 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. The CUBE headquarters, I'm John Furry, CoastalCuber, guest here is Megan Eisenberg, CMO of a new hot company called Trip Actions, formerly the CMO at MongoDB. Before that talk you signed, we've done each other some advisory boards. Great to see you. Yes, great to see you as well. Exciting new opportunity for you at Trip Actions, just transitioned from MongoDB, which by the way had great earnings. They did, I'm proud. What was the big secret to MongoDB's earnings? Tell us while it's fresh in your mind. I think they're executing and their growth is amazing. They're bringing their costs down. I mean, they've got product market fit, their developers love them, and so I'm proud and not surprised. You're there for four years and you've transformed their go-to market so that fruit's coming off the tree. Yes, it's exciting to see the process, people, technology all coming together and seeing them scale and do so well in the markets, yes. Being here in 20 years living in California, Palo Alto, you see the rocket ships, ones that flame out, the ones that make it, and there's a pattern, right? When you start to see companies that are attracting talent, ones that have pedigree VCs involved, raising the kind of rounds in a smart way where there's traction, product market fit, you kind of take special notice and one of the companies that you're now working for, Trip Actions, seems to have the parameters. So it's off the pad, it's going up into orbit. Yes, we're taking off. You guys are really growing. You got a new round of funding, $150 million. Yes. Unique application in a market that is waiting to be disrupted. Yes, I mean, it's 800. Talk about the company you work for, Trip Actions. Trip Actions is a fast growing business travel platform. We service customers like WeWork, Slack, Zoom, Box, and we're growing. We're adding 200 customers a month and it's amazing just to see these fast growing companies, right? When they hit product market fit, I think the keys are they've got a massive addressable market, which we have 800 billion online travel. They're solving a pain and they're disrupting a legacy, the legacy providers that are out there. We're three and a half years old and we are really focused on the customer experience, giving you the choice that you want when you book, making it easy down to six minutes, not an hour to book something. And we've got 24 seven support, which not many can compete with. You know, it's interesting. You know, look at these different ways of innovation, especially SaaS and mobile apps. You know, chapter one of this wave, great economics. Yes. Once you get that unit economics visibility, it's a great SaaS. It's occasions happened. But now we're kind of in a chapter two. I think you guys kind of fit into this chapter two where it's not just SaaS, because you know, we've seen travel sites get out there, you can book travel. This chapter two of SaaS is about personalization. You see machine learning, you got cloud economics. New ventures are coming out of the woodwork where you could take a unique idea, innovate on it and disrupt a category. That seems to be what you guys are doing. Talk about this new dynamic because this is not just another travel app what you guys are doing. You guys have a unique angle on this, applying some tech with the corp. Talk about that, that this chapter two kind of SaaS business. I think when I think about chapter two, I think about all the data that's out there. I think about the machine learning. I think about how we understand the user and personalize everything to them to make it frictionless. And these apps that I love on my phone are because they know what I want before I want it. And I just took a trip to Dallas this week and the app knew I needed to check in. It was one click, told me my flight was delayed, gave me options, checked me in for my hotel. I mean, it was just amazing experience that I haven't seen before. And it's really, if you think about that business travel trip, there's 40 steps you have to do along the way. There's got to be a way to make it easier because all we want to do is get to the business meeting and get back. We don't want to deal with weather. We don't want to deal with hotel issues or flight changes. And our app is specific to when you look at it, you've got a chat 24 seven and someone's taking care of you, that concierge service. And we can do that because the amount of data we're looking at, we're learning from it. And we make it easier for travel managers. Half the people go rogue and don't even book through their travel solution. It's because it's not tailored to them. So this is the thing I want to get at. So you guys aren't like a consumer app per se. You have a specific unique target audience on this opportunity. It's travel management. I'm going to date myself, but back when I broke into the business, they would have comes like Thomas Cook would handle all the travel for Eulah Packard when I worked there in the 80s. And you had these companies that had these contracts and they would do all the travel for the employees. Yes. Today it's hard to find those solutions out there. Yes. I would say it's hard to find one that you love. And Trip Actions has designed something that our travelers love. And it is, it's for business travel. It's for your business trips. It's taking care of your air, your hotel, your car, your rail, whatever you need. And making sure that you can focus on the trip. Focus on getting there. And not just the horrible experience we've all had it. I travel a lot. I traveled certainly back and forth to the East Coast. And to take those problems away so I can focus on my business is what it's about. So just to get this right. So you guys are obviously unicorn of the funding you have, great valuation. Growing like crazy, you got employees. So people looking for jobs because they're hiring probably. Yes. But you're targeting not consumers to download the app. It's for businesses that want to have company policies and take all that pressure off of the load. So I as a user can't, by myself, can't just use the app, or can I? No, you can. No, no, that's the whole thing