know, with bookings, Expedia, Trip, Make My Trip. And I can go on and on and on. We are actually a really good partner with everybody. We didn't know that, which in the early days created two issues for us. One, fights, sometimes unnecessarily fights. We had a pretty big fight.

1:09:56We've done one of the biggest airlines in the world. A lot of misunderstanding. Actually, nothing like we didn't take the time to understand what they care about. and they couldn't care less about a small startup that C &O starts in Palo Alto. But also you will not make money. Our business model is like a travel agency. We are making money when an employee in an enterprise is coming and booking a trip. We make money out of it. The only way to make money is to actually partner, partner, partner, partner. So this is something that took us some time to really understand. And we thought that we were developing this really cool app, this really cool backend for the admins.

1:10:38Everybody would love it. And why would the airlines not want to, we didn't even think about it. Like that we need to do. I think this was the biggest learning. I think when you come to an existing industry, I'm sure that you have it in fintech. Uh, when you come to an existing industry, you need to respect, to learn, to respect the players in this industry and you need to learn to work with them. And we went the other way. I think today we are the best partners to airlines, hotels, aggregator that is out there. We are really having this ongoing discussion of what's in it for you, what's in it for us.

1:11:11And it's very, very unique. With AI, how do you think the industry is changing? It's going to be really fast. I think that we've played with AI from our early days, more with machine learning, because I've mentioned content. And we took the approach of bringing every inventory in, everything that is out there, more than Google, everything that is out there. But then you need to make some sense out of it, because if not, you'll have like endless amount of content. So we use machine learning to prioritize the stuff for you. We use machine learning to, you know, to save money for companies. So we had the team.

1:11:47That's why we were lucky. We had the team that could actually then move to Gen.AI. and Elon and the team built this platform we call it Navan Cognition which was our approach to eventually have a good discussion have the ability to have a good discussion between us and the user and when I'm saying good discussion early day when we implemented Gen.AI for the purpose of support you want to change your trip you're stuck in the airport something like that we've got hallucinations on the level of the bot will tell the users Okay, here is a number of travel agencies to change your flight, stuff like that.

1:12:24So Elon and the team actually built an extremely safe AI platform, right? That is unique for Navan to allow a real discussion with our users to eventually change their trip, support themselves, book their travel. Planning will be completely different. On the go will be completely different. What happens when you come back will be completely different. So five years from now, do you think travel agents still exist? Or what's happening with the actual travel agent? I think the travel agents will be there for a reason. I think there is a segment that is called VIP. We've done a pretty big acquisition around that, Reed and Mackay, we've done it during COVID.

1:13:05And the willingness to pay there, means booking fees, is really high. And the users there, whether they're EAs of CEOs, whether our execs, whether our frequent travelers that really care, the use case there is, I want you to take care of me. I want to go there. It's kind of what I've described with AI. So it's the same use case. I want to go to London, but do it for me. And I think that people that are willing to take this service are expecting something else. They are expecting the white glove. They don't want to talk with a bot. They want to talk with a human being, and they want that person to take care of them.

1:13:45So I think this will stay. We think that person will use a bunch of AI to... I think so. So I think the infrastructure will change. We actually announced yesterday that Nina, she used to be our COO. She now became, she relocated to London and she became the CEO of Riden McKay. Oh, well. One of the reasons for us is also infrastructure related. How do we connect the two infrastructures? and then I think that the people that are using our VIP services will still talk with an agent but this agent will use a lot of internal tools that we have today to make your trip a really good one. Which in practice will mean that...

1:14:26It's AI. Yeah, it will be the front end but instead of me having to book stuff or do all these things manually there's going to be an AI doing so one agent is probably going to be able to handle so many more. I think that what you're going to get is a lot of specialized agents. Agents that are really, first of all, really good at service. But also maybe they know something about location. Maybe they know if I want to plan my trips to, I don't know, to the Far East, they will be experts of, but you need to see this, you need to do that. And again, AI can do that. But that's where I think these agents will be used to.

1:14:59You trust their taste, right? I think it's taste. I think also don't underestimate generations. Like I even see it, you know, like we see it in a mobile versus web. Who is booking, who will book, everybody will get support on mobile. Like, you know, you're on the road, it's on mobile. But who is booking the trip on the web versus who is booking the trip on a mobile app? And it's completely age-related. So the same thing will happen, I guess, with AI. And so what do you think is going to happen? meaning like obviously there's the kind of big, you know, corporate travel agents, SamX, GBT, BCD, et cetera.

