YouSaid · the spoken record

Ariel Cohen

lines on the record: 60
first: 2026-02-07
most recent: 2026-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think almost like the opposite of AI, I think that people will get way more towards fun, spirituality, experiences. I think you and I talked in the past about my kind of walkabout trips once a year by myself to scuba dive somewhere. I think people will have more time, more ability to also focus on that, like talking about the price that I've just talked about. And I'm excited to see what will happen there. It's kind of the opposite of tech, the opposite of AI, but it's kind of, I think, where society will be able to go to with way more efficient kind of life and workplace that we will have.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is very kind of loopy. Yeah, it's a good question. It's a really, really good question. I don't know. It's probably something to figure out with my therapist, but I can tell you that nothing is more rewarding than that.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, and that's kind of what I told you that with money, you gain more time. Invest the time in your kids five, six years ago, I didn't. In the last three years I have. And there is nothing, you know, we talked a lot about Navan mission and vision and private jets and all of these things. There is nothing more rewarding than that. I have twins that are 18. My relationship with them is so good, so deep. And I have also a 12 year old. Again, same thing. Invest the time. Invest the time. Don't pay that price. I did pay that price earlier. And I definitely regret it. And I'm not doing it anymore. I'm really, really spending the time with them.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think I'm not there yet. I'm sometimes flying jets, sometimes I'm flying commercial. I don't know. I think it saves time. I think that it just saves time. That's what it does. I think people flying is hard, you know? Time zones is still a thing. Jet leg is still a thing. In a way, that's what, you know, I think my wife keeps making fun of me. The entire Nirvana was created because of my anxiety in an airport. And it's so, so true. And so I think it's still no matter what, even with jets, I'm still having the same anxiety.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think first of all, getting help, like having people around you that can do stuff that you don't want to do. I don't know, fixing stuff in the house, you know, doing stuff that also I'm not good at doing. Getting help free up a lot of time, something that definitely to your point about I live in both New York and here in Palo Alto, that's recent and I love it. I can enjoy some of the things here. My kids, by the way, live there, but I can also enjoy New York and I love big cities. So that's kind of similar to what you said. We kind of have this really like apartment in a neighborhood that we love. And that's fun.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes stuff easier in the way that you can focus more on things that you care about. You can get much more help around you to then actually creating a nice balance between building something great, but also having your own life. So I think money definitely helps there. But, you know, when I'm waking up in the morning, it's about like really building this thing. It's not like I'm checking the share price times my holdings. This is my money. I'm not doing that. Actually, it's not how I think. So I think it's about convenience. It's about you actually get more time back.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the long term stop in a way obsessing about some short term issues and really, really think about the long term and make sure that everybody out with you on this journey.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think both of us worked in an enterprise businesses. I've mentioned HP earlier, but others, to have the needed experience to build something significant in the enterprise. But for us, travel, we didn't know anything about it and concur back then looked so scary that probably we've delayed this journey by two to three years.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that if I knew everything that I know today, I would probably skip a startup and actually start Navan way earlier, but I didn't know. But definitely Ilan and I reflected on the Nirvana idea, the trip actions idea back then way before we jumped to do it. We had another startup in the middle, probably would have been really beneficial. Probably Nevan would be significantly bigger and more impactful today if we would have done it earlier. So that's a pretty big.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's when he has, but it's not about that. It's about people, by the way, can do their own journeys. Like, do you know how many career mistakes I made in my life? People can have their own journeys. And by the way, some of them came back. So people can have their own journeys and bet on their own backs. But I actually think values and what kind of a story you want to be part of is more important than let's jump to the next shiny thing.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More people than the people that live on this planet will use Zoom. What exactly do you think is going to happen? And they made their choices and it's okay. But I want to have people in this company that believe in our mission, that believe in our vision, and check if we are going towards that. And if we are, they are usually staying.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the really good employees, and I told you, I have experience with this during COVID, the really good employees are not built like that. I think they are very resilient. They want to win and they want to see through things that they've built. This is Rate I saw during COVID. This is what I see now. So people that tend to go to the next shiny thing are not necessarily to begin with or dead a line to our culture. Now, again, it's my role to explain the choice to them, to show them the vision, to show them the roadmap. But we had, you know, during COVID, kind of made June, July timeframe, a lot of employees leaving to Zoom when they were at their peak. And I remembered even then I was talking with them and I was telling them, hey, this is at the peak. Like, where do you think it will go? Like, do you think that...”