Ilan Twig - Co-Founder & CTO at TripActions

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ilan Twig, the co-founder and CTO at TripActions. And we discussed the challenge in scaling culture during hypergrowth, how he uses methods from the Israeli Air Force to strengthen his team, and why those that can scale themselves earn a seat at the table. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Alright, hey buddy.

(Ilan Twig at 00:00:41) Hey, how's it going Joel?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Fantastic. Oh, look at that green background, it's beautiful.

(Ilan Twig at 00:00:47) It was not even planned, it was completely by accident.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) I love it. Are you in your office?

(Ilan Twig at 00:00:53) Yes, it's actually a really exciting week for us because it's the first time that we are doing this globally off-site. So we actually flew in people, like 550 employees from all over the world, to join us here in Palo Alto. And it's a super exciting event. It's going to start tomorrow, but people already started to flood the place.

(Ilan Twig at 00:01:14) And we built huge tents outside in the parking lot, and it's like a huge operation. Very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) And that must have been pretty complicated to get everybody there. You don't know any good trip companies, do you, before they travel?

(Ilan Twig at 00:01:28) So yes, at least that we got some advantage on this one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) Did you actually use your platform to get your people there?

(Ilan Twig at 00:01:35) Of course, of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) Yeah.

(Ilan Twig at 00:01:38) Yeah, we actually also have a team that is dedicated for meetings and events, and it's to take care of these things where you need to fly 50 people, 200 people, or even 1,500, block places, tails, and take care of these events. So we actually used that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) Now is that becoming more popular? Because a lot of companies are remote and then they get together for their annual events.

(Ilan Twig at 00:02:02) Yeah, it's becoming really popular. You know, WeWork is a customer and they have huge events twice a year with thousands of people flying all over the world, and it's amazing. I mean, you know, face-to-face is a powerful thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) So what's the event going to be like? What are you doing at the event?

(Ilan Twig at 00:02:22) So we have, let's see, we have Wednesday and Thursday. We actually have a full agenda.

(Ilan Twig at 00:02:30) The whole goal of this event was just so that we get to know each other because, we are 800 employees in the company, and there is probably 150 that have been here for about a year. So the rest are pretty new, and the pace of hiring is accelerating. So really, the majority of the employees joined in the last six months or less. So we don't know, and no one knows anyone. So the goal is to really make it a social event, spend time together.

(Ilan Twig at 00:03:04) We actually branded the event, we call it Reconnect. And we're going to have a combination of fun events where we speak into groups and we interact together, and there are some competitions. And so between these kinds of things, as well as, you know, we're going to have a fireside chat with a really close friend of ours. We're going to talk to him in front of everybody.

(Ilan Twig at 00:03:35) We built huge tents outside in the parking lot. Maybe I can show you later, but it's huge. You can host a thousand people in one place. It's insane.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:47) I'll send you my number. You can text me after the show.

(Ilan Twig at 00:03:50) I'll do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:50) I'll do that, yeah. I'm really curious.

(Ilan Twig at 00:03:52) Yeah, yeah. Very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:54) So you have all your people there, you're getting to know each other, you're reconnecting. Where are you growing a lot? Are you going in engineering across the board?

(Ilan Twig at 00:04:03) It's pretty much across the board. We are at this point, we are onboarding I would say 50 to 70 new employees every month. That's the pace, and it's growing. And it's globally and across many departments. Just in engineering, I'm going to grow the team from, we started the year with around 40 to 150 by the end of the year, globally across three different locations.

(Ilan Twig at 00:04:32) And then next year, we'll probably get to I don't know, three to 400. You know, that's kind of what's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) How are you dealing with that massive influx? What type of problems do you experience?

(Ilan Twig at 00:04:47) So I can tell you, think about it. The organization, let's say a year ago, we were 150 employees. We didn't hire much. And then before you know it, you know, there's like 20 people showing up and you're standing there clueless. Okay, now what?

(Ilan Twig at 00:05:05) It used to be, hey Joe, you work with this guy, and I work with that guy, and then, oh, there's another one. Who are you? Okay, cool. So let me work with you as well. And then you need to, before you even know it, you need to build a machine. And so in the engineering at least, it started just like four months ago that we realized how fast this thing is and how we're not prepared. And it cannot continue to be like this ongoing improvisation kind of approach.

(Ilan Twig at 00:05:39) And now we have a machine. And I think this machine can handle, let's say 15 a month, but it will break when it comes to 30, 40. But it's like an ever-changing process. We don't have a status quo. I think that's the problem here.

(Ilan Twig at 00:05:59) There's no status quo. If you think you have a status quo, you're behind. That's kind of your reality. So it's a red flag. It's like, uh-oh, I'm about to fail.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) Did you build a people ops team to help onboard and get these people in?

(Ilan Twig at 00:06:14) Yeah, so we actually, so first, one of the engineers that have been with us from the beginning, he really wanted to be more of a project manager, and his skills are really, really good for that. So he became a technical project manager. His first assignment was, figure onboarding, figure it out. So he was the owner, and he put a process together where it started with us, the engineers, coming up with topics that we think that all new hires have to go through.

(Ilan Twig at 00:06:46) So, you know, one thing led to another, we now have, good morning Christine. We have now, we call it the TripActions Engineering University. It's a full day. We have different speakers, we have some assignments, and what we do, we do it once a month, and it's for all new hires around engineering globally.