1:15:39Well, obviously if AI, the cost of everything and servicing these customers is going to go down a ton, I imagine, right? Or if it hasn't happened yet already. What do you think happens with the market structure? Do you think it becomes cheaper for the corporations? Do you think all these companies just become way more profitable? Do you think, you know, how do you think that the change in cost structure in the industry is going to impact the industry? I think that the providers of this industry, the travel agencies, will need to go through a technology transformation, which they didn't do for.

1:16:17They just didn't do it. And there is a business reason for that. If you look at the travel agency on a corporate travel agency, what the industry called TMC, Travel Management Company business model, It's kind of a cost-plus business model. I'm getting commission, but I'm also charging you a booking fee, and I'm doing it every time that you contact me. And I'm doing it with a margin, right? So I don't have the real incentive or urgency to wake up in the morning and automate something. So therefore, you go and look at how many agents Amex are employing. It's 19 ,000 agents, okay? And what are they doing that you're booking to?

1:16:58You call them, so they're not support. You call them and you book your trip. You email them and you book your trip. I think the question to ask is that thing is good for the customer. That's the real question to ask. Is it good for this travel agency? Yes. There are a lot of reasons why it's good for the travel agency. Part of this relate to maximize commission. Part of this related to I don't need to develop. I don't need to move to something else. The market is okay with that. But doesn't the company care that they're spending so much money on commissions? But if you don't have competition, and don't forget that Navan is the first company that showed up and basically presented, okay, there is an online way to doing it.

1:17:37And so if you don't have competitor that is doing that, and everybody are doing the same, like all of these agencies are doing the exact same thing, what is your incentive to change? Now, the question, can you change? If I'm not a tech company, how do I change? How do I now move from like really the phone? I remember funny, when Andresen first funded us, I remember that me, Ben, Mark, and Ilan are sitting in a room and Mark was talking a lot about the potential with mobile and machine learning. This was a while back, right? And I remember that I told Mark, hey, listen, it's all cool, but you need to understand we are disrupting the phone.

1:18:19We're not disrupting like something on mobile. We are describing people that are calling an agent and booking a trip. So everything that you're talking about will come, and it's actually coming now 100%. But you're really talking about we are competing with travel agencies that are basically employing agents to book and change your trip. And sometimes you can use a software that is developed by an ERP company. And if you think about ERP, it's a process of moving packages from places to places, not people, and understanding their needs. So I think competition matters here. And I think what will probably is more new tech companies joining this industry and probably introducing and competing with us.

1:19:10I mean and how price sensitive is this industry meaning like if you show up to a large customer and say I'll do it for half the price as you know the competitor do you think you would take the customer or there's like so much inertia that they're like I think it was price sensitive before we came I think that and the reason was that everybody did the same thing it's I'm a travel agency I'm connected to a booking tool I'm connected to expense management tool I'm connected to a credit card I'm connected for some virtual card solutions the whole concur setup exactly so So I need, I don't know, six vendors to run an enterprise level travel, right?

1:19:46WeCam is all in one. We are providing everything. Everything that the customer needs, we are providing it. And what we are, so you know, when you are using a lot of system, it's so complex that you are saying, okay, I just needed to work, right? And I'm not gonna start to challenge a booking fee. And don't forget that everybody were charging the same booking fee per transaction when you call me or when you book something. so it was the same. So you come and there is this big three that are running on RFPs that basically will run on prices. I'm like 25 bucks, I'm 23 bucks, I'm 21 bucks. That was the thing because it's the same thing.

1:20:22And when we came, we told them, hey, when it's online, your employees are saving a lot of time. And you're talking about your salespeople. You're talking about your C-level. You're talking about like really employees that are making a lot of money. so is the thing that you want to deal with right now is a booking fee of 21 bucks or 23 bucks we did another thing we are taking one time fee per trip so we are not doing this idea of every time that you contact me you're going to pay me why it's important first of all it's much more simplified for the customer and much more transparent but also put a burden on us to keep improving exactly you have to be more efficient who is enjoying this efficiency both sides, the customer.

1:21:05Efficiency means the time, the average time to book a trip on a van is six minutes. So efficiency means I'm not wasting my employees' time. So these kinds of things is saving, creating so much value to the customer. Add to this that the system is designed to save money, not on a booking fee, but on the actual price of the trip. So that's so valuable to customers that nobody will start to talk with you about 21, 22, 23 bucks booking fee. The value that we are creating is actually in the millions. And, you know, for, I would say like, a skeptic of Navan could argue that, hey, GBT is worth four billion, they're kind of the largest market.