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of tell them to look at this in two years' time frame, three year time frame, and probably 10 years' time frame and think about where we could be. You know, there is this famous kind of letter that kind of Bezosente is investors, right, when their share price was, I don't even remember what was the number, but very, very low. And he was pointing to the business and to the business that is doing great. And guess what happened later? The share price more than caught up in that case.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. That's what I told you I think the tough part that it adds to is that what I've told you is me. Like am I getting depressed or like in some maniac when it's like when the share price is up? I'm not. But am I naive about it? Do I think that a lot of the Navan employees are refreshing their app all day long and checking where it is? They are. And it is my role to actually bring them along to the journey and keep pointing to what I know about the company, what the employees here know about the company. And, you know, we kind of talked about it in Q3. Think about like, we are going like crazies in the PLG market and we are going like crazy by signing new deals in the enterprise market. And we pointed to examples in Q3. The employees have all of the information to make their decision. And yeah, then there is the share price. And I'm sure that it impacts them. And it's my role to...”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I see all of the stuff that we are doing in Navana, all of the stuff that we are building, and I'm just waiting for people to come back to travel and to see the new Navan. And life would be great. I was like, this is an opportunity to think about how to build a better business. It's exactly the way that I'm looking at this today. Maybe that's a different type. I talked to you about our culture. I see the opportunity. I see a huge opportunity for Navan, right? So I don't know. I'm like, I'm not waking up in the morning. I'm checking the share price twice a day. I'm checking it when I'm kind of waking up. And when the market ends just to know, right? People are asking you and you need to know. But I don't know. In any case, I'm not selling or I cannot sell. My employees cannot sell. So I don't think it's matter. I think you need to build value, which eventually the shareholders and investors in the van will actually benefit from it. But again, start.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember that we talk during COVID and everybody were telling me that nobody will ever travel again, and what are we doing with Navan? And I told you, I don't know, I'm looking at 300 people will travel when, you know, obviously when the pandemic will end.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you, it's kind of interesting that you bring up Robin. I was kind of investor in Robin Hood through VCs, but then also through in the IPO I kind of jumped on it. And I went through the suffering, right? So they popped and then completely crashed. And a very long time they were down. He did so amazingly, you know, he was like, you know, they are going the company amazingly. They have really good cost structure that he did when they were going down. penetrated to new products, new things. So I don't know why he was, you know, I don't, you know, I don't know him. I don't know why he was depressed when the Shephaz was done. I think this is where they actually define the company and build the company and actually create.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really good compared to this grade that you take every millisecond in the share price. So that's about it I don't like just because it creates behaviors that are not even relevant, right? I don't think that people can actually know either or share. I don't know why the share price goes up in this morning and goes down in that morning and so on. You kind of know when you report, you know, when you're delivering some announcement to the market. So that doesn't make me excited about that part of being public. So maybe that's kind of the reference. Can you find the happy CEOs? But I do like the other parts that comes with it.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I told you I'm happy that we are out there and telling our story. Is that fun? You know, you have this mechanism that makes people obsessed on, I don't know, refreshing their screen and check what are their share price is. It creates a burden to explain to people your employees basically everything I'm telling you about Navan at the end of the day is dependent on the employees here being part of this journey. We talked about it in the context of COVID, right? How do you convince an employee to stay in a travel company during a pandemic? You can apply the same thing here. Everybody saying everything is disrupted. Everything will be different. No software company that was”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that eventually this will catch to where it needs to be. And I think again, we need to make the right decisions for our users, for our customers, and the investors will benefit a lot from it over time.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I told you earlier, it's almost like I have two lenses that I'm managing Navan, is the business doing great? Okay, the business is doing amazingly. So are we gaining share? You could see LQ3 earnings and you can see that we are taking a lot of shares, right? We've announced us getting into the enterprise market and taking companies as customers like Visa, huge healthcare companies, enterprises all over the world, like companies that are really in the main street of doing stuff that are very, very far from, you know, we are all in the tech world, very far from tech and kind of becoming avanned customers. The business is doing great. And I think as long as we will service our customers and our users, the business will continue to gain share. We're going to take the entire market. I really believe in it. And the market, the investors will figure it out.