(Ilan Twig at 00:07:17) So they all come to Palo Alto to go through this day. We pair it with the two other days of TripActions. So it's like a three-days university where you learn about TripActions, you get onboarded to the systems, then you have all the engineering stuff, the engineering systems, the GitHub, the Jira, and all of these things, how we work, walking through the codebase, having a lot of engineers walking you, talking to you about how we build software here, processes, overview of the code. So yeah, people from HR, IT, engineering are involved in this process.

(Ilan Twig at 00:07:52) It's a machine. It's really became a machine. And I can tell you that it will break in two months, three months. It will break and we will need to reinvent it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:00) Yeah, well that's how it goes. Because the next thing that's going to happen is as you get these teams working solid on the product and they get into that groove and they've been there for a year or so, they're going to start wondering, well, where's my career trajectory and how does that work? And they're going to ask those questions and then you're going to be like, oh, we've got to answer those. How do we keep people around by showing them a future?

(Ilan Twig at 00:08:20) Exactly. Yeah, so it's a good thing and a bad thing, but I guess it's a good thing. It's, there is no status quo. This is the reality.

(Ilan Twig at 00:08:30) There's, by the way, there's a new problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) Yeah.

(Ilan Twig at 00:08:33) Yeah, there's new problems every day. Dealing with scale is very, very challenging. And dealing with a constant scale, we've been experiencing this scale for three years now.

(Ilan Twig at 00:08:47) So the business is growing really, really fast, and the company is growing really fast. And yeah, you know, 50 to 70 new hires a month is a lot. It puts a ton of stress on a really young organization. We are four years old, that's it. It puts a lot of stress on all functions across the board, on all managers, on all levels, because you hire a person to be of a certain level, and before you know it they are struggling because it's a stretch. And then at some point, you know, it just doesn't work anymore, and then you need to hire someone for the level above. I just hired just now a VP of Engineering and two Directors of Engineering.

(Ilan Twig at 00:09:34) The first time that I'm introducing hierarchy in the organization, and they just joined last Monday. And the VP of Engineering that I hired managed groups of 500 engineers in the past. And obviously right now, when I started the process with him, we were 40. And he was like, why do I need to even talk to him? So you need to, it's difficult. Open your mind, create some space for imagination, and bear with me. Let me describe to you what's happening here. I know it's difficult to imagine it. And then, you know, it took me six months to find someone and took me three months to close the process with this guy. He's super fired up. He joined just his first few days, going through a lot of learnings, and now we are close to a hundred.

(Ilan Twig at 00:10:23) And I actually think we will be more than 150 by the end of the year, much faster than what I even described to him. By the end of next year we will get to his capacity. So, you know, it's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:35) It is. No, we just did the same thing. We just found somebody that took a company from a million to 40 million, right? Because we're at around the million mark.

(Ilan Twig at 00:10:43) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:44) And we convinced them, like, come over here and do it again. You know, right? You just did it. It took you three years to do it. Come do it with us. And he's all about it. You know, we, it took like three or four months of building the relationship, you know, letting them see exactly what they're doing, get, feel good about it. But once they got into it, and now they're telling me why it's going to be so great, and I'm like, here we go.

(Ilan Twig at 00:11:07) Exactly. Here we go. Now we go, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) It's the same thing.

(Ilan Twig at 00:11:10) It's the same thing. But it does require some leap of faith because they come here and they don't see a big organization, and you don't even see managers. Like, what do you expect me to do? And I'm telling them, you know, I hire you for 18 months from today, and it's going to get really quickly. So yeah.

(Ilan Twig at 00:11:30) And in fact, it's a good opportunity to get to know the team, get to know the code if you want to, get to know, get your hands dirty if you want to. And normally, you don't have this opportunity. So now as we grow into your capacity, take the time, meet everyone one-on-ones, you know, join meetings, educate yourself. So I actually think that there is some merits in this chaotic, insane environment. There is some merits of hiring for the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:01) Yeah. Well, allows people to raise their level of influence and learn how to become valuable to the organization. And there's so much opportunity for individual ownership and for them to just come in there and really get to exercise without all the red tape, and then the best people will rise up, right?

(Ilan Twig at 00:12:16) Exactly. That's how we, that's how we really value that. And that's why we don't really, you know, it's the first time that I'm introducing some notion of hierarchy, like director and VP. But the way it works here, it's really, it's all about the essence. And so we, you know, people that we have, really young, you know, our executive staff, we have maybe 20 people around the room, maybe 15 to 20 in the executive staff. Half of them are less than 30 years old.

(Ilan Twig at 00:12:45) It's just those early comers that managed to scale themselves up. Now will that change? Could be. Maybe even probably. But say right now, this is where we are, and those that managed to scale themselves up are sitting there around the table.

(Ilan Twig at 00:12:58) No one cares that they are young or old or this or that. It's just about the essence. If they have smart things to say and contribute critical thinking, the ability to scale themselves, to scale themselves up and to reinvent themselves, you know, the door is open. The sky's the limit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:16) I love it. I love that energy too. We have the benefit of being around that because a lot of the companies that work with us, they're growing so fast that people get promoted into management or leadership and they don't have that experience. And that's why our company is growing, because we do that. We upskill into leadership development. But the coolness of what I get to see when I talk with you, because you're in it, that's the experience that I get when I'm interacting with the people on the platform that we have, because they're all in that position.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:45) And then sometimes I get an episode where it's a company that's, you know, 50 years old. It's just like, not that they're bad, it's just like I can tell there's companies that are 50 years old that have a lot of energy, and there's companies that are really boring.

