My Company's Revenue Dropped to $0 — and We Thrived | TripActions CEO Ariel Cohen

Please welcome CEO at trip actions, ariel cohen. Okay, hi everybody. I'm really happy to be here face to face. I'm sure that you heard these comments from everybody. But it's fun, it's fun to be here together. And it's pretty much, you know, what repactions is all about. It's about bringing people together and meeting. So I'm excited to be here. And you can see on this headline, it's kind of, you know, I know that a lot of people here are startup people and it's kind of scary, right? You go up with your revenue and suddenly in one day you are losing all of it, right? So think about that. And this is kind of the story that I'm planning to share with you today. So, you know, I thought of like trying to give you some of our experience and almost like a recipe to how to deal with a crisis. And of course crisis are different and this crisis is extremely unique, right? So for us, on one day, giving you some context, we are for five years, four and a half years, we are going like this, right? So every week we are going at a 5 to 10% growth rate on a weekly basis for quite some time. And over one night we lost all of our revenue, all of our usage. That was March 2020. So what do you do now? And I think that there is something that is super, super important to always have not related to crisis, but I think that it's the only way that will help you while you are dealing with a crisis. And it's really having a well defined vision and mission that this is super, super, super critical and the reason that it's important when everything goes down, you'll need to convince a lot of people to continue to being there with you, your customers, your employees, your investors. You will really need to convince them to stick around. And without a proper vision and mission, it will be very hard to do that. Then another important thing, and I only recently realized that, is to define the crisis, right? Crisis is all different. This was actually our third big crisis as a company. It's by far was our biggest one. But crisis tends to be different and to understand, hey, this is a pandemic, this is not a financial crisis, and how long will it take Was super important. So, you know, people that were part of the 01 crisis needed to deal with the fact that they couldn't raise money. We actually knew that that's not a financial crisis which impacted our activities and our actions. There is another important thing. We kind of realized that if it's a Pandemic. Let's try to understand what pandemic means and how long does it take, and I'll talk more about that. And then just use the opportunity, right? Use the opportunity and think, what does it mean for you? And how can you actually come out of this stronger? And that's just to give you an idea. Today, our revenue is 30% higher than what we had in March 2020. So just pre Covid. And we are today growing every week at a 10% rate. Okay. So you can understand how much. Thank you. So you understand how much. We kind of went nicely through that. And the last thing, don't have a plan B. I'm always like, that's something your investors, everybody will want you to have a plan B. Don't have a plan B. It's very hard to plan for a crisis. If you could plan for a crisis, you would not have the crisis. Right. So just don't have a plan B. Have an extremely strong team that can go with you through the crisis. So I've mentioned vision and leading to the vision. So what's our vision at Trip Actions? So for us, it's almost the opposite of everything that was going on in Covid. It is about meeting face to face. It's bringing people together, together. And we are trying to do it in the most efficient way possible and creating really an amazing experience for everybody using Trip Actions. And something that was important for us for day one is to lean on talent to make sure that we have the best people around to support our customers, to build our product. And that's super, super helpful when you're facing with challenges. And eventually, we are trying to build the biggest, the strongest, the best travel platform on the planet. That's what we are trying to do. We are trying to do it globally and having all of the ingredients there. Business travel, corporate payments, expense management, personal trips for our customers, and so on. So it's a massive platform play that we've been building for quite some time. So Covid. So as I was saying, we were doing this going really, really fast. And I remember kind of end of February, beginning of March, I was actually in Seattle. I was flying there for a business trip, and an extremely important meeting there got canceled because of COVID So I'm kind of. I actually never. I was actually in the airport, never left the airport, came from sfo, landed, realized that the meeting got canceled, turned around and. And got back to, you know, to San Francisco and on that airplane. I remember that I knew we needed a completely different plan. Like all of our plans around growth hiring. Our biggest challenges up until a minute ago were completely irrelevant. We need a completely different plan, and we need to act fast. And this is before we saw the revenue going down to nothing. This was just the, hey, we are selling travel. We are a travel company. People are not going to travel. We. Right. We need a completely different plan. So we had kind of, I would say, a crazy two weeks of eventually looking at this and actually looking at this graph. And this graph is real. Like, this is like over less than a week, our entire revenue, our entire usage of the platform going down to zero. So it's definitely scary, right? But you definitely need to think, okay, what does it mean for you? What do you do next? Right? And I was talking about defining the crisis, and the first thing that we did was actually to lean into the immediate mission. So we had customers, we had users, we started to play with. What if. So what if all of travel is getting canceled again? That's before it was happening. So what if you will not be able to get back home? Like, our customers will not be able to get home. What happens then? What if everybody will need to work from home? Right? So everybody needs to work from home. It means that our global call center needs to be mobilized to work from home. But what if it happens on the same time? So at the same time, we need to mobilize our entire call center. You're talking about hundreds of people globally, and then they need to support a lot of travelers that will need to get back home. And I remember that Wednesday, I, up until today, remember the day when the US Announced that they