Guest: Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan

As a business travel-focused startup, Navan (previously known as TripActions) was heavily impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020; after laying off 24% of the staff, CEO Ariel Cohen says he became a “wartime CEO,” spending three months in “complete denial and just executing.” By June, employees were leaving and he was depressed — but he still believed that business travel would come back. “You cannot just look at a moment and say that it will change everything,” he says. “... I disconnected from the news and from some of our investors and from ... negativity and started to lead the company again.” In a way, he explains, it was like a reset to the earliest days of the business, because the only people left were long-term believers like him.

In this episode, Ariel and Joubin discuss “tier one” VCs, developing goodwill, company money vs. employee money, wartime CEOs, putting handcuffs on founders, staying dynamic, returning to the office, scuba diving, shared values, Macallan whisky, believing in startups, losing employees, in-person connections, secondary liquidity, and “deposits and withdrawals.”

In this episode, we cover:

• Picking the right investors (01:22)
• Connecting to the Matrix (04:04)
• Obsessing over failure (10:29)
• Reflecting on an eight-year journey (14:56)
• The benefits of naïveté (17:50)
• Ariel’s entrepreneur father and early jobs (20:45)
• Older startup founders (23:03)
• Getting out of large companies (25:35)
• Personal burn rate (28:03)
• Becoming the big company (30:11)
• Pivoting into AI (32:44)
• Project Reset and personally resetting (34:12)
• Making controversial decisions (39:55)
• “What could I have done better?” (45:43)
• Ariel’s co-founder Ilan Twig (47:04)
• What makes a co-founder relationship work? (48:50)
• Running out of cash (51:18)
• Being a travel startup during COVID (55:53)
• The depression quarter (01:00:12)
• Long-term believers (01:02:54)
• Why Navan would go public (01:07:55)
• Startup advice and hard-charging CEOs (01:11:27)
• What “grit” means to Ariel and who Navan is hiring (01:15:24)

Links:

• Connect with Ariel
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: ariel@navan.com
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm