Neil Mehta
speaker
321 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 4 May
Neil Mehta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But in our industry at the Series B, we can both look at two companies kind of competitive, both doing 30 million in ARR, growing 100% a year. there's a chance that the one you invest in is worth many billions in enterprise value in the future. And the one that I invest in is borderline insolvent in five years.
There's a huge spread, but yet it's most likely that the Series Bs, those trade approximately the same amount, same term. And so I think having a system that allows you to build differentiated insight in a targeted way can yield better results. I can't promise it, but it's also just a much more fun way to live life. I think when you talk to founders... Now, again, for...
The 3,000 founders that'll get funding, the matrix, large scale. I'm glad our industry is going from a cottage industry to becoming this large asset class. It's going to help so many people get so much more. It's actually great for Green Oaks, the later rounds too. There's some of those companies that might be very interested in this down the road.
But for the 10 to 15 best founders that care about that relationship, they care about speed, they care about fidelity, and they care about price, I think we are a much better experience.
It doesn't matter to me. I have no plans to sell my painting. I have no plans to- Do you have an email? Yeah, I have no other hobbies. No, this is it. This is all I want to do for the rest of my life. I mean, as long as I can and investors allow me to and the founders we work with allow me to, yeah.
At the highest bid order, we have got much better, not a little better, much better at separating the vital few from the trivial many. There's a version of Green Oaks two or three years ago where not just me, everybody at Green Oaks would do 12, 15, 20, 30 meetings a week. We used to show this slide to our investors. Here's how much fees happen. And we had 92% coverage. Aren't we great?
We'll never leave a stone unturned. It's the way I grew up. I grew up believing that the way you generate great returns, the way you find undiscovered opportunities, there are really only a few ways to make money in the world. One is speed. You just go faster than everybody else. Citadel may be a version of that. That's really interesting.
Our favorite combination is when you have the same speed and the same information, but you have differential insight. I think what we've become much better at at Green Oaks is increasing the speed and velocity in our information asymmetry, and being able to generate differential insight that matters to long-term enterprise value.
Putting those things together with a small team and building a flywheel for doing it over and over and over and over again every day, that has been a sea change in the last couple of years.
So... Let me start with Navon, which is formerly called TripActions. TripActions, for those that don't know, it is a travel management company. It does your corporate travel and expense management end-to-end. It's a company I'd been following for a little while, and COVID came, and it was a travel management company. That's my question. not a good thing to have happen to your business.
And so trip actions, which is what it was called at the time, revenue went from a hundred million down to zero. It happened overnight. Remember Trump, first version, went on TV and shut down all the flights from Europe. And he felt like Lehman Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever, but I think it was a different day. And they felt like, oh, this is not good. This is real.
I called him a week later and I was like, I know your revenue just went to zero. But I have conviction that you are the right end state solution for this market. And I think instead of battering down the hatches and preserving all the capital you have, I think you should be aggressive in capturing flow share.
And we'll write sort of unlimited number up to 500 million, ends up being less than that, but up to 500 million for you to go do that. And it took us four days or something like that. And- TripActions dramatically accelerated its market share leadership over the course of COVID.
Over those two years, it went from number four or five in the industry, maybe even number eight in the industry, I think, to top two in the industry and was able to be aggressive at a time when other people were nervous. Another example is SVB weekend with Parker and Rippling. We've been investing in the business for a long time. It has always helped us to have a prepared mind.
And when we have these moments of volatility, it doesn't change the end state all that much. So SVB weekend, you remember, it was Wednesday and Thursday, it started to have some trouble. Friday morning, Parker called and said, SVB looks like it might go into insolvency or be taken over by the treasury or by the Fed. And people make this mistake.
People think that Rippling was having financial troubles. is the opposite. Rippling used SVB for essentially plumbing, essentially the pooling of capital that would be then dispersed to employees for customers of theirs. And so it was just like rails that it was using. And by the way, credit to Parker. There's a lot that's been said about Parker from his previous company.
And I have to say, he's one of the most high-integrity people I've ever met in the world. Just to talk about customer centricity, the reason he called me on Friday morning wasn't because Riplin was in trouble. He called me because he wanted to make sure that on Monday morning, his customers weren't in trouble. All of his customers got money.
There were other payroll companies that were planning to send an email out on Monday that was like, Sorry, you know what's happening with the US financial system right now. Payments to your employees will get delayed. That was not an okay solution for Parker. So Parker called me on Friday morning. It took us about 30 minutes to agree to invest 500 million. Credit to his team, by the way.
Spent the entire weekend, day and night. It wasn't 18 hours. It was 24 hour, two blocks, 48 hours of straight work. And by the way, Sunday, another credit to Parker. Sunday, It looked like everything was going to be okay. And Parker's like, just in case, this is the right thing to do. We're going to do this. We handshook on a deal. We're doing the deal. What an amazing partner to have in Parker.
Monday morning, every Rippling customer got their money on time at that schedule. True. Carvana is a funny one because it was public. Carvana is a company we had been following for a long time, never took venture financing, you know, earning a little bit. And he was out in Phoenix. He was building a customer experience that we always thought very highly of.
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