00:08:38 · Michael Sindicich
[00:08:38] S1: I would say, first of all, I'm not that good at chess. This was more of like an after school program for little kids. But a really funny story. So six months into working at Navan, I walked by Ariel's desk. Ariel's the CEO and founder. And I look at a picture on his desk and I say like, Is that Sivan? And he was like, How the fuck do you know my son's name? And I was like, I taught him chess at Juana Briones. Yeah. So he was in kindergarten at the time. So imagine the students I'm teaching are more like, you know, okay, it's an after school program. Parents are working. Let's like corral everyone, try to teach them how to play chess, also a little bit of daycare. But then all the way up to, you know, sixth grade or so, those chess players can actually get very competitive. I just think the most important thing about chess is one, having a strategy for the opening, but then two, kind of understanding every single move that your opponent can, come back with and then how does that change the game of the future. And it's a lot of if thens. Right? So... And I think that that's actually, I find it pretty helpful in the company and as we're thinking about strategy and growing the company, which is like, if someone does this, then we'll do that. If we do that, then we unlock this. If we don't do this, then this is the ramification of it. And to me, chess is one big, like, if then kind of statement of, like, how can you position yourself in the best way so that your opponent basically has less opportunities of if thens, and you have more opportunities of if thens.
00:10:06 · Miguel Armaza
[00:10:06] S0: So over the last decade or so, what are the roles you've had at Navan? Yeah.
00:10:12 · Michael Sindicich
[00:10:12] S1: It's a good question. I started out as the first salesperson at the company. And so that was basically like, okay, we went and built something. Now, Michael, go and sell it. Go figure out how to bring it to the market. That was kind of the... By the way, it's kind of how I still see my role is basically bringing what we're building to market and at the same time taking what the market's asking and taking it back to the teams to figure out how we can build it in our way. That was the beginning was for a salesperson. I would go around, build infrastructure, figure out the technologies we should use, how to set up the go to market, do all the calling, the emailing, etcetera. Then ended up building out the SDR team and then the sales team. I was managing the sales team for a bit. And then every time I would kind of take the go to market to the next place. So, like, at first we were selling small companies, then I went to go lead the mid market. After that, then that was scaling. I went to go lead enterprise. So then I was kind of taking the company to larger and larger businesses. And then we saw this, as I was doing enterprise, we saw this huge, huge opportunity around Fintech, actually. So I guess that's relevant for the conversation today. But what would happen is, in the beginning, we were selling a travel booking tool and we were selling a travel agency. And so if you're familiar with larger companies or legacy setups, you'll typically have your travel, you book it on Concur, and then maybe you work with an Amex, GBT, or a Carlson, or a BCD as the agency. We brought those two things together because we figured, okay, can have the best technology, but unless we own the support experience as well, it's never gonna be perfectly seamless. So we built this entire travel agency, and that means getting licenses and, you know, being able to have agreements with all the airlines and different points of sales and all this stuff around the world. But as we went to go sell to enterprises, one, people were asking us from the beginning, when are you gonna build expense management? So people see travel and expense really tied together. But actually, avenue into the Fintech angle was a different story. Big companies that were using us would put what's called a ghost card on file in the product.
00:12:27 · Michael Sindicich
And so what'll happen is when someone goes to check out for a flight, let's say, you use the corporate card that's in the system to pay for that, is one option. And then what happens is the finance team, the accounting team, has a hell of a time trying to reconcile every single booking with every single transaction on the credit card, and you play this game of match at the end of the month, which wastes a lot of time, but you're basically reconciling, and it's nice of you to do because you're not pushing it onto the employees where the employees then do all the reconciliation in the form of an expense report. And so we saw that happening. If you don't have a card, then employees are busy, you know, chasing receipts and trying to get them and reconciling themselves. If they bought a seat upgrade or if they changed their flight or if they went to the hotel and then collect the folio and then itemize it, and it's a really, really cumbersome process. And we saw the Stripes, Adyen, Marqeta, these guys coming out. And we said, actually, what if we could fully automate travel payments? And so what that would mean is us actually connecting into a modern kind of program manager, connecting to a network. In our case, it was Visa. And we started with Stripe, early days. And we could actually issue, underwrite the customer, give give kind of a short term, like, deferred debit or credit loan, and essentially underwrite the customer. And anytime someone, a traveler goes to book something in our system, we can generate a new 16 digit virtual card. Even though it might say, you know, company payment method, it generates a new card and it perfectly reconciles in real time. It is only applicable to that merchant, so there's no fraud. It cancels, you know, after the trip ends, and it basically follows along that journey. So if on the credit card statement it says price line $13.67, I know that I can match that to Michael's SKO Marriott Hotel. And that was a beautiful solution. I never saw something that we just launched and every company was like, oh my god, I need this. I want this. I wanna use it. Like, on day one when we launched it, we had very big enterprises already signing up for the solution. Then by the way, a week after we launched it, the pandemic hit. And so the pandemic, all of our revenue went to zero.
00:14:43 · Michael Sindicich
We had just launched this new payment thing And we said, okay, now is probably the right time to go into expense management, into creating purchase cards, like being more of a spend management platform as teams were really distributed. And so to answer your question in the beginning, like went from sales leader there to eventually the CEO of the payments and expense business. And that was cool. That was like my first time from leading salespeople and, you know, having a number to actually leading like product design, engineering, operations, legal, HR, you know, all of the things that you would do. And we really treated it as a startup within the startup, as its own business. Like there was a time where we weren't going to the company all hands. We had our own all hands and things like that. And I think it was so important for us because if we were to build this Fintech, you know, new products and treat it as, hey, here's a new business that is, you know, we're leading with, you know, a random, like, just a project on a PM's team with a few engineers, it never would have become like the big business that it is today. Definitely created a lot of headaches, right? We had multiple sales teams, different products, competing resources, like lots of duplication across the company. But think it was very big and smart investment decisions to actually build something that can scale to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and really a good product that then we can sell. And after that journey, about a year and a half ago, both businesses were scaling really nicely. And what Ariel asked me to do is to be the president of the company, which is an ambiguous title, but essentially it means is leading everything go to market. And so what I did was combined all the sales teams, combined the rev ops teams. We have a marketing CMO as well, and that's kind of combining the messaging around travel expense and payments and meetings and events and VIP and a lot of the different businesses that we've built internally. And and then corp dev and M and A and and partnerships and field operations. So that's kind of what I oversee now. And it's, you know, one big, really aggressive, you know, kind of scaling go to market motion.
00:16:54 · Miguel Armaza
[00:16:54] S0: When revenue goes to zero in March 2020, was there a point where you doubted that you would actually make it as a company?