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This win, win, win between the airline or any type of partner, the customer, and the user and the employee. And that win-win-win, you eventually get paid for. So it also creates a win for us, but you need to take the first leap.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of think about it the other way around, and we always thought about it like that if you create value, you're gonna get paid. I'll give you an example. We were the first ones and we are the leaders by FAO on this of connecting directly to airlines instead of going through some aggregators, connecting directly to the airlines. The model in travel says that if you go through an aggregator, you're going to make more money. But we knew that that's the right thing for our customers. When you connect directly to an airline, you get more information for them. So you can tell them this flight is likely to get delayed. You can tell them this is how the Delta 1 seat look like compared to the Polaris seat look like on this airplane, on this flight. These are things that people value. When we connect directly to airlines at the beginning, we did take a hit on the revenue. And now we are no longer taking a hit of the revenue because we have in the platform.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also to develop new stuff because Navan Edge, which I'm kind of really waiting to release, is a completely different way to buy stuff. Basically, you know, we are focusing on the travel vertical, but you will look at this and you'll say, wow, that's actually an interesting way to think about what do I want, right, is the traveler in this case. But generally, what do I want? How do I want it? How my needs are being met?”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know to give you this answer, Elan will give you a really big number here, which we decided not to share yet, but you could see, like if you'd ask me where most of the engineering investment is going to, it's mainly to AI related projects and that's a huge change.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's kind of where it is going. And there are still things there that today you need to configure, right? So you need to connect to your servers. You need to connect to your backend and so on. But who says that that will be the reality in six months or 12 months from now? I will tell you that cognition, interestingly enough, Navan Cognition is doing the configuration for the developer. So we actually remove that part.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing, and this is actually really good for me as a CEO, you can create way more pressure of move faster because you get to say, but why can't you do it faster by vibe coding it, right?”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the power dynamics are changing kind of in engineering between product design, but cycles will get shorter. I'm certain about that.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's a good question. You know, I'm coming from a product background, right? And I keep asking myself, is the product person becoming really the most important person? Because actually knowing the use case is a super, super, super important, probably more important than anytime. And suddenly the product manager gets a tool to come and say, you know, like there is always this tension between a product and engineers, right? The product paper will want to do something. The engineers will tell them that you cannot do that. I wonder if this tension is going away by the product you're just saying. I'm going to do this by myself and prove you wrong. I don't think that we are there yet, but I think we are increasingly getting there. Which again, talking about modes, I think the knowledge mode is going to be very, very high. Like knowing and very important, knowing what the nuances, right? What exactly the users want? What customers wants and so on.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recognition is our own platform. But I think that recently they are kind of combining platforms there. So I'm actually not the right person to tell you which platform you used.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually don't even know. No, I think Elon, it's probably actually our own platform. I'm not certain about it. I can actually ask him.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give them stuff forever and through cognition, you're going to very soon see on our platform book with AI, which will be a completely kind of different experience. But I gave the team a challenge, and actually Elan, my co-founder, obviously, took it first and did it over the weekend to VibeCode our expense product. And it took him six hours to do that. So Ilan over the weekend completely wiped code our expense product. There is nothing there. Like there is a big fintech component very similar to travel. You know, how do you swipe a credit card and everything is magical? How do you report on the transaction and so on? But the actual app, super easy to vibe code. And you think about like we kind of briefly talked about the ELP earlier. You think that all of these integrations are very, very hard to some net suite or whatever, how to”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Area that they actually think it's almost impossible to disrupt us is the travel side. To create the infrastructure that we've created to bring the content into the platform. The plumbing there, I don't think that people fully understand the plumbing that you need to create and how deep it is to buy an airline ticket in a location, to then change the ticket, to then apply unused credits. It is extremely fragmented space. You need to be licensed everywhere in the world, which means that you need to be incorporated in the world. So you are running this online platform. But on the other side, you are connected to an infrastructure that we created in the last 10 years and we are still creating it to connect to everything, to have the ability to change everything. So that's really a huge, huge mode, right? So when it comes to travel, I'm more seeing the opportunity to sell better, to service our customers better.