(Ilan Twig at 00:14:00) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) I like the energy, man. I really love it. Now how did you get started in technology? Were you programming young? Were you interested in technology when you were young?

(Ilan Twig at 00:14:09) Yeah, it's a thing that was just meant to be. So I'm first, you know, when I, I came from a family with not so much means, so I still don't know how my father managed to get me the first computer. When I got older, I was convinced myself that he stole it somehow. I don't know, but I'll have to ask him. He's going to visit me soon. But yeah, when I was in first grade, it was '81. I was seven years old. My father got me the first computer.

(Ilan Twig at 00:14:37) He asked me, do you want a computer? I said, what's a computer? And then we went to some relatives in the other side of the country to see a computer, and we saw it, and I said, yes, I want this. I was a kid, and yeah, that's how it started. It was a Texas Instruments 99/4A. It was one of the first computers, personal computers. It had no games or anything, and the only thing you could do is code in BASIC. And that's what I did.

(Ilan Twig at 00:15:04) I started there. I got obsessed. My first program was 10 print Ilan, 20 go to 10 run. And it was like, woah. Ilan, Ilan, Ilan. And then yeah, I could do it with a tab and you could see it filled up the entire screen instead of one row, and then I started to play with it. And I got obsessed. It was an obsession.

(Ilan Twig at 00:15:26) And you know, when I was in fourth grade, I got my second computer. It was an Atari 800XL. And this one had more capabilities. It could play some sounds, and it could show multiple layers of graphics and stuff like that. It had 64K, kilobytes memory, and I literally knew every single byte what its role is and what happens if I poke with it and peek and poke and all of that.

(Ilan Twig at 00:15:54) I was, it was just a curiosity and obsession that filled me from the inside. And then when I was in fourth grade, I got this computer. My siblings, I have three of them, they really wanted to play Pac-Man. I developed Pac-Man and they started playing.

(Elon Twigg at 00:16:11) Yeah. When I was in fourth grade, I had a lot of these kind of projects. At some point, they got bored from the game because it had only one screen.

(Elon Twigg at 00:16:19) And I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna develop another Pac-Man and another Pac-Man and another Pac-Man. So I developed a screen builder, and I could design multiple screens. And it was kind of fun. Yeah.

(Elon Twigg at 00:16:31) I did a lot of projects, cool projects. I connected the telephone to the computer with no modem, but I managed to do a lot of cool stuff. Then I got this SAM. It's the speech synthesizer. Yeah.

(Elon Twigg at 00:16:47) I could do text-to-speech. It was like, it sounded something like this. It was so funny. And we were a gang of, like, a few of us with the Atari 800 XL. And my friends were all about games, and I was all about developing stuff.

(Elon Twigg at 00:17:03) And then we got this software. So I connected it to the computer. So what I did, I developed this software that has a delay, let's say one hour. And then in one hour, it calls one of my friends, and then it says, in Hebrew, it swears at them. It tells them bad words.

(Elon Twigg at 00:17:20) And the thing is, I timed it. So, you know, one hour, and then I would go to my friend, and then the computer would call and swear, and they would be 100% sure that it's the other one, right? Because I was there. So it couldn't have been me.

(Elon Twigg at 00:17:35) And I tricked them all. And then years later, years later, I told them it was me. And they're like, what? But yes. So it was so cool back then.

(Elon Twigg at 00:17:48) Yeah. So it was all from, like, project to project. I think one of the highlights was, at some point, I discovered that there was some bit in the memory that could actually control a physical wire connection. So it controlled the cassette deck that was connected to it. You would hit play.

(Elon Twigg at 00:18:13) It would not do anything until you click enter. So I'm like, okay, there must be some way the computer controls it, and I figured out the wiring. And the result of that was, obviously, it opened the door to a lot of possibilities. I connected pretty much everything electric in my room to the computer with some sensors.

(Elon Twigg at 00:18:37) And then, you know, my father, when he got into the room, he was like, what the fuck? Everything is wired. Everything. And I'm like, Dad, Dad, look. It's so cool.

(Elon Twigg at 00:18:47) And I went to the lamp. I had the standing lamp, and I did, like, clap, and it lit up. And then I did clap, and it was, like, everything was—but he was so not impressed. He's like, don't deal with electricity. You're going to kill yourself.

(Elon Twigg at 00:19:05) So yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:06) Right.

(Elon Twigg at 00:19:07) I was 16. I knew nothing about electricity. I just thought it's so cool. Yeah. So that's how it was then.

(Elon Twigg at 00:19:16) You know, the university, it was obvious that I'm going to do computer science. And from there, it was just a natural progression from a developer. At some point, I became a manager. I was a developer for many years. I had my own company back in '99.

(Elon Twigg at 00:19:33) I sold it. We were doing mappings, something pretty similar to Google Maps today. Back in 1999, the challenge was how to create maps that you can move really fast back then when it was, like, really slow modem connections. 33,600 or something like that, kilobytes per second or something ridiculous like that. So I ended up developing, like, vector-based maps, and it was pretty fast, and we ended up selling it. And, yeah, this is my—TripActions, my fourth startup.

(Elon Twigg at 00:20:12) And my passion in computer science, if I had to name one, is actually image and video analysis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:17) Really?

(Elon Twigg at 00:20:18) Yeah, I'm obsessed about it. This is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:21) I know some pretty smart people over in that world. I mean, yeah. I actually have a referral. I mean, he just sold his company to Adobe, and I'm not sure how long he's gonna go before he starts something else.