are shutting down the borders, and there were two days to get back home, right? So you had companies, customers, users calling you frantically, basically telling you, I need to get back home. So you can see this tweet that's from back then. And this is at the end of this week. I remember that the entire team was exhausted, like, basically after bringing everybody back home. But it was also a proud moment, right? It was a moment that we knew that we, you know, we took care of our customers. And I think at that point, there was, okay, so what's now? Okay, we kind of stabilized it a little bit. So what's now? And you cannot have this magical thinking. All of you were in there in Covid, and everybody experienced it differently. But I know that a lot of people thought, you know, maybe in June, the summer is coming, and maybe in June everything will be great, people will get back to travel. And of course, if that was our thinking, our Entire execution, our entire behavior would be different, right? So it was really important not to have this magical thinking, you know, everything will be okay in three months and kind of look back into history. And when you look at pandemics, right, and you seek for advice, you ask experts, it usually lasts for at least two years and, and it usually have three waves. So we actually knew that even if in June, July, we'll see the cases going down and people coming back to travel a little bit, we actually knew that it doesn't mean anything from our execution perspective. And that was super important because thinking about it as a two year thing impacted our entire thinking about innovation. Raising more money. We raised more money in May 2020. How many people do we want to employ? How do we go to market? And so on. So leaning into the mission. So the first question that we ask, if we can innovate what our customers needs from us. And we always had this capability of showing our customers where their employees are and to have the ability to communicate with them. But then we said, what if we can correlate this to the COVID information, to the CDC data, to other information sources? So we've created this dashboard and then capabilities for our customers that allow them to come and say, hey, it's the middle of March. I see that cases are going like this in Italy and I have four travelers that are planning to travel there. So I can cancel their trip right now. I can also completely take it out of policy. This thing became irrelevant two, three months down the road because nobody was traveling. But today, that's how customers are managing their travel. They're looking at reproduction factors through our system. They're looking at Covid regulation, right? I'm flying to the uk. Do I need to quarantine or not? Right? All of these things are super important today. And these are things that we actually developed a year and a half ago. So very, very important right now for companies that are managing travel. But you also need to have some hope, right? And we needed, I know that I personally needed to have some hope. I know that our employees needed it and our customers, users, just everybody, you guys. So we came up with this pass the airplane idea. This was kind of towards the end of March where everybody were in their houses and quarantining. And we basically said, what if we can build these airplanes? And like just having people kind of through social media, kind of moving it from one person to the other, and that was amazing. And like people got engaged with that. You could see it all over Twitter. It got 12 million kind of followers. It was really an amazing campaign. But for us, for our team, it was not even a campaign. It was kind of, let's get this going, like, let's do something. Let's have some progress here. So again, that's something that, looking back, I'm super, super proud of this thing. It's not business related. It was not related to our call center or money situation or laying off employees. It was just, let's have a little bit of hope here and then the opportunity. So sadly, in March, we also let go of 25% of our employees. Right? So that was a massive moment for us. But then what do you do next, right? If you just ran this massive layoff, do you have a future? Do you want to maybe hibernate the company? Maybe take it to 20, 30 employees, just develop technology and come back when Covid is done? Right? That was part of the discussion that we have. That was part of the possibilities. But I remember that I actually, I knew a lot about Amazon and then Netflix in 01. And back then, you know, over like few months, they, you know, you look at Amazon, their share price back then went down to seven bucks. Their cash situation, they only had six months of cash in 01. That's Amazon, right? And this is where they lean into innovation. You know, AWS. I'm sure that probably 90% of the people here are using AWS. This is when they lean into AWS, to Amazon prime, to Kindle. So I remember that I was talking both with our team and our investors and I was saying, you know what, this is our Amazon moment. This is when we can accelerate our market penetration. And we knew something important post Covid. It will be very helpful companies to manage travel, to manage expenses in the way that they used to do that. Right. If you look at the normal system out there, you're usually ending up calling a travel agent and with a lot of regulation with safety implications. You cannot do it like that. Right? So we actually knew that we have an opportunity. So we started to go upmarket, we started to go globally. This is in April 2020. We've learned how to sell Trip actions right now. But we also introduced a lot of new products. So Liquid was the first one. We actually released Liquid at the end of February 2020, so just before COVID So now we still don't have traction there. Should we put it on pause and not continuing with that, or should we double down on Liquid? And we said, let's double down, but let's take it all the way to completely to Challenge the idea of managing expenses to completely coming and saying, hey, you swipe your credit card, whether you're in a trip, whether you're your home, buying some furniture, you swipe your credit card. And that's the last thing that is happening in the organization around expense management. And obviously when travel comes back, customers are thinking about it as a T and E. So obviously you get the attachment. So we actually doubled down on Liquid. We've released the no expense idea in September last year. Liquid today has more than 400 customers and it is growing at the 40% rate every month. Right. So that's how much Liquid is penetrating the market