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good on taking them into consideration and kind of completely changing the way that people are thinking about travel. By the way, that's why I think we're going to win. The reason that I think that we're going to win, we are almost in the middle between, I would say, companies that already like the way that they perceive risk and we cannot do anything is very much there. We are also not a startup. We are in the middle and we're going to do the right thing for our customers. That's kind of what drives us.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the way that we look at this, we have these concepts of models supervising other models, and it's for different tasks and for different tasks you need different things. And our point of view, you know, when you think about PII, when you think about security, we have an extremely, extremely strong CISO person in the company. And he is on one side very good on telling us what not to do and what are the risks. And on the other side finding the right solutions. And it's important. That's why I've said it's actually hard to create software generally in the enterprise, but with new technology to lead into the enterprise, there are so many things that you need to take into consideration. But a regulation is one of them. Travel and fintech is regulated and it's very much licensed driven all over the world. So all of these things we are really”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of commoditized infrastructure, I need to create a development platform here, which is kind of in a way similar to what Microsoft did in the 90s. So I think right now you kind of see the lead coming from Anthropic, but God knows, like everybody have a lot of ambitions and are kind of pretty good companies.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a topic, it's interesting. We've seen our agentic platform, cognition, plays between models based on who will give you the best answer. And actually we saw movement much more to Google recently. A lot of the transactions with Edge, which we didn't release yet, but we have it internally, are actually with Google. It's kind of our own model plus Google coming together giving you the right answer, but it changes a lot all the time and Tropic are an amazing, amazing player. And I also think that what they are doing in the development infrastructure, that's actually a massive, massive change that make me, by the way, completely rethinking how our engineering even operates and so on. I think that all of these companies are super smart, super aggressive, but you can see them going from the very low and the”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you why I'm actually happy that I'm not an investor all the time. I'm a founder. I actually don't have a clue. If you are an investor, how you even choose, you know, between all of these LLMs until you're just spreading around and investing in all of them, but it's kind of hard.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm an optimistic. Some people think differently. I think the opportunity is huge. I think if we'll move from the LLM infrastructure discussion, which I think people are obsessed there, which I actually don't think it's an important discussion, it's also a very commoditized kind of thing. And you'll go up to the what people are getting, to our people getting benefits. I think people will start to get a lot of benefits. I say it with Navan. I think in the corporate world, we are probably one of the few that are generating real value to companies and users using AI. The opportunity is huge.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very hard if you sat in 2000 and try to understand e commerce and looked at Amazon and ask yourself, is that some one-off with the bookstore or is that going to change the way that we buy stuff? I don't think a lot of people, I think maybe Bezos knew, maybe some employees in Amazon knew, but I don't think that a lot of people sat there and knew, hey, people will buy stuff, including servers in the data center, AWS, completely differently than the way that they are doing it today. So people are trying to estimate which jobs are going to get redundant and which jobs are going to be created. It's just impossible to know these things. I think you will need to think through there will be the ups and downs and eventually, again, I'm looking at this more from a consumption perspective, is the experience for all of us going to be better is a walk life going to be better. I think yes, because”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the beginning of a huge revolution that will have it up and downside. We kind of joked about our age, right? I've been around when the browser started to get introduced generally, but then into the enterprise, right? And people moved from a client-server app to browser apps, right? I'm really old.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are using open source models. We've built our entire agentic platform to know where to go to the right API in the Navan platform to change your flight and to give you credits. The complexity level of travel is so high. Via LLMs, like you can book your trip, whatever, or you can, it's a really nice cute demos. Trust me. It's not even remotely close to being there.