#141 CEO Navan, Ariel Cohen: Be Naive!
Grit5 Kesä 2023

#141 CEO Navan, Ariel Cohen: Be Naive!

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

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

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

In this episode, we cover:

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


Links:

Jaksot(279)

President at Confluent, Erica Schultz: Cashing in on Your Currency

President at Confluent, Erica Schultz: Cashing in on Your Currency

When Confluent’s President of Field Ops Erica Schultz was 23, she was working at Oracle and cold-emailed the manager of the Argentina office, asking to work for him. This experience would open the doo...

21 Maalis 20221h 6min

CRO Zoom, Ryan Azus: It’s Not Zoom Fatigue, It’s Work Fatigue

CRO Zoom, Ryan Azus: It’s Not Zoom Fatigue, It’s Work Fatigue

Ryan Azus, CRO of Zoom, has been selling all his life, from baseball cards as a kid to ads in the school newspaper to — crucially — books every summer in college. Every year, he and and thousands of o...

14 Maalis 20221h 9min

CCO Instabase, Ozge Ozcan: Rising and Falling - Like a Phoenix

CCO Instabase, Ozge Ozcan: Rising and Falling - Like a Phoenix

Instabase’s Ozge Ozcan believes that many women have been fed a false story about motherhood: That it can be seen as a “decelerator” to one’s career. Instead, she’s found that raising two daughters ha...

7 Maalis 202255min

CMO Samsara, Sarah Patterson: What You Do vs. Why It Matters

CMO Samsara, Sarah Patterson: What You Do vs. Why It Matters

Sarah Patterson, CMO of Samsara, doesn’t believe in keeping your armor up around your coworkers: “You’ve got something else on your mind, it’s going to come through,” she says. While working at Salesf...

28 Helmi 202259min

CRO Calendly, Kate Ahlering: Embracing Leadership - On and Off the Basketball Court

CRO Calendly, Kate Ahlering: Embracing Leadership - On and Off the Basketball Court

Kate Ahlering might be the perfect guest for this podcast. She eventually worked her way up to Chief Sales Officer of Glassdoor, but when she joined in 2013, she helped define the company’s leadership...

21 Helmi 202253min

CEO Loom, Joe Thomas: Communication, the Mother of All Skills

CEO Loom, Joe Thomas: Communication, the Mother of All Skills

When Rippling CEO Parker Conrad was raising a massive $250 million round last year, he didn’t start by presenting his deck to venture capitalists in person. Instead, he sent a 39-minute demo of his pr...

14 Helmi 20221h 15min

President at Databricks, Andy Kofoid: Reinvention at Any Stage

President at Databricks, Andy Kofoid: Reinvention at Any Stage

When Andy Kofoid was growing up in the working-class town of Joliet, Illinois, he dreamed of getting to college and — like a lot of his relatives — worked in construction. Today, Andy is laying digita...

7 Helmi 20221h 13min

Former CEO Splunk, Doug Merritt: Creating 360° Order in Chaos

Former CEO Splunk, Doug Merritt: Creating 360° Order in Chaos

Doug Merritt joins this episode on the tail end of his impressive run as Splunk’s CEO. With decades of leadership in what can be described as an “exploratory career,” Doug breaks down his professional...

31 Tammi 20221h 22min

Suosittua kategoriassa Liike-elämä ja talous

sijotuskasti
psykopodiaa-podcast
mimmit-sijoittaa
rss-rahapodi
rss-lahtijat
rss-draivi
rss-porssipuhetta
rahapuhetta
oppimisen-psykologia
rss-rahamania
rss-seuraava-potilas
rss-neuvottelija-sami-miettinen
rss-bisnesta-bebeja
rss-paatos-podcast-suomen-kovimmat-paatoksentekijat-2
rss-paasipodi
rss-40-ajatusta-aanesta
taloudellinen-mielenrauha
syo-nuku-saasta
kasvun-kipuja
rss-viisas-raha-podi