is that as a user there's three things we're providing to you. One, inventory and choice. So you go and you know all the options. You get the flight you want. It's very clear in our, we have a new storefront where it shows you what's in policy, what's not. So we've got that. It's ease of use. It's booking quickly. Nobody wants to waste time dealing with this stuff, right? You want to go and book quickly. And then when you're on the trip you need 24 seven support because things go wrong. Airlines travel gets canceled. Weather happens. You need to change something in your trip. And so yes, the user has the app on their phone, can book it, can do it fast and can get support if they need it. So stand alone, users can just use it as a consumer app. But when you combine it with business that's the magic that you guys see. Is that the opportunity? Yes, I should say as a consumer, as a business traveler. So you're doing it through your company. So I'm getting reimbursed. So for the companies, the company's your customer. Yes, the company's our customer. The user is the traveler. Yes. Okay, got it. So if we want to have a travel desk in our company which we don't have yet. Yes. It would, we would be. We would sign up as a company and then all your employees would have the ease of use to book travel. So what have been, what's the sum of the numbers in terms of customers you have? So 200 month over month. Yes, we're over 1500 customers. We're adding 200 a month. We've got some significant growth. It's amazing to see product market fit. And the cost of the solution, tell us about how people buy it. $25 of booking and there's no add on cost after that. If you need to make as many changes as you need because of the trip calls on it, you do it. So basically per transaction. Yes. Small little fee, $25. Yes. Okay, so how do you guys see this growing for the company? What's some of the initiatives you guys are doing? A new app? Yes, I mean. CMO, what's the plan? Yeah, so I mean, it's a massive market, 800 billion, right? And we've only just started. We've got a lot of customers but we've got many more to go after. We are international. So we have offices around the world. We have an Amsterdam office. We've got customers traveling all over. So we're continuing to deliver on that experience and bringing on more customers. We just onboarded WeWork, 10,000 travelers and we'll continue to onboard more and more. So as head of marketing, what's the current staff? You have openings, you mentioned you had some open recs. Yes, yes. You looking to hire, you going to build out? I've got 20 open recs on the website. So I'm hiring in all functions. We're growing that fast. And what's the marketing strategy? What's your plan? You have a little teaser on thinking, core positioning, go to market. What are some of the things you're thinking about building out? Marketing cloud stack kind of thing. What's going on? All of these things. My three top focuses are one, marketing and sales systems, making sure we have that MarTech stack and that partnership with the sales tech stack. Second thing is marketing and sales alignment, that closed loop. We're building, we're building pipeline, making sure when people come in, there's a perfect partnership to service what they need. And then our brand and messaging. And it's the phase I love in these companies, it's really building. And it's the people process and technology to do that. And the core positioning is what customer service, being the most user friendly. What's the core positioning? We're definitely focused on the traveler. I would say we're balancing customer experiencing, making sure we get that adoption. But also for the travel managers, making sure that they can administer the solution and they get the adoption and we align the incentives between the traveler and the travel manager. And customer profile, what small medium size business to large enterprise. We have SMB and we're going all the way up to enterprise. Yes. Has it been much of a challenge out there in the business travel side? I just don't know, that's why I'm asking. It's like, because we don't have one. I can see our cube team having travel challenge. We always do. Yes. You know, centralizing that, making that available, but it would have to be easier. Is it hard to get, is there a lot of business travel firms out there? What are some of the challenges that you guys are going after there? Well, I think what matters is one, picking the solution and being able to implement it quickly. We have customers implementing in a week, right? It's understanding how we load your policies, get you on board, get your, really your employees traveling. And so it's pretty fast onboarding. And we're able to tailor solutions to what people need. What are some of the policies that are typical that might be out there that people like? Yeah. So maybe for hotels, you may have New York and your policy is $500 a night. I would say a normal typical behavior with someone would book it at $4.99. They go all the way up to the limit. We've actually aligned our incentives with the travel managers and employees in that if you save your company money, you save and get rewards back. So let's say you book it for $400. That $100 savings, $30 goes back to the employee and rewards. They can get an Amazon card, donate to charity, charity, whatever they'd like. So they kind of act like an owner because they get a kickback. Yes. So that's how you're going to address adoption. Yes. So what are some of the adoption concerns you guys building around with the software and or programs to make it easy to use? I mean, we're constantly thinking about the experience. We want to make sure just, I mean, I think about when I used to drive somewhere, I'd pull out a map and map it out. And then I got lucky and you could do map quests. And now you have ways. We are that ways experience when you're traveling. We're thinking about everything you need to do that customer when they leave their front or all the way to the trip, all the things that can hang them up along the way we're trying to remove that friction. That's a great example. In ways is such a great service. Yes. These Google Maps or even