right now. And we've just launched it in, in emea. Right. So very important part of our strategy then, Team travel. There was the question, so what happens after Covid? Right? So people will come back to the offices, will not come back to the offices, how people will behave afterwards. And we thought that remote work introduced an opportunity. We actually thought that if a lot of people are working remotely, if some are doing hybrid teams meetings, like off sites, the stuff that we are doing here will become more important, probably bigger than before COVID So we've introduced Team Travel, right? And Team Travel is how you can book your entire trip for an entire team in the most efficient way. And then Lemonade, obviously personal trips came back way faster than business trips. So for us, we said we have this install base, we have this amazing product, we know that people like it, so can we bring it to our users, to people that used to use us for business travel? Can we offer them access to Lemonade? And today you come to our platform only if you're a trip actions customer, but and you get amazing prices that you can actually not see outside. You get all of the inventories that are out there in one platform and support from one vendor, which is us. So Lemonade is actually going faster than Liquid. It's going at a 50% rate month over month right now. And lastly, we recently bought acquired Ridden Makai, which is the leading VIP white gloves travel agency actually on the planet. And we thought if we can connect that level of service that is really designed for the C level, for executive assistance to our technology, we are basically getting the best solution that that is out there. So for sea levels that are using us, there is a slightly different ui. It's very high end, different price point. But on one side they're using three the technology, the booking tool, all of the back office. On the other side they're getting agents, travel agents that know how to Service you in kind of a white glove way. So this was a massive acquisition for us. We paid $260 million for it, and we did it as Covid was going, right? So think about how much we believed the traveler will come back. And let's see how our belief is going. So this is actually from a week ago, and you can see that from a travel usage perspective. And this is without ridden mackay, we are pretty much in the same numbers that we were in March or February 2020. So we basically got back to the same place. We are making more money today because all of the things that I've mentioned earlier, so that's why our revenue is way higher. But even these numbers, yesterday was our best day in terms of bookings, credit cards, revenue in the history of the company. That was yesterday. And usually Mondays are very strong. So that definitely requires this. So, you know, we came into Covid with one product, business travel. And we are coming out of COVID with business travel, with personal trips, with white glove service, corporate payments, spend management and team travel. So that was the decision that we made back then. That was, okay, we have a problem, we can raise money, right? So we knew that, let's double down, right? That was the decision back then. And that's what we've been doing. And you can also see it from a customer's perspective. So we went into Covid with around $2.1 billion of travel budget under management. So this is how much corporations were spending to our platform today. We have more than 5 billion in the platform. You know, in the last six months, we added customers like Heineken, Netflix, AECOM, Primark, right? So very much big enterprises globally, and all of them are using us right now for travel as well. So people are definitely getting back to travel and definitely massive growth, probably in the worst time ever to grow a travel company. So this is kind of a good summary of the year, right? We started 2020 extremely strong, launched in EMEA, launched liquid Covid, happened, needed to run layoffs immediately, raised money to make sure that we have enough money to run through these two years, went through this entire process, ending the year ending 2020, we're doing an up round, getting to $5 billion valuation at the year of COVID And that kind of tells you that when people are getting actually into the data, into the numbers, this thing makes a lot of sense for them. So when we are saying, hey, we are 30% stronger than where we are, this is not the business travel industry. This is us growing, taking share, and now we are way Stronger than when we were at the beginning of the year. So key takeaways, I think really the most important thing, have a clear vision. Have a clear vision for your company. You can update it from time to time, you can update your mission, you can check is this thing still relevant? The amount of time that in the last two years I was telling people, in board meetings, in employees, all hands, hey guys, we are a travel company. The amount of time that I needed to say that was probably endless. And this was important, right? This what kept everybody going with the same mission. Not trying to imagine. Maybe we've done maybe with liquid. It was a pivot. It was not a pivot. This, this was our second product relevant for tne, right? And having one clear vision really makes sure that nobody is starting to imagine maybe we're going there, maybe we'll go there and so on. Define the crisis. More than defining the crisis, act quickly. We were probably the first Silicon Valley company and one of the first ones in the US to run layoffs. And of course back then everybody on the press were after us, right? But you need to do your thing, you need to manage your company, your business, your vision, right? So definitely define your own thing, believe in it and just do it Again, leaning into the mission, once you are doing stuff like that, you really need to again convince everybody and then finding the opportunities. Of course it's a cliche, everybody are mentioning it, but using the crisis and really finding the opportunities there is super, super important. The last thing that I will say in this context, I'm sure that all of you, I'm talking about a Covid crisis, so why would you care? But at least in the six years of trip actions, as I said earlier, we had three crises. I think that companies, startups will always have a crisis, right? And of course these crisis will be different, but I actually think that the same ingredients are there if you want to run through this successfully. So I would say that's kind of my, maybe my takeaway. I hope that like sharing it with you was helpful and thank you for coming and listening. Sa.