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is nothing even remotely closed to what is needed when you go to a complex vertical out there, okay? And it's definitely not in the kind of Sierra level, but even if you take it to the level of the APIs, if I'm kind of taking an anthropic and an open AI, it is not even remotely closed to what you need. You cannot have any type of hallucination when I'm changing your flight. I cannot tell you go from gate B32 to C whatever because you have a new flight there and you'll get there and it was hallucination. You cannot do that. You're going to, first of all, lose the customer, but you're going to also get a lawsuit. You cannot support some free upgrades on something that does not exist. And I can go on and on and on. We are using all of the models that I've mentioned, but we are also using our own data.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was 16 minutes one six. You'll think that 16 minutes is something horrible, but try to call any other provider in the space during that time, that airports are shutting down. So this is the power of Navan. This comes from AI. This comes because we are having our own AI destiny with our own platform that actually understands how to support you, not on resetting your password, but how to change a very, very complex trip. And you're going to see us. We are very soon going to release Navan Edge. It's a completely new product. I think it's the biggest or most important release that we've ever released. And you will see how much value a user, a company can get by using Navan Edge. And eventually the market will figure out and we'll actually see who has the lead in AI for travel, AI for frequent travelers.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually don't think it matters. I'll tell you why there was this weekend in New York, right? I was actually in New York in the weekend. Airports were shut down. New York and JFK were completely shut down. So it's not like flight got canceled. The airport was shut down from, I think, Saturday evening all the way through Monday at noon, right? That's the entire eastern part of the US. We've managed to support all of our customers in timely manner. How did we do that? Ava, our AI chatbot, managed to at that time you're talking about the hardest thing ever to support. This is my flight got canceled and the airport was shut down. I need to sleep somewhere. I need a new flight. I'm in panic 55% of the chats were run through Eva. Our call center in the worst time during this event, the wait time.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software that people like to use. I was always calling it out regarding Navan. It is extremely hard to replace Navan. That's why we rarely have children. I'll give you one stat. In the history of Navan, in the history of Navan, we lost six enterprise customers. Five of them are back. Okay, so if the user loves you, if the employees love you, that's the biggest mode that you can have. I think distribution matters. But you can build it. And that's kind of the bow that we have here in Avan.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I think the distribution matters. I think that the most important question to ask is the user that is using me, happy to use me. And if that user is not, and I've never met a salesperson that told me that they like to use Salesforce, and if the user is not, you will get disrupted. To your point, there are a lot of modes there that are related to integration into the enterprise that are related to distribution. But, you know, I worked for HP, for HP software, and it was the same story. Distribution was everything. I was always kind of amazed. I actually learned a lot from it. I was calling it, it's like Walmart to send to sell servers and stuff for data centers. But over time, the disruption will happen. If the people that are using you just don't like using it. And I think that the new type of software that you see out there.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% not. Yeah. I think that the market has, I would say, two observations about us that are incorrect. The first one, it is very hard to compare the Navan business to find a comparable, to compare it to anything else. Because on one side, it is a tech company and we value that we are creating is for travelers and their employers. So it makes it look like a SaaS company. On the other side are a business model is very much consumption. You come to the platform, we only make money when you use us. And the way that our business works, we sign agreements today, we pay commission today. So all of the go-to-market cost is going today. And in the next years to come, you are going to...”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But back then, you know, we didn't know about this thing coming. And I think some kids right now that are building the next Navan, these are the ones that I'm always worried about them. I'm not worried about the ones that you are mentioning.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this conference in Napa, and Sam Altman actually presented ChatGPT before it was released. And I remember I got back to our offices and I called Elan, my co-founder and two other execs, Nina and Michael. And I was telling them, if we will not build our own platform right now, like right now, we are so dead. And this was after seeing one demo four years ago. And I was really hysterical about it. And I was like, well dead. Like I cannot see anybody using like, you know, I think I even talked with you about this notion of software is dead. I actually, I think last time that we've talked, I was calling this out that software is dead. And this was years ago. So I was worried exactly about that, the thing that you don't know. Now, luckily we had enough paranoia to build our own AI platform that is really powering everything in Navan today.”
2026-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From $6.2BN Market Cap to $2.8BN: What Is Not Translating About Navan's Public Story | Are Any Public Company CEOs Actually Happy? | Why Navan Built It's Own Customer Service AI and What it Could Mean For Customer Service AI with Ariel Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source