1:21:47Why won't you guys be worth only four billion, you know, at their size? Like what is structurally different that will allow you to? It's, you know, I told you that I'm the first skeptic of Navan, I'm always asking this question of like, is this is a real business. And then, of course, part of this is a valuation. The business of Navan and GBT is completely different. The first thing, we are providing all of the needs of the customer. So we are not telling them the software go and buy from somebody else, Concare, and then the duty of care buy from somebody else and the credit card from somebody else.

1:22:20So we are basically providing everything together. So the actual offering is much bigger. So that's one thing. Then the take rate, how much we make on a transaction, our gross margins, I cannot mention numbers right now because of some limitations. It's okay, no numbers, there's more. But our gross margins are significantly, significantly, very soon you'll know, are significantly bigger than Amex. It means that you're talking about a completely different business. This is a digital business versus I'm a travel agency. And the third thing, our growth rate is completely different. So if you take, we make significantly more money on every transaction.

1:23:00Our growth rate is really high and the business is the entire thing. It's just not the same business. So like your ACV is much higher, you know, because you're doing, you're stickier because you're also the booking tool and everything. Exactly. You're not kind of the concur that you can change the travel. And you make more money because there are several systems. Totally. You're charging for both. Yeah. And you have way more automation. So your gross margin are higher and you grow higher. So you think long-term you're going to be a much higher margin business than these businesses are today? That's kind of what we are doing.

1:23:28So we are thinking about it like Amazon. You have this business and then you add another need of travel and another need of travel and another need of travel. It's just endless, completely different businesses. It's like, I don't know, comparing Amazon back then in 99 to, I don't know, or even worse, to some bookstores. Seriously, yeah, it's true. It's true like, you know, whatever. Yeah. So the comparison is kind of the same. Barnes & Nobles. I forgot the name. and the good news for us, investors totally get it. That's great. That's awesome. So looking back at the story now, when you think about the street fighting, when were the moments in the journey that you felt the most similar to when you felt when kind of you were like street fighting?

1:24:14Oh, definitely when we had this dispute with this airline. Oh, really? Yeah, we, so... Forgive us the micrallor. Don't you say who the airline is? Yeah, I will definitely not say which airline. I'll tell you after. But we basically, overnight, a certain airline came to us and told us, hey, we don't want you to book flights on our airplanes, right, for your customers. Why wouldn't they want you? So we didn't know why. I think they viewed a system like ours a system that are commoditizing the airlines. And there is a reason for that. So does every other title agency in the world, right? So think about it.

1:25:00OTAs, in a way, are actually doing it. And airlines don't like it. That's why OTAs are not making a lot of commissions from airlines. So that's something that happens. Exactly, it's mostly hotels. In the corporate space, there is still very strong relationship between the airlines and the TMCs. and for an airline if you kind of dumb down their content of this is first class this is business class this is coach it's actually really commoditizing them because you're treating everything is the same way and you know you know that i don't know let's take two extreme emirates and easyjet are not the same right so you cannot dumb it down to a list you know here is a Here is an airplane, here is a seat, right?

1:25:46You have to show how this thing look like, how the first class on this airline look like. Emirates first class is definitely a different experience than Alaska first class. Exactly. And by the way, it will come with different prices and so on. So the airlines will come and say, I want you to show our content on a shelf like it is on a store, that the user will be able to kind of not think about it. Everything is the same first class. Everything is the same business class. I understand the difference. Exactly. And if you go to an airline website, an airline website will do it. The airline website will show you, this is a picture of my suite, or this is a picture of my cabin, or there is a door here, right, and so on.

1:26:28And airlines are actually really good on pricing it to the level of different airplanes, like, you know, 380 versus the 777. I'm flying a lot to London, and BA has a business class on their 777 that is completely different than the one on the... Exactly. Very different. Especially if you're tall, you would notice the difference. Exactly. And one has a door and the other one does not have a door. So if you're an airline, you don't want this thing to assist them to call it business class on British Airways. You want to show it, the picture, what the difference is, and so on. So that was the issue of that airline, that we are basically dumbing down the content and we are doing it in an area that it was not done before, basically corporate travel.

