Navan IPOs on Nasdaq: CTO Ilan Twig celebrates with 17 family members and a glass of champagne

Thank you so much. Have a good day. Uh before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concier service. It's a vacation home but better. Our next guest is from Navon.

We have Alan Twig, the CTO and co-founder. [music] Welcome to the show. Get that gong right. Congratulations. Let's ring the gong preemptively. Preemptive hit. Okay, now we can I love it. Now we can have a conversation. Champagne. Cheers. Cheers. Uh, we have We have Happy Dad.

[laughter] Nobody's joined Nobody's joined drinking champagne ever on this show. If you're joining uh drinking champagne, I'm going to have a happy dad from the Neelk boys from uh a really long a really long day. So, that's my last thing before the big party starts. So, well well well congratulations. Amazing.

And you're live uh live from the NASDAQ. How's how's the day? How's the day been? Uh and yeah, may maybe kind of back up a little bit and actually introduce yourself. I think people can probably tell [laughter] what what you're up to, but yeah, sure. No, so my name is Elan Twig. I clearly like champagnes.

I'm the CTO and co-founder co-founder of Navan. Uh Navan is a travel and expense management company. We started more than a decade ago. Wow. Today we IPOed. Super pumped. Congratulations. Was a beautiful day. Yes, exactly. My entire family.

By the way, I think I I broke the record of the number of family members that joined me to the ceremony. Yeah, it's amazing. It's so funny because the last time we were at night Yeah.

The last time we were at an IPO, um it was for Clara Sebastian who's a friend of the show and he for him it was it was just like another day. He was like, "Oh yeah, I didn't even bring my family. I just kind of stopped by, IPO the company, come back.

" But so every founder, every family members executive like processes these things differently. It's always interesting to hear how people treat it. How many roughly like 30 30? So no, it was just for my family. It was 17. 17 deserves the 17 family members at the IPO. Congratulations. Yeah, it's really amazing.

By the way, if I may say one last thing about the guests, so my parents were here, both of them. Sure. My dad turns 90 in two weeks. Wow. And he was here with me on the Yeah. On the stage. He was like happy. That's amazing. I think most of my excitement was watching them totally being so excited. Yeah.

not understanding anything because they don't really speak English, but they kind of got the gist of what's happening and it was super exciting. Yeah, that's uh incredible.

What uh take us back through I mean I'm sure when you when you looking back into like the depths of co which probably it feels a long time ago but you were in a business that was I mean I just imagine you you uh aged more rapidly than maybe Brian [laughter] Johnson would like during that period.

walk us through kind of some of the key moments getting getting to this point. Yeah, maybe I should first tell you that before COVID I had black hair all black. Oh, wow. [laughter] Well, it looks it looks good on you. Looks good on you. You look more like a serious, you know, executive now. Yeah. Yeah.

I can fool people around you that I'm serious. Um Yes. No, you know, you run a company that the business model is you we make money when people use the platform. There was no monthly fees. There was no you don't pay no long lock in. No enterprise contract. No enterprise contract. So and why?

Because both my co-founder Ariel Cohen and I, we had this philosophy that if the company uh generates money on usage, then the company will always be focused on making sure that people would want to use the product because it's a it's a great experience. And it worked well for us for the first five years.

And then when COVID hit, no one was traveling and no one was using our platform. Not because it was an inferior product, it was because there was a virus and no one could travel. And so we found ourselves with the best product out there with zero usage and zero zero revenue.

And it took six weeks from like I don't remember the number maybe 100 million to zero. Six weeks. So then what? Yeah, it was it was a very interesting point in time. But I can tell you that, you know, 5 years later, here I am with a glass of champagne. My parents were here.

We were celebrating the IPO with a company that has way more products, a much more resilient business model, and trust me, this time it's a pandemic proof. So, we're not going to go to zero. We'll go down, but not to zero if it happens again. So, we learn, you know, that's why we have gray hair. Um, battle scars.

And yeah, it's a it's a it was definitely a challenging time, but uh but I think that you know judging by results, I think that it was managed well. Obviously, the entire company, the entire um management team, the board, we were all united around the decisions and here we are.

How are you, we were talking to Brian Chesy at Airbnb last week and uh he was sort of mapping out his vision for the future of travel. this idea that as as we become more online, we also maybe want to become more offline as well and maybe we're we're traveling more as well as spending more time just online.

Uh how do you how do you and how do you internally in the company think about the future of just business travel, pleasure travel, just like the overall travel market, right? So, first I should tell you, you know, I'm the CTO and I love technology. I I mean this is my thing. I really really love technology.

When Chetchup PT came out, I the first thing that I did, I bought like a $30,000 worth of a GPU. That's what I did. No way. [laughter] And and I I built a PC. My co-founder thought that you should fire me. It's like you have a PC under your desk. I said, "Yeah, and I paid for it. You don't don't worry about it.

I paid for it. " [laughter] And and then I started deploying LLMs on top of it. Uncensored LLM. I I dove deep into that. And I really wanted to know the nature of these creatures, how they behave. Because if I were to deploy anything to production based on these creatures, I call them.

I need to know who they are, how they behave. Will they lie? For example, do they know what a lie is? Will they use it? Oh, they lie. Yeah, but forgetations. They will also lie for other reasons intentionally intentionally like they they would not want to lose for example and they would lie in order not to lose.

er lots of discoveries but uh ultimately it led us to once we really understand the technology how to deploy this thing to production and let it run completely unsupervised and do stuff for us and and I think the important thing is completely unsupervised the first thing that we've done is we deploy the Ava Ava is our virtual travel agent and she communicates with travelers as things happen when they need to book something or there's disruptions and they need to push push their travel by one day, cancel this leg, argue about the refund, etc.

, etc. And she would do all all of these things for them. And it is all based on um an internal framework that we built. We call it navan cognition. Uh I really like the name cognition. I didn't invent it. It was a professor from Colombia that we work with. And why cognition?

Because it turns LLM into a highly functioning cognitive system. So Ava today is completely unsupervised. She manages thousands of chats every day with a very very high customer satisfaction that matches the humans level and she offsets more than 50% of the incoming chats. She does not deflect, she solves.

So I think our our approach to travel is we we look for ways to leverage technology to make travel easier so that people can focus on being there rather than getting there.

getting there is is is just a noise that you have to it's you know it's a penalty that you have to pay but the focus for corporate travel is to be there and to be fully there and there's people outside trying to make me laugh from outside laughing so [laughter] and I I'm a little bit well I'll try I just have one one suggest one suggestion I think if make an agent one of your you know your your baby creature and call it Twiggy please nickname Microsoft has Clippy Non needs Twiggy.

You already went through one. You went through a rebrand. You were Trip Actions. Now you're Non. I want you to rename Ava to Twiggy. I think it's [laughter] I'll do my best here. I'm going to dream for that. Really. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you so much for coming on the show on such a big day. Congratulations.

Such a such a monumental moment. Uh and and please extend our congratulations to the entire family, all 17. All 17 and the whole team. Uh, it's a beautiful moment and just uh I hope you have an IPO. I hope you have a great rest of the day, great rest of your week. Thank you so much. We'll talk. I'm gonna party tonight.

Thank you so much. [laughter] Thank you. You guys love your podcast. Love it. [laughter] What a what a legend. What a legend.