YouSaid · the spoken record

Ariel Cohen

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60
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2026-02-07
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2026-02-07
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1
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  1. “I never wake up in the morning being worried about a non competitor. I tell you what is the only competitor that I'm worried about. The one that I don't know about, the one that sits like the ones like Navan 10, 11 years ago that are ignorant enough about the problem but are really, really, really good, that will create something, a different point of view of what we are doing that will be very disruptive to us as we are very disruptive to everybody else in this market. And that's something that my paranoia level on that is really. I'll tell you a story of what made Navan and AI story, right? And we are not an AI story at the beginning, but it's actually interesting. We always use the machine learning to prioritize our search results, to optimize saving for companies. This is what's from like 2016. And I think four years ago, three and a half years ago, I 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

  2. “Announcement last year, and I love the Brex, guys. We are partners. We know the founders really well. But I don't think that you want to end your journey in Capital One, right? So I'm basically saying people came and go throughout the years. I think our culture is what matters and that's what will keep us around and that's what will keep us a winner and probably the winner and these mechanics of maybe it's better to be in the private market because nobody will look at how I'm defining revenue or what ghost margins or what contribution margin. I think it doesn't create a good business. We've talked about these things even three, four years ago. So we've been managing to build a good business pretty pretty early. So I don't think it's matter. I think what matters is the culture. Do you have what it takes to see it through? And I think we do.”

    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

  3. “The first thing is, I actually reflected with one of our execs here, our president, Michael, Michael Sindesic, about something really interesting. He was our 10th employee. So we've seen everything with me, almost like a co-founder in the company. We talked about the ones that came and go during the years. Like when we started Navan, there was this company, Upside Travel. We raised $4 million. They raised $200. Same year, okay? Talking about the same Navan like we're going to disrupt corporate travel. The founder was the founder of Priceline. So if you think about somebody that needs to win against us, that's them. Way more finance, the right people, the right connections. I don't even know what a GDS is at that point, right? And they are not around. And then there were so many companies along the years, including in the fintech industry. And you saw 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

  4. “So much mechanics, you have lockups and you have this distribution and you have a discord and that quarter and beat and race and a lot of mechanics. At the end of the day, I think what matters is, and that's what I hope that the investors that invested in the IPO have, it's a long-term view that Navan will take the entire market of 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

  5. “My thinking about Nirvana is much less about some price engineering in a certain day, even if the IPO day is very important. It's more of like, can you take a long-term view of Navan? Do you believe that Navan will take the market, right? And the market in the way that we define it, we define the market very, very differently than everybody else. Like everybody think about it, maybe we are kind of disrupting concurrent AMAX. That's not the way that we define it. We want to service every frequent traveler that is out there. There is the managed side, you know, Amex and Concare. There is the non-managed. Everybody that are doing whatever they want to. It's actually a bigger market. And we think that we have an opportunity and the right to win in both markets. And that's what matters. Now, that by definition makes the point of view that I have a very long point of view. And it starts in two, three years from now because, you know,”

    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

  6. “Dam for that type of segment, it is actually important that you're going to be public, they want the transparency, they want to understand your financials, they want to know that you'll be around. So there is a list of things to be public. Timing, you know, you start, you are on the road, right? And the amount of times that the market has changed while we are going public, we are actually starting a non-deal road shows in April on the same day that the tariffs were announced and the market corrected by I think it's really, really hard. So I think we kind of decided to go for it. We followed through and timing. I think eventually we are running a really good business. So everything will get sorted 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

  7. “There were a lot of reasons there, by the way. I think the first thing is that I am someone that I'm going on a certain trajectory. I'm following through. So the decision of taking a company public that had a lot of reasons. You've called out one, which is basically a capital structure and the way that the balance sheet work post-COVID, but there are other reasons. For example, in the payments business, I think there is huge, huge advantage to be a public company in the way that you are actually raising capital for that part of the business compared to being a private company. I think if you kind of go too long in the payments business on being private, you may end up not where you want to be. So that kind of was definitely a driver. But it's also, you know, we've been starting to take share in the enterprise segment, assigning more and more and more customers. And for”

    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

  8. “You talk with even with your board. That's a part that I like less because I do like to be very open and not to think a lot about what I'm saying. So that's kind of, I think, the fun part, but also the heavy lifting kind of 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

  9. “It's a good question. I'll tell you what I've enjoyed and what I didn't. I definitely enjoy there is something fun on bringing your story and what we've built and almost like summarizing it, you know, when you go to do an IPO, you're bringing this story to completely different new people, right? People that we've never met before, new set of investors, analysts, bankers, a lot of people that actually were not familiar with this story. So it's almost like you need to summarize 10 years in the making into, I don't know, 10 to 15 slides plus a document, you know, the S1. And also there are a lot of lawyers involved in this and bankers and so on, but you do get to tell your story to a bigger audience. And that's the fun part. It also opens you up to a different type of customers because of it. So that's the fun part. There's a lot of, I would say, process related things, things that you need to do. It changes the way that you speak and talk with your employees.”

    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

  10. “Dude, it makes us really old. That's what it actually is the problem with this statement 11 years in this journey and probably at least for me another 20 20 years to go.”

    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