(Elon Twigg at 00:20:34) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:35) His name is Bruno Ator. And, yeah, they did this amazing concept of, in real-time video, like, it would replace the billboard with, like, a paid ad.

(Elon Twigg at 00:20:48) Oh, pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:50) Yeah. And so you could take that spot and then it's basically like a pay-per-click applied to it. So based on what viewer was watching it, it would be different for different viewers. It would be real-time replacement of advertising.

(Elon Twigg at 00:21:02) Oh, amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:03) Yeah. And he sold it to Adobe and, something like that.

(Elon Twigg at 00:21:07) Yeah. Very cool. I think there is a lot to be done with computer vision, image analysis, video analysis. My brother, which is four years younger than me, and I, in 2005, we, you know, we had some time on our hands, and we ended up developing this software which we ended up selling. It's still, it still exists on our website since 2005.

(Elon Twigg at 00:21:32) And what it does is basically using a simple, you know, video camera, webcam, I mean. It basically tracks the movements of your head, and it translates them into mouse movements. So it basically allows people with disabilities to control the computer. Back in 2005, and it still exists.

(Elon Twigg at 00:21:51) It's called iTwig, E-Y-E Twig. Twig is my last name. And it works for, you know, Windows and Mac. And it was a really cool solution. And I remember we wanted to experiment with it and try it.

(Elon Twigg at 00:22:07) So we went to the school of kids with disabilities in Tel Aviv, and we asked them, hey, would you be interested in experimenting with this? They said, sure. We would embrace everything and anything that would improve the life of kids. So we showed up to the meeting, the experiment. There were two kids, a boy and a girl, 14 years old, sitting on, you know, a wheelchair, and each one had a different type of disability, but they could only move their head. And so they were sitting in front of the computer stations.

(Elon Twigg at 00:22:43) And my brother started to set up the environment. He hooked the webcam. There were no webcams back then. So he hooked the webcam and he loaded the software with a USB drive, a thumb drive. And I was talking to the crew because there were, like, five, six different crew members there. And I'm like, hi. My name is Elon. Nice to meet you.

(Elon Twigg at 00:22:58) And they said, okay. So what do we need to do? And I said, well, you don't really need to do anything. And they said, what do you mean? Normally, there's, like, these helmets with micro switches, and we need to calibrate it to the pose of the kids so they can move.

(Elon Twigg at 00:23:10) And I said, no, no, no, no. It's just with a camera. And I'm starting to explain to them. And by the time I'm explaining it to them, the girl started to laugh. And we all look at her, and she was searching on Google for her favorite actor or singer. And then she went to Google Images, and she saw the pictures, and she was laughing. And the principal of the school was so shocked that it just works that she said, hey, I want the rest of Israel to know about it.

(Elon Twigg at 00:23:42) I'm originally from Israel. Is it okay if I talk to some people that I know? And I said, sure. So that was in the morning. In the evening, we get a phone call from the Good Morning Israel show.

(Elon Twigg at 00:23:54) And they said, hey, can we host you guys tomorrow morning? And I said, sure. So 5 a.m., I was there, and they put, you know, makeup on my face. I'm like, what's going on? And there's the big lights, and it was a live TV show in front of pretty much all of Israel. It's tiny, but still. And, yeah, that day when I went to my day job, I arrived at, like, 11. I was treated like a VIP, like a celebrity. I was like, yeah.

(Elon Twigg at 00:24:24) We saw you this morning. What are you doing? It's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:29) That is super exciting. And you're helping people. You are doing what you love. Yeah. And you're still helping people because TripActions came from a problem that you personally experienced, right?

(Elon Twigg at 00:24:41) Yeah. So TripActions came—I think TripActions is like the sum of all of my experience in life, kind of like experience with working with people, experience working with managers, experience working with direct reports, experience with technology, experience with passion, experience with challenges. Like, this is really the sum of everything. And it all started with my co-founder and I.

(Elon Twigg at 00:25:04) We used to have a company that we started in 2012, and we sold it nine months later. And then both of us overnight became road warriors. Now we had a two-year commitment as part of the acquisition, and we knew that we wanted to start something, a different company and to build a real company. The previous one was nine months. Yes.

(Elon Twigg at 00:25:28) I was a CTO. Yes, he was a CEO, but it was a six-person company. We, you know, we didn't really feel like we experienced that. So we made a commitment between us that, you know, two years later, we're gonna start another company, and we knew that the odds are really low. And then, you know, we started to explore different ideas. And as we explored, we also experienced what corporate travel means. And it was such a bad experience from the way you book the travel. You use really those archaic systems that were designed in the nineties, web only. And then, you know, once finally you have your itinerary, normally, you end up talking to an agent to help you with the booking, to help you book the flight that you couldn't find or that hotel that you couldn't find on the system or the rate is insane.

(Elon Twigg at 00:26:19) So they help you with that. Finally, when you're on the road, things happen. And when you travel, you know, three times a month, things happen all the time. Oh, I know. Yeah.

(Elon Twigg at 00:26:29) You know, you travel a lot. And then you're tired, then you're angry, and you don't have any patience, and you're hungry, and then something happens. You just want someone to solve your problem. You don't want anything else. You don't want to wait on the line.

(Elon Twigg at 00:26:44) You don't want to tell them your confirmation number to then be told that was a booking ID, and you actually need the—whatever. And it's so annoying, so you go back to your email and you look down below with the really small fonts. So is this the booking ID that's—whatever? And then the service that you get is really, really, really not personal and very generic, and you really don't have time for that. So we just thought that there has to be a better way to do it.

