{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Grit","title":"#141 CEO Navan, Ariel Cohen: Be Naive!","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4620,"description":"Guest: Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan\nAs 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.\nIn 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.”\nIn this episode, we cover:\nPicking the right investors (01:22)\nConnecting to the Matrix (04:04)\nObsessing over failure (10:29)\nReflecting on an eight-year journey (14:56)\nThe benefits of naïveté (17:50)\nAriel’s entrepreneur father and early jobs (20:45)\nOlder startup founders (23:03)\nGetting out of large companies (25:35)\nPersonal burn rate (28:03)\nBecoming the big company (30:11)\nPivoting into AI (32:44)\nProject Reset and personally resetting (34:12)\nMaking controversial decisions (39:55)\n“What could I have done better?” (45:43)\nAriel’s co-founder Ilan Twig (47:04)\nWhat makes a co-founder relationship work? (48:50)\nRunning out of cash (51:18)\nBeing a travel startup during COVID (55:53)\nThe depression quarter (01:00:12)\nLong-term believers (01:02:54)\nWhy Navan would go public (01:07:55)\nStartup advice and hard-charging...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/jCea5f44KBONhOsyLyht9nXUrj2YBNfA6fc-kgyfWTM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/Lzk3NzAvMTY2Nzg2/MjQyOC1hcnR3b3Jr/LmpwZw.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}