20VC: Why Salesforce, SAP and Concur Will Die | Scaling 3x and Raising at a $9.2BN Valuation in COVID | How OpenAI is Changing the Travel Industry Forever | Never Before Revealed Margins on Travel and Expense Management with Ariel Cohen, Co-Founder & CEO
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ariel Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Navan (formerly TripActions), the #1 travel management super-app used by over 8,000 companies. Ariel has raised over $2BN for Navan from some of the best including a16z, Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed, Greenoaks, and Elad Gil. Prior to TripActions, Ariel co-founded streamOnce, a business multimedia integration platform that was successfully acquired by Jive Software, where Ariel had previously served in a senior position following his time at Hewlett-Packard.
In Today's Episode with Ariel Cohen We Discuss:
1.) Why Education is Outdated and Wisdom to People Entering the Working World:
- Why did Ariel not really attend many classes when he was a student?
- What would be his biggest advice to young people leaving school today? Where would he focus?
- Why does Ariel believe that traditional education is more outdated now than ever before?
2.) Why SAP and Salesforce Will Die:
- Why does Ariel believe that SAP and Salesforce have not innovated for a decade?
- Why does Ariel believe that Slack is a disaster inside of Salesforce?
- What are the single biggest advantages that startups have over these large incumbents?
- What can startups do to retain innovation and speed as they scale into becoming an incumbent?
- Why are the best founders willing to kill their own projects?
3.) Growing a Business 3x and Raising at a $9.2BN Valuation in COVID:
- How did Ariel grow the business 3x with all travel being banned?
- What were the tactics to blitz scaling during COVID?
- How did Ariel approach his investors for a new round in the middle of COVID? How did he get such a high price in the midst of a global pandemic?
- What is the bull case for how Navan can be a $40BN company?
4.) Margins Matter: Gaining Leverage Through Additional Margin:
- With Navan's 80% margin, they have 30% higher margins than other competitors, how do they have such high margins?
- With the additional 30%, how does Ariel plan to scale Navan's reach and use the margin to do so?
- How does OpenAI play a role in helping Navan increase its margin even further?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In five years from now, nobody is going to use Conquerain Emacs. |
| 0:03.8 | Nobody is going to use Salesforce. |
| 0:05.2 | These companies have lost the way around innovation. |
| 0:08.6 | They don't know anymore how to innovate. |
| 0:10.6 | They cannot attract the people that know how to innovate. |
| 0:13.9 | These companies actually, I would argue, will just die. |
| 0:17.2 | That's what will happen because innovation happens. |
| 0:19.7 | These companies lost their way around |
| 0:21.7 | innovation and they will just die because they are not relevant. This is 20VC, the memo, where we chart |
| 0:26.8 | the success story of one of the breakout companies of the last decade. And today, we have a special |
| 0:31.5 | guest. Just yesterday, they announced their rebrand from Trip Asions to Navan and wow, what a show |
| 0:36.8 | this was. I'm thrilled to welcome Ariel Cohen, co-found and CEO Navan, and wow, what a show this was. |
| 0:42.2 | I'm thrilled to welcome Ariel Cohen, co-found and CEO at Navan, formerly Trip Asions, |
| 0:46.7 | the number one travel management super app used by over 8,000 companies. |
| 0:51.4 | Ariel's raised over $2 billion for Navan from some of the best, including Andresen, |
| 0:55.3 | Z Ventures, Lightspeed, Greenos, and Elad Gill. and prior to Trip Asions, Ariel co-founded Stream Ones, which was successfully acquired by Jive Software. |
| 1:00.5 | But before we dive into the episode's day, if you lead a team and have ever had to buy |
| 1:04.3 | software or services, sell software or services, hire contractors or make a deal, basically |
| 1:10.1 | everyone, let's admit it, you've probably |
| 1:11.8 | experienced how slow and confusing contracting can be. It doesn't have to be so hard though. It's |
| 1:16.8 | 2023. We need contracts to keep pace with the speed of modern business. And that's where Ironclad comes |
| 1:22.7 | in. Ironclad is the leading contract life cycle management platform for innovative companies. It lets users create, understand and control contracts in a walk-up usable browser tab, making |
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