(Elon Twigg at 00:27:18) It just doesn't make any sense. And on the consumer side, things have evolved a lot with, you know, products like Priceline and Expedia. You could actually have a really good experience booking your own flight. You do not need to talk to a travel agent. Why is that?

(Elon Twigg at 00:27:35) And we started to explore. And yeah. And then we got hooked into this topic. And at some point, we said, okay, we think that even just with new UI, it would be nice. But as we dove, you know, deeper into that, we realized that there's actually three components there. There is the booking experience. There is the on-the-go support. And we came up with another—we had another idea around savings because we all know that, you know, there's company policy. And if the policy says that you can only spend up to $400 per night in a hotel in New York, you will spend $399.

(Elon Twigg at 00:28:18) You will definitely not spend $200 or $150. And so we just thought about it, and partially, it actually even makes sense because when you travel a lot, you want to spend the night in a nice place. You want to, you know, own the experience that you're going to have. You're away from your bed. You're away from your house.

(Elon Twigg at 00:28:35) You're away from your, you know, kitchen and breakfast and what you're used to. So you want it to be nice. But we thought that, you know, it could be an individual decision, and definitely, people don't think about the company money as if it was their own money. It's just a natural thing. And so we thought that if there would be a system that could incentivize users to, or at least allow them to make a choice and choose something that would be more affordable, and then share some of the savings with their employer.

(Elon Twigg at 00:29:08) So that's kind of like a program that we are facilitating around hotels. And it all starts with choice. So we bring endless choice to our platform. We are connected to a lot of, you know, vendors. Pretty much, I feel pretty confident to say that if you're looking for a certain hotel and you could not find it in our platform, it's because it either doesn't exist or it's just not available.

(Elon Twigg at 00:29:32) We're connected to really, like, pretty much everything. So it starts with choice. There's always sales and promotions and special inventories, closed user groups. And now we show you everything. And we're telling you, hey, you can choose. You have a choice. If you choose this one, you're gonna let go of your points. If you're gonna choose this one, you're gonna get your points, but it's non-refundable. And we have pretty much everything.

(Elon Twigg at 00:29:58) We show it in a really concise way. By the way, it's a huge technical challenge. Unbelievable. Because there's no unique identifier for hotels, and there is no unique identifier for rooms. It's really complicated. It's really, really complicated. And we are working with six, seven different vendors, and we keep adding. It's so crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) That sounds fun.

(Elon Twigg at 00:30:19) It's fun. It's fun. I have four huge machines in Amazon. That's what they're doing. They're busy just deduping stuff, deduping stuff, deduping stuff. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:34) Wow.

(Elon Twigg at 00:30:34) And I cannot say that we are 100% accurate. We are good enough, but it's a big challenge. But, anyways, we show everything to the user, and we let them choose. And the users love the platform. The, you know, the employers love the platform.

(Elon Twigg at 00:30:52) All of them report a significant reduction on the hotel spend without compromising on the user engagement. Right? Users are happy. It's their choice, and they're sharing part of the savings. So that's kind of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) Like new wave of companies. You give people options. You give them the power. You give them control to make their decisions. Let them gamify their own reality.

(Elon Twigg at 00:31:15) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) And then you get engagement.

(Elon Twigg at 00:31:18) Exactly. Exactly. Our numbers are really, really good. So what we see in a—when we deploy—sorry. When TripActions is deployed in organizations, we see more than 90% adoption within the organization, which is, compared to less than 50% with any other competitor in the market.

(Elon Twigg at 00:31:41) And if you think about it, like, a key ingredient in building a successful travel management program is usage. If, in the end, employees don't use the platform, all of the benefits that you try to accomplish or to gain by deploying the system, you kind of miss. You're gonna get 50% of that. And what companies are trying to achieve with those systems, they're trying to get some visibility and some control and reporting. And, you know, as an employer, you have the duty to know where your travelers are at.

(Elon Twigg at 00:32:16) It's called duty of care. And you need to know where they are at. You need to be able to contact them. So you need to have a system to—so that's why there are companies like TripActions, travel management companies that manage your travel program. But then again, you need the usage.

(Elon Twigg at 00:32:31) And so we get more than 90% adoption. We have, you know, our support organization is really, really, really efficient and gets more efficient by the week. A lot of the technologies that we build for the traveler, we then give them also to the agents. And then the agents enjoy the best technologies out there to power the service that they provide to the user. And in fact, a lot of people tell us that when they talk to our agents, which is a complete stranger, they feel like they're talking to someone that was taking care of their travel for a decade.

(Elon Twigg at 00:33:08) They really know. It feels like they know what they want because we use machine learning for that, and it's the same model that serves the user, serves the agent on behalf of the user. So it's, you know, it's beautiful. It's really nice. It's just really, really nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:23) Well, I expect that level of quality from someone who is, like, tinkering with it, you know, just for fun. Because that means you actually really care, and you're all about, like, just doing cool stuff that's very valuable. Now I talked a little bit about money. Right? So I'm a startup. We're growing, and we raised our first round about October of last year.

(Elon Twigg at 00:33:48) Wow. Congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) Thank you. And we're just getting into our second one right now.

(Elon Twigg at 00:33:53) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) And yeah. But you guys are, like, way far ahead right now. You just did $250 million at $4 billion. Right?