1:27:13and nobody thinks about Concare as a lot of people booking their business class through it so they didn't care about that they know that because people are not doing it people that are really serious about travel will contact the agents they will not do it on Concare because Concare if you've ever used it I guess that you've never used it I've used it for the sake of competitive research but not I've actually used Concare in my past it is like an ERP system It's more about the approval. It's more about the process. You'll see the content and not everything will be there and definitely not a description of what exactly you are buying.

1:27:52So it's very, very different. But if that's the case, if I'm a real user that really cares about travel, I will actually go and contact the agent or send an email to the agent. That's how this thing... And we are the first one that are coming and saying, okay, you're going to book it like it was an Expedia. talking with that airline we actually realized that we don't have an issue, we are a tech company we would love to create much more visibility to the users of what are the differences, today in the van it's called the next generation storefront, today in the van when you get in, you have this table that is designed to compare the various airlines and give you this almost metric kind of thing this is a price, this is what you're going to get.

1:28:39You double click on it, you see the picture of the seat that you're going to sit on, you're going to see the various prices and why there is a difference in a price. So it's very unique. It's something that we've developed. Very hard to develop something like this on top of a GDS back then. But we were really pioneering it and we've done it through a discussion with that specific airline. To get there, it took us some time. There was a lot of street fight and a lot of misunderstandings. today actually this airline is our actually best partner. But back then a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of street fighting.

1:29:16Definitely was a time that I was very worried about like will Navan even be, you know, get to be a company. So that was definitely that kind of thing. And what about, tell me about COVID. Like what was it when, how did it feel when travel just stopped? It was very, on one side, very scary. In hindsight, it changed Navan for the better. We've opened all of these new businesses, payment and expense, VAP, consumer travel. We are offering in the system, users can actually use Navan for their own personal trips. They're using rewards, Navan rewards, when they decide to save company money. And every time that they do that, they get rewards from us and later they can buy their personal trips through our system.

1:30:00Again, it launched during COVID. So in hindsight, it was actually really good for Navan. started the company in 15, mid 15, launched it in 17 to the market. So we were going extremely fast. And you know that when you grow fast, it means that you also bear in a lot of cash, right? And if overnight your entire revenue disappears, and we actually went to a negative because you need to pay some of the money back and so on. Our burn rate was, I think it jumped to$30 million a month, like overnight. You're not the only one, right? At the same time, every single travel company. I think some of the best deals ever made in terms of risk reward were lending money to travel companies during COVID.

1:30:41100%. You know, Airbnb had pretty big deal. Insane deal. That was like one of the best deals that. Yeah, we did a deal with Greenox, with Neil, which is a convert with a lot of penalty, you know, in the time that. And by the way, it's a debt kind of deal. So it's very protected to the investor. Everybody. Neil was kind of going between one company to the other, Toast as an example, that were kind of disrupted and were offering the same kind of concept. But, you know, he did it. The ability also to take money, because I remember in Silicon Valley, everybody were talking about travel will never come back.

1:31:18Everybody learned how to use Zoom. I actually thought that was going to be true. Yeah, a lot of people thought that. I was certain that this will not happen And the reason was, and we still, that's how we view Navan, we're in the business of bringing people to be there, to meet, to make sure that their entire focus is to get to know each other. And we want to remove all of the hassle around it, making travel easy for frequent travelers. So if you're in that business and you believe in it, you know, you know that there is something that is happening in the face-to-face meeting that will never happen in a Zoom.

1:31:54Now, can you do a video conference some of the time? I'm doing video conferencing all the time. But when I want to really talk with somebody, interviewing somebody, raising money, gaining somebody's trust, it's always a face-to-face. Not to mention that besides the COVID deal, I don't remember with Green Ox, I don't remember one time that I actually raised the money in the meeting. It was always after the meeting. It was always some walk, some drinks, some, right? So I'm thinking about it. You actually do business where people are. You're meeting people. And I knew it. And I was saying there is no chance that video conferencing will replace it.

1:32:36And I remember back then I was saying it all the time and people thought that obviously I'm talking for my position. I cannot get into the idea that this company is dead. But I was actually certain the travel will come back. And to show you how much I was certain, I've mentioned Rylan Mackay that we've acquired during COVID. We've done two big acquisitions, this one and the German company, Comtravo, during COVID. Really during COVID. I actually remember that I flew out to meet, I always talking about meeting. I couldn't bring myself to buy Comtravo without flying there and see that it's a thing, meeting the people, feel that it was a startup, so feel that the people are there.