(Elon Twigg at 00:34:00) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:01) But I wanted—that's exciting and everything, but I want you to come back to me. I want you to give me some love and some advice here. So I'm, like, just crossed over year two, under just under $1 million in annual revenue. We're raising our next round. It's tough. You know? We're at that, like, cash flow management point. It's not easy and relaxed. It's like we're doing everything we can to make it work. We have sales. We have happy customers. We have results. It's like the perfect storm, and we're just making it happen to own as much of the company as we can as possible. Right? So, like, were you at that stage? Can you take me back to, like, early TripActions?

(Elon Twigg at 00:34:38) Yeah. Short answer is no. But let me explain the real—let me explain the reality. TripActions—so we had this idea. Right? And then we pitched it because we were second-time entrepreneurs, so it took us, you know, no time to raise money. We raised $4.5 million, which is a big seed round. And now we're sitting in an office, me and my co-founder. Okay. Now what? So I said, let's go and get some Post-it notes and whiteboard, and let's start. So that's how it started. A year later, we had the—so, actually, six months later, we had, like, a pre-alpha. Three months later, an alpha through and then a beta. And I would say a year to a year and a half later, we had a solid, solid GA. V1 MVP. It didn't have SITMAP. It didn't have a lot of things, but it was solid. For what it did, it did really well. It worked. You could book your flight, your hotel, your car, and life was good. You had an itinerary, push notifications, delays, and all of that. What we—so the $4.5 million, you know, was way more than what we needed to get there. Right? Way, way more because I built the first backend, then I hired the front end, then we were four of us building the whole product. It was good enough. What we've seen is that when we launched GA, we actually realized—it was funny. I remember this moment with my co-founder. We haven't lost any customers since the pre-alpha date, and you can just imagine how shitty the product was in the pre-alpha date. It was really lacking. It was really bare bones. It was buggy, but no one left us. And, you know, a month, two months, three months into GA, we see, you know, 20 to 25% growth. We're saying, okay. You know, it's small numbers. The reality is that until today, it still is 20 to 25% growth month over month. And today, it's in the millions. It's no joke anymore. I'm talking about hundreds of new customers every month. Customer is a company. Hundreds of them every month. So the story in TripActions is about an amazing product-market fit very early on, and now it's all about scale. So it's actually two things. It's the product-market fit, and it's the market. The market is very unique. It's huge. Possibly one of the biggest markets ever. And the way we measure the size of the market or the way this market is being measured is by how much money companies or corporates spend on travel annually. That's how we measure the size of the market. And just in the US, it's very surprising, but companies spend more than $500 million a year on travel, just US-based companies. And then worldwide, it gets to $1.5 trillion, which is mind-blowing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) You mean $500 billion in the United States?

(Elon Twigg at 00:37:42) Sorry. $500 billion. Yes. Yeah. $500 billion. I said million. Yeah. No. No. $500 billion. So now, you know, we grew really fast. And just like two months ago, when we announced the round, we also noted that we crossed the $1.1 billion in travel budget that we manage. So if you take all of our customers and you summarize the travel budget, how much they spend on travel annually, you'll get to $1.1 billion, which is a huge number, but it's tiny compared to the market. Even if we just stay in the US, there is still, I mean, $500 billion. So if you're an investor and you're dealing with a company that grows so fast, it has clearly a product-market fit, an amazing product-market fit, and there is a virtually infinite market, you either want to jump on this wagon or you don't, and those investors definitely want to be part of it. And, you know, that also explains why, you know, our pre—we had a round in just in November of last year, and we raised $150 or $160 for a $1 billion valuation. And seven months later, we quadrupled the value, and we raised even more money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) It's because they all talk to each other, and they're all upset. So you built this, like, this market from that smaller round, and everyone's like, I missed out. I missed out. Open up another one.

(Elon Twigg at 00:39:08) But I'll tell you, it was the same investors from the—between the C and the D, same investors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) Oh, really? They just wanted more.

(Elon Twigg at 00:39:14) They wanted more? Exactly. They're like, okay. You want some more? We'll give you a little bit more. Yeah. You know? Why not? No. But I think, you know, each company, each market has its story. And our story is about—it's less about, hey. Have we found the right pain to solve? Or, you know, do we know how to sell it? Who is really the buyer? How do we pitch it? It's less about that. This, we got lucky with all of that, and we figured it out very early. It was just an amazing product-market fit. We are now dealing with how can we make sure that we are sustaining this growth. And that's why we're doing this day, for example, the reconnect is because the one biggest fear that we have is around culture. 700 or, like, 600 out of the 800 employees are new. They don't know TripActions. They don't know how we do business here. They don't know how we think. They don't know how we prioritize. They don't know what the trade-offs are. They don't know what the flexibility that they have is when they make decisions. And it's really important for us that they keep embracing those values that got us to where we are. I'll give you an example. As a support engineer, a support agent in TripActions, you have a lot of flexibility. You know that the number one value in TripActions is it's all about the user, all of our users. And so you could find that in Twitter because that's how I learned that from Twitter and Facebook. It showed up in my feed. One of the travelers tweeted this amazing story about the interaction with our support agent. There was a whole issue around the hotel. It was canceled, not canceled. I don't know. It had to be moved. So, obviously, the support agent did what they—what's—it was a she. She did what she could do to help. And then in the end, she asked, hey, is there anything else that I can do for you? And the guy said, you know, I would just die for, like, a plate of bacon. And sure enough, he got to the room, and there was a plate of bacon with a nice note from the support agent. And this is the flexibility. There was no approval needed. There was no—it was just a decision of the moment, and that was done by a support agent, not even—that was, uh, you know, probably three months in the company, and she just embraced this value. And, obviously, we highlighted that in our weekly company meeting, and we embrace that. So that's what we fear losing. We fear losing this connection with the users, the creative thinking, the—that's what I meant when I said the flexibility that you have, the priorities, the trade-offs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:05) They feel like owners. Right? They feel like they're part of the company. They can do this stuff.