1:33:18And I remember I flew out and got COVID. Oh my God. So, but that's how much I knew that the travel is important. And you ask how it was. It was scary. But I'm someone that kind of in the team, you've met some of our team. It's a very resilient team. The team switched. Like it was beginning of March. We realized that whatever we thought that we're going to have will not happen. We realized that we need to switch. And the first switch, and I'm actually very proud of it. The first switch was actually to think, how can we take care of our customers? I remember that we've introduced in the system a COVID map that will tell the travel managers, hey, you cannot go there because there is kind of a COVID spread.

1:34:02So block that thing on the system for the users to do. So that was kind of aligning to the market. But the most important alignment was we started to kind of game planning it and we said there will be one day that all of the flights will get canceled. It happened, by the way. but it will happen. And our travelers will be all over the world. And there was less travel, but still people were traveling. So we're saying, what will happen then? And we had another issue where we said people will go and walk from home. We will need to send our entire support team to walk from home. And back then our support team had real computers that are attached to the wall.

1:34:39So how do you do that? And we started to invest money. It was in a week where we see that we are going to lose all of our money. We've invested money on mobilizing our call center and creating a plan to actually support our customers when they call us. And I remember travel got canceled. I remember the date. It was on a Wednesday. Travel got canceled. And basically, people had two days to get back from Europe to the U.S. or from everywhere to the U.S. And we needed to find solutions from them. Our wait time in the call center was six hours. This is compared to days if you called an airline or if you called a traditional TMC.

1:35:16and we're super proud of it. I think we got a lot of points with our customers of, hey, we're going to take care of you even in this situation. Yeah, these moments of crisis is where you build so much trust. I remember one of the first things that when we were starting Brex, we talked to someone, we like talking to people in the industry that were there because you can always learn from people that are there and what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. But one of the things that stuck with me that I think Amex was doing really well is that they were like, look, whenever there's an issue, that is the best opportunity that you have to build loyalty for customer.

1:35:49There's no better opportunity to build loyalty when there's an issue. We had the same thing and I think you guys really did an amazing job there. It was during the SVB classes. Oh yeah, that was crazy. Yeah, and I remember that I looked at the numbers and I was saying, okay, we are exposed several times. First of all, our system was running on SVB. So the way that we are kind of back then were moving money to Stripe was through SVB. So first of all, if we just take our money out of SVB, no credit card of Nervan will work. So you cannot do that. Then there is another exposure. We have a lot of tech companies that are customers, and some of them are using SVB cards.

1:36:31And as a travel company, you are actually in charge of the transaction. So basically, we ran the numbers, and we're basically saying, hey, we cannot pull the money out. And it was a lot. we also have this exposure here to SVB. And also if tech goes down, maybe all of our other customers kind of are going down. So basically we're in a big problem. So what do you do? Do you go and block the credit cards? Do you tell the customers to pay you right now? What do you do? And it's, I think to your point, we could have done all of these shitty things, but instead we've decided to kind of wait it out, managing it, see what's happening and kind of continuing to support our customers.

1:37:15And again, it's the type of things that people will remember. People always remember that. Like the decisions we made during SVV, people till this day kind of talk about it. Yeah, I remember you basically said, hey, if you're blocked, like come to us and we're going to underwrite it. It was really, really cool. Yeah, and I think that's definitely learning. Looking through your whole journey, obviously there's insane amounts of grit and grind, right? Like from kind of building a first startup, second startup, you know, street fighting, all that. What do you think you got the most lucky? Probably on everything.

1:37:47I think, I'm not kidding. You know, you can tell these stories of like, you know, we started a company and we knew that we're going to buy, you know, build an Amazon for frequent travelers. And you can tell all of these stories. At the end of the day, a lot of things need to work out for this thing to be successful over time. I'll give you one thing. I think timing was really important. If I talked about my previous startup, the timing was completely off. Here, there was something, mobile already happened in your consumer life. And it kind of, it was ridiculous to think that if I can use DoorDash to book my lunch, I will need to call an agent to book my trip to New York, right?

1:38:36And we didn't think about that when we started the company. But now looking back. Looking back, probably if we would have started it in, I don't know, 2010, or as our first startup, people were not ready in the corporate life to move and I'm going to book my stuff through a mobile app. People were not ready back then. So launching it in 2017, that's obvious what you're going to tell me to go and book my flight on Conqueror calling an agent. It doesn't make any sense. So that's sheer luck. Then another thing I've mentioned that we didn't know anything about the travel industry. And Ilan and I were looking for the API.

1:39:16And I started to contact people in LinkedIn from the industry. And all of them didn't get back to me. One of them, I still remember, his name is Ron Wagner. He's kind of an industry veteran. He's now 75 years old. Back then he was in his late 60s. Actually, probably older. He responded, met us, and started to explain everything fulfillment to us, everything about fulfillment. And it was so important because it's so different than the way that you think about it as a tech company. Not only did that, he introduced us to a travel agency in San Francisco that became our first partner. And that travel agency is heavily connected to United.

1:40:02so he introduced they introduced us to United that created our first airline partnership and that's pure luck you know this guy I don't know checking his LinkedIn and you know and seeing this and agreeing to have lunch with me and I still remember the lunch I told him we're going to take the entire industry and look at me like we you know like I lost my mind and then I told him but I don't know what GDS is right so in the same so I think there was a lot of moments that But are you talking with me? I'm not kidding. When you talked with me and introduced me to Neil, it was after I heard at least 20 no's from investors regarding investing in a van.

1:40:45Because we had this amazing pitch. You know, we have 650 employees and we have no revenue, right? How do you raise money for that? And suddenly, you know, you and I connected and you told me, hey, maybe it's relevant. This is all luck, you know. It's like you cannot explain it in any other way. I think you definitely need to be lucky. Yeah, no, I agree. I always, you know, when I kind of told you what I believe on the opportunity, the other thing I believe is, look, having a wave behind you helps so much. Right. You know, like I think when people see a lot of these stories of success, I think we tend to create this like hero journey story, right, where like, you know, there's a founder.

1:41:24Obviously, that's super important, but behind every successful company, there's something in the world and the industry and the market that's pushing them to kind of be successful as well. You know, when you talk about the wave, you can take it to the people, right? So if I'm thinking about the people that are really influential in advance, so you've worked a lot with Michael Sindesich. Michael joined us on our, I think 10 or 11 months as our first sales guy. But, you know, when he talked with me and I've explained the business to him, he thought that we were running some scam. And when I met him, I was saying, who is this kid?

1:42:01And we actually had an advisor, a sales advisor, that told me not to hire Michael. And Michael is like the most influential person in Avon right now. But that person, the thing about it, if I had listened to that guy, right? And I can tell you a similar story about Nina. I don't think you've worked a lot with Nina, but Nina is also very, very important in Avon. Same story, and I can go one by one. And so it is kind of almost like the stars needed to align for Michael to, he can tell you the story. I will kind of out him, but his father told him not to join us. So, you know, kind of all of these stories that eventually making this thing happen.

1:42:41And probably without these people, to your point about the wave, we wouldn't be here. Totally. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Before I arrived, I was talking to your chief of staff, and she gave me a really interesting nugget about you that you decided to get really good at the stuff your kids are good at. So that you're horse riding, horse back riding now? Yes. Tell me about that. Yeah. I don't think it's about that. I think what I've decided, I think, you know, we talked about kids earlier. Kids are really amazing. And especially when they're in that age, that they're people. You can talk with them.

1:43:17You can really relate to them. And I remember that during COVID, it was my aha moment that I invested all of my time on building this startup, and I'm not that connected to my kids. And I was actually trying to force it, which was a good thing. You know, sometimes you need to start to... And I did this thing with every kid I did something. So I was kind of going sailing with my daughter, and I was doing off-roading with my son. And then with my little one, with my 11 years old, she wanted to start and do horse riding, actually equestrian, horse jumping. And I remember I was sitting there waiting for her one time as a parent, and I looked at this and I said, that could be my thing with her.

1:44:05But also I kind of got interested. It looked kind of cool. And I kind of started to do it. And today we do it actually even this weekend. We go to this horse show together. We're going to jump together. whether we talk about it. It also gave me a lot of motivation to be in shape. You know, when you kind of do these things with your kids, you want to be in good shape. You don't want to be like breath. Exactly, exactly. So horse ride is definitely one of them. It's actually became a thing. I really like doing it. But all of these things and just actually spending time with my kids, it's one of the things that I like to do the most.

1:44:39What do you think from when you were growing up that you're going to do similar to the way you were brought up versus different? Wow, that's a really good question. Similar to different. I think I've learned early, probably not in the right way, that freedom is everything. That kind of being free, feeling free, it's something that's kind of, you know, you live your life once and be free. Be free on every aspect of your life. And that's something that I think is probably a habit that I started in, it's not even high school, it's middle school, and kind of kept it almost as a value. I want to be free.