(Elon Twigg at 00:42:09) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:10) Now you said you're originally from Israel. And my dad was in the Air Force here in the United States, but you also—you shared with me on our last call something really interesting and a small story about the Air Force in Israel and how you've adopted some of those into your company.

(Elon Twigg at 00:42:26) Yeah. That's actually something really, really exciting that turned out to work really well for us. But, again, as part of the ongoing challenge on how do we retain the culture and how do we create a company that it's fun to work for, and that the employees spend most of their time, if not all of their time, on solving problems, on taking the company forward rather than on trying to understand what other people think about them and what they should say now because he said this and she said that and—you know what I mean. And I've seen how companies get destroyed, completely destroyed by this really, you know, sick culture. The productivity goes down significantly, and there is no creativity. And my co-founder and I—by the way, I'm 45 years old. My co-founder is 43 years old. So we've seen a lot, and we really wanted to avoid it. So as part of that, we started to work with this company. It's called Shamaim. And it was founded by an ex-pilot from the Israeli Air Force. And, basically, what this pilot learned from the Air Force is that there is a way to accelerate excellence through a culture of debriefs and ongoing learnings. And so the example that—or the story that he tells us—by the way, they are all here as well as part of this, the entire team is here. It's, like, 12 people, as part of this off-site. And so he basically said, you know, I just graduated from the Air Force, and I became a pilot. And, obviously, very junior, went on my first flight. When I come back, there is, like, 40 pilots after their flight in the room, various levels, and all of them stand in front of everybody, and they are saying what happened in—it's a debrief. What happened? Why did it happen? And how will I improve? It's a very—it's a personal thing. How am I going to make it better? And the numbers on the aggregate are kind of amazing. The statistics is that it takes 450 flight hours to become a pilot that could serve in any army, in any air force. In the Israeli Army, it's 250 hours. And, you know, with the assumption that Israeli pilots are as good as, let's say, as good as the other pilots, how is that? And it all goes back to the debrief that really—you know? And just imagine this scenario where you have 40 pilots in one room. The amount of—it's probably the most amount of ego that could be in one room. Right? That probably cannot go worse than that. And yet you see even the highest-ranked pilot there standing, talking about their mistake and how they will improve. It's a really powerful thing. And so this guy saw the potential of bringing this culture into organizations and help corporates get better faster by embracing. And so we fully adopted this process and this methodology. And the result is that, you know, every meeting that I have, my staff meeting, my skip-level staff meetings, company-level meetings, the all-hands starts with a debrief that someone does in front of the entire company, and it's very personal. It's really important. It's how will I improve. And, you know, I did one. We had an outage. Obviously, I didn't do the outage, but I had a lot of learnings. How will I improve for the next time? And explained it to the entire company, it's five minutes. And it's really powerful. In the end, something happens, good or bad, by the way. An event happened. You spend five minutes on the spot, and you do this debrief, and you move on. And then you can share it with your team. You can share it with the entire company. It's really powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:42) And how do you pronounce his first name? You introduced us, but I don't know how to pronounce it.

(Elon Twigg at 00:46:46) Ophir. Yeah. He's actually walking—I saw him walking around here. Yeah. So Ophir is the founder and the CEO. He's a pilot. And, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. He's a pilot. And it's funny. His entire company is a collection of pilots from the Israeli Air Force. All of them. So, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:11) Yeah. Thank you for the introduction. Chloe actually set up a meeting. We're interested because we do the leadership development actions, right, with Leaderbits. And so I'm interested. I want him to come tell me how he's achieving success with that debrief, and then I want to make some Leaderbits. Because all we do is we go find, like, the best advice in the world and then turn it into actions and then deploy them. So I'm going to get him on—I'm going to have him share with me. I'm going to share with him what we've learned. I'm going to see if there's opportunity for me and Ophir to work together. And because we're just 100% focused just like you are on your customers and making it easy. We're just focused on, like, how do we create better leaders faster, and then we'll just figure out the sales thing. But if you can actually make someone better, like, you experience, you get to experience the benefits of that debrief. So you know it works.

(Elon Twigg at 00:47:58) Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And it's really powerful when you see a leader standing and talking about their mistake and how they're going to improve. It's just a powerful event, and it inspires, and it sends a very clear message. We embrace mistakes. Actually, we embrace learnings. If it's from a mistake, it's fine. I mean, I think mistakes are a great opportunity to learn. We do not embrace having the same mistake twice, but we totally—that's not good. That basically says there was no learning, and then that's a problem. But we totally embrace the act of learning, and that's why we do it, and that's why it's so bold. That's why it's every meeting. We have this all-hands once a week, and we dedicate the five to 10 minutes on a debrief. It could be an executive debrief. It could be a support person that does a debrief and everything in between. It's just a really powerful event. It's inspiring, and it sends a very clear message to the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:00) Yeah. The—it shows that the behavior of this leadership team is we don't hide stuff. We don't sweep stuff under the rug. We acknowledge it. We grab it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:09) We make it transparent. We figure out together, and we move on. It gives that whole culture of ownership throughout the entire organization.