1:45:22So that's something that I would want to keep, and I think I am. Probably my childhood made me, at the beginning, much more risk-adverse. And probably taking risks is something that is very different than how I was kind of, you know, thinking about stuff as a child. and I've learned to do it in a kind of phase because I was getting older. Like incentivize my risk-taking. Exactly. Yeah. Super interesting. We're going through this whole like AI moment right now, right, that everything is kind of changing. I guess like what are the things that you think about with the ever-changing world, you know?

1:45:59Like what are the things that make you concerned? What are the things that make you excited? Yeah. Yeah, you met my girlfriend Alex earlier and we're actually talking a lot about that. But I think that you'll see a fork in the road. I think the world will become more efficient, but way colder. A lot of things will be very transactional because it makes everything so efficient. And I think there will be the opposite. I think people will look for much more experiences, for much more meeting and being together, both in your personal life, but also in your work life. People will seek the human connection because of that thing.

1:46:41I think they always seek, we always seek human connection, but I think it will create this thing, hey, here it's all transaction. Here it's super efficient. It's good. You know, this efficiency is good, but I need to be with people. And I think it will create a lot of change in society, but also a lot of opportunity. So it's almost like I'm thinking less about, you know, Navan is becoming more and more an AI company. I mentioned our infrastructure earlier. And I think every company that wants to be alive will become an AI company. But there will be the other kind of thing. And I'm actually very fascinated on the other thing, which is how do you bring people together?

1:47:26How do you maintain this humanity? And I'm kind of happy that Navan has something in it, which is if we are in the business of bringing people together, you're kind of helping the other side to also be which is the humanity side of things totally i honestly like sometimes people email me wanting to meet up and if it's a in-person meetup i'm like yeah sure i'll meet if it's a zoom i think like five times before scheduling you know like i'm like i can't take it under zoom and i'm also tired like you know i'm like and then i do other things so you're not really listening and you see that other people are not listening but for me the ai it's not even about Zoom.

1:48:00I think the, you know, how fast business travel came back or travel generally came back, that was somewhat reaction to, it's not just Zoom, to everything COVID. I was locked in my house. I couldn't leave now. I want out. And I think in a way you can think about it in the same way regarding AI. If everything is like that and I kind of get it, I want the other thing. and I'm going to almost run to this as a human being. So I think that's kind of what we're going to see. I think we're going to see almost like this Zoom reaction that you're talking about. I don't want to do this Zoom meeting, but I'll be happy to meet with you.

1:48:38I think that you'll see generally of people looking to kind of fulfill themselves, experiences. We talked about sports earlier, doing these things, being in nature, meeting. You know, I think in the last few years, you see like, I don't know, a huge explosion in raving. I think you are also kind of, there is a reason for that. People are looking for the other side or the other kind of more humane side. Totally. No, I 100 % agree with that. I think people are wanting to get even more together in the world of AI, but AI is making everything easy in between. Getting there, what you guys said, it's like, don't worry about getting there, just enjoy being there.

1:49:17But you know, I think it also, when I told you we take six minutes to book a trip or most of the trips are being changed by a click of a button, it frees up time. And from an employer perspective, it frees up time for you to sell more. Right? So that's kind of what we sell. But if you think about the entire AI revolution, it will work less. Right? I'm like... A lot of the things that I'm thinking about, how am I doing Dex today? I'm describing to ChatGPT what I want to do, and this thing is doing it for me. How do I answer emails? The same thing, right? All of these things. So actually have more time as a CEO.

1:49:56But I think everybody will have more time because they'll start to use it one way or the other. And this time, assuming that GDP will continue to grow because it's more efficient, obviously you'll need to find different mechanisms to give people wealth. But once they'll have time and wealth because GDP is bigger, I can see only experiences like people having fun. I think it will happen because, yeah. I 100 % agree. So you mentioned it. What are the kind of ways you're using AI today and you're kind of just to do work or your personal life like with ChatGPT and others that it's most surprising to you?

1:50:36They're like, oh, I didn't think when this first came out, I was going to use it for this. I think there is, when ChatGPT came, I didn't realize that they will also personalize it. So basically I thought that they will separate me. I was naive. I thought that they would separate me from the information that I'm getting, right? So I kind of viewed it as it's a nicer search, right? It's kind of summarizing what Google would have given me. I think because it's so personalized, it's every day I'm surprised. I was asking, what is the best five hotels in Barcelona? I'm going to Barcelona. What are the hotels that I need to set?