(Elon Twigg at 00:49:16) Yeah. That was a beautiful sentence, I have to say. I really like the way that you summarized it, really, really well. That's exactly what it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:25) We do our Friday stand-ups here, and we have people say they have to say how they grew personally. Because in order to work here, you have to be growing yourself as an individual. It's just a thing that we decided from day one.

(Elon Twigg at 00:49:35) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:35) How you grew personally, how you grew professionally, and then you report on your metrics. So we're still small. We're like eight, ten people. So it takes 30 for all of us to go up for two minutes and say it. But I like this debriefing, and I'm gonna have us do a—I'm gonna actually have us do it so we can experience what the debrief's like.

(Elon Twigg at 00:49:52) That's exciting. I'll grab Avi Efer right after this recording, and I'll talk to him about it. He's really exciting. I think he will be really excited to work with you. I think from the first time that you and I spoke, I felt that there is a really good match here between us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:12) Yeah. Because we're all direct. We're just like, how do we achieve the result the fastest, and let's all just get on board with that. Yeah. I like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:20) So we're gonna start to wrap up here, but I'm curious now, like, what are you most excited about right now? It could be the event or the growth, whatever's on your mind.

(Elon Twigg at 00:50:30) Well, this event is hard to ignore. So, like, you just walk around and there is energy everywhere. Everyone is so excited. Everyone is smiling. There's, like, so many people around me here. It's really powerful. I don't know. I guess the growth has been like that for three years, so it still is very exciting. I guess the one thing that I'm really, really excited about with this opportunity at TripActions, with everything that is happening, is the fact that we are now at the point where we literally can do anything and everything or what it takes to complete our mission. And it can be any complex technology solution that was never developed before.

(Elon Twigg at 00:51:21) Anything that can help support any of our values. You know, it's all about the users. So if there is anything that we can do to improve the user experience—you know, one thing that I noticed as a traveler, I booked this room. I remember it was with my co-founder, and we went to, I think it was Pittsburgh. We opened the door of the hotel room. We got into the room, and there was this dirty underwear on the bed.

(Elon Twigg at 00:51:48) So—oh, no. So I just—you know, I wish I could talk to someone, and I obviously had to go down and talk to someone from the lobby, and they ended up taking the underwear. But, you know, just because of this memory that I have, I want to develop this technology or whatever that the second you enter the room, literally, you open the door, you go into the room, a support agent shows up and asks you, how's the room? Like, thumbs up, thumbs down. And non-intrusive. You know, you can ignore it, dismiss it if you want.

(Elon Twigg at 00:52:22) But the notion that someone is taking care of you in the right time, in the right moment, with the right kind of intervention. It's not, hey, how is your day, Mr. Blah Blah Blah? Okay. Leave me alone. It's like, you know, do you like the room kind of thing? Is it good? And then, obviously, if you're saying thumbs down, we show up and we solve it for you. So, you know, we're working on detecting Wi-Fi networks and then the name of the network and kind of aggregating a lot of knowledge that we have to really differentiate between the guest network and the network for the actual people that stay in the hotel, et cetera. But, you know, things like that—so the notion that anything is possible to provide the absolute best travel solution in the world is very exciting. This is really exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:12) Well, you have an app, and so you'll know when I'm walking into the room. That's, like, perfect timing. Right? Just be able to detect. Okay. I'm on location. How is it?

(Elon Twigg at 00:53:20) Oh, you're, like, right there with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:22) I didn't even have to go hunt you down. Yeah.

(Elon Twigg at 00:53:24) I love it. Look, location by itself is not accurate enough because if there's, like, 30 floors, how would we know? But that combined with Wi-Fi and the strength of the Wi-Fi and the names and the previous knowledge that we have from other travelers—yes, you kind of figured it out. That's how we are going to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:44) Yeah. Average time to get to room per hotel. Yeah. Come on. Come in here, bro.

(Elon Twigg at 00:53:51) It's crazy. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:53) My mind can't help. I'm just—or just you talking about it subconsciously just starts like, this is how I build this. Here we go. Yeah. We should break.

(Elon Twigg at 00:54:03) We should brainstorm more. And I love talking to people that like to think about those kind of problems with no limits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:10) Yeah. No. That's the beauty. It's like I can just open up my brain and let—and I've detached so far from ego. I just let the ideas flow through. And when I pick up on a stream that's, like, good, I'm vibing with it, it's like, all right, let's we're all just kinda talking it out. Yeah. Perfect. Do you have anything else you wanna get out in the world? If people wanna learn more about TripActions? If they're interested in a job, where should they go?

(Elon Twigg at 00:54:34) Well, our website is really, really informative. There is really everything you need to know on our website. People can contact me directly on LinkedIn. It's Elon. There is, I think, only one Elon at TripActions. There's definitely only one CTO, so you can find me there. Yeah. Very exciting. All those that are looking for good solutions for travel and they want to keep their employees happy and engaged, you know, you don't need to fight with them anymore on policies and nickel and dime them and all of that. There is a way to do it. There is a way to keep them happy. There is a way to manage it. Yeah. So look us up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:11) I love it. I'll put everything in the show notes so people can just get the links real quick. And that's it, Elon. We did it. We made a podcast episode. This has been happening.

(Elon Twigg at 00:55:20) It was excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:21) All right. Enjoy the event, my friend.

(Elon Twigg at 00:55:23) Thank you. Talk soon. Take care. Bye-bye.