1:51:16And I got an answer. but in the answer I could see it was not only you know the usual stuff you know you probably I prefer boutique hotels and hotels in whatever area and all of this it also touched personal aspects of my life and it told me you better stay in this hotel because you prefer that thing right it was so surprising to me and this thing encouraged me to to continue to to open up to chat CPT. So it's almost becoming kind of another human being that you are interacting with. That knows you so well. That knows you so well, probably more than anybody else. And you can claim that Google knew me in the same way, but they've never demonstrated it, right?

1:51:57You didn't know that that was happening at Google. Exactly, exactly. You didn't know. I don't think they never took it further to, I know you. This thing is telling me I know you. and there is something that's surprising me about that every day actually this thing inspires me to think about what can i do for travelers for frequent travelers uh with that amazing technology you know um for me it was the i use it to get feedback on my ideas a lot so i think before i would have an idea i would have to like go find an expert in the field you know or something or like i would show if i'm doing a fundraising deck i'm sure to investor now like i asked chat gpt's like hey this is my idea describing a lot of detail and like just give me the bull case the bear case you know like will be the counter arguments like and it's just like so good for you know that i was doing the same thing and that's why i was you know a lot of people are asking will it replace travel agents or support agents or whatever i was when we did our annual planning uh i was actually giving chat gpt a our a kind of board decks you know and also our numbers from two years ago last year and I asked it what should be the goals that I'm putting for the team for this year and it gave me the goals I looked at this I didn't change anything okay I copy pasted it and shoved it in a bow and said here this is the one goals for the year so it was kind of an aha moment that I was saying wow this is actually really really cool that's awesome yeah um well as we're getting to the end here let's talk a little bit moving forward right you said you're turning 50 this year?

1:53:36Yeah. What's... In 10 days. 10 days, wow. Yes. It's amazing. Well, by when this is released, probably 10 days ago. Yeah, actually, it'll be 14 days into the age of 50. Yeah. What are your 50s going to look like? I think I kind of, you know, we talked about grinding and building a startup and a family and all of these things. And I think in the last five years, I realized that there is actually more to life. And I think my next kind of maybe 20, 25 years will be much more balanced, right? So obviously my 50s, but much more balanced. But in a good way, I see myself still, you know, running in a van and probably I have ideas for the future and I see myself doing that, but I see myself also jumping on horses or traveling or meeting people or raving or having fun.

1:54:24So all of these things together. So I think this is actually maybe a process that started for me a while back and will continue to kind of evolve. Is there anything in the bucket list? I definitely, but for that I will need some time. I definitely want to spend a long time in India. We've done, last year we've done, I think you did something similar in Japan, but we did a kundalini yoga training in Rishikesh in the same time that you were doing your, I think, silent retreat in India. In Japan. In Japan. and I was always before that going to India more for business. So kind of saw India, but not really.

1:55:09And then suddenly I saw another aspect of India, really got fascinated by that and would like to probably spend like, you know, several months there kind of getting deeper. So that's definitely in the back at least. That's awesome. Well, as the final question, we went through your whole journey. what do you think that the era of today is different than the your your teenagers like what you know if you compare the two of them like what are the starkest differences you know i see through my daughter i think she processes information my 11 years old completely completely completely different it's it's insane like she gets stuff and i think some of it she tells me that she's not using TikTok, but she is.

1:55:52So some of it is TikTok. Some of it is, you know, think about it. All of this generation is kind of growing up with social networks. Not even, you know, I was not, my house didn't have a phone. Not a mobile phone, a phone, right? So from that to I'm like, information is kind of in my face and then I'm asking ChurchGPT what to do. I think this generation is really having a completely different brain. I think completely different brain. The way that they are evolving, the way that their brain will evolve is completely different to the way that I was as a kid and thinking about stuff. How about you?

1:56:31How are you different? How am I different? I think everything is possible. It's kind of something that you probably learn in Silicon Valley, but also something that with confidence, with achieving some stuff, you realize that everything is possible and then it's kind of what do I want to do? What interests me? What will be my next thing from that perspective? Even bringing it to Nivan, you know, when we started Nivan, we were hoping to win some corporate deals to replace Conquer and Amex. And now we are thinking about it, hey, we could be the standard for travel. Every frequent travel will book their trip through us and we really mean it.

1:57:12It's like something that we are passionate about. So it's such a change of thinking while you are kind of maybe seeing what's possible. That's amazing. That's a great way to close it. It's super optimistic. You can do and build everything. Yeah. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. It was amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Thanks to our friends at Atomic Growth for helping with production and distribution.