Apple Maps ways, everyone goes back to ways. Yes. Yeah, I don't, I mean. In ways did cause a lot of street congestion in the back streets of Palo Alto. Yes. Well, we're going to expedite our travelers. Well, it's a great utility, new company. What attracted you to the opportunity? What was some of the, because you had a nice gig going on over there, MongoDB, what was the motivation to come over to the hot startup? Yeah, you know, I love disruptive companies. I love massive addressable markets, good investors, and an awesome mission that I can get behind. You know, I'm a mom of three kids and I did a lot of travel. I'm your typical road warrior and I wanted to get rid of the pain of travel and the booking systems that existed before trip actions. And so I was drawn to the team, the market and the product. That's awesome. Well, you've been a great CMO. Your career has been phenomenal and great successes. It's obviously being a mother of three. You know the challenges of juggling all of this. Life is short. I'm going to be using these apps to make sure you're on the right plane. I mean, I know I'm always getting back from my son's lacrosse game or event at school. This is, these are like, it's like ways. It's not necessarily in the travel portfolio, but it's a dynamic that the users care about. This is the kind of thing that you guys are thinking about, is that right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I always think about my mom when she worked in having three daughters and I work and have three daughters. I feel like I can do so much more. I've got DoorDash. I've got Urban Sitter. I've got Waze. I've got Google Calendar. I've got trip actions, right? I've got all these technologies that allow me to do more and not focus on things that are not that productive and I have no value add on. It just makes me more efficient and productive. Talk about some of the tech before we get into some of the industry questions. I want to talk about some of the advantages on the tech side. Is there any machine learning involved? What's some of the secret sauce on the app? Yeah, definitely. We're constantly learning our users' preferences. So when you go in, we start to learn what hotels you're going to select. Where do you like to be near the office? Do you like to be near downtown? We're looking at your flights. Do you aisle, window? Nobody wants middle. Okay, sometimes you got to take it. Yes, but we're learning about your behaviors and we can predict pretty closely, one, if you're going to book and two, what you're going to book. And as we continue to learn about you, that's why we can make you more efficient. That's why we can do it in six minutes instead of an hour. That's awesome. So Megan, a lot of things going on. You've been a progressive marketer. You've loved, you've done tech-sav, you've done a lot of implementations. But we're going to see change now where people got to think differently. They got to think, okay, I need to bring on an app for your case with business travel. There's real policies there. So you want to also make it good for the user experience. Again, people-centric. This personalization has been kind of a cutting-edge concept now in this chapter too. A lot of CMOs are either there or they're not or trying to get there. What are you finding in the industry these days that's a best practice to help people cross that bridge as they think they crack the code on one side and then realize, wow, it's all another chapter to go? You know, I think traditionally a lot of times we think we're aligning very much with sales and that matters that go to marketing sales aligned. But when it comes to products and customer experience, it's that alignment with marketing and the product and engineering team. And really understanding the customer and what they want and listening and hearing and testing and making sure we're partnering in those functions. In terms of distribution getting the earned concept, what's your thoughts on earned media? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think it's the direction, right? There's a ton of noise out there. So you've got to be on topic. You've got to understand what people care about. You've got to hit them in the channel that they care about. And very quick, right? You don't have time. Nobody's going to watch something that's 30 minutes long. You get seconds. And so part of the earned is making sure you're relevant, what they care about, and they can find you. And content, big part of that for you guys. Huge part of it, yes. And understanding the influencers in the market. Who's talking about travel? Who is out there leading in these areas that travel managers go and look to? Making sure we're in front of them and they get to see what we're delivering for them. I like how you got the incentives of the employees to get kind of aligned with the business. I mean, having that kind of perks. If you align with the company policies, the reward could be Starbucks card or vacation or more time. Whatever the company wants. This is kind of the idea, right? To kind of align the incentives and make the user experience, both during travel and post travel, successful. That's right. Yes, making sure that they are incentive to go, but they have a great experience. Okay, if you'd explain the culture of the company to someone watching that's maybe interested in using the app or joining you guys as a team, what's the trip actions culture like if you had to describe it? Yeah, I would say one, we love travel. Two, we are fast growing, scaling and we're always raising the bar. And so it's learning and it's moving fast, but learning from it and continuing to improve. It's certainly about the user, all of the users. So not just the travel manager, but our travelers themselves. We love dogs. If you ever come to the Palo Alto office, we've got a lot of dogs. We love our pups. And just building something amazing. I mean, it's hard. The employees got to know that it's a rocket ship. So it's great. You got to hold on. You got to run hard. You have the right personality to handle the pace because you're hiring a lot of people. And I think that's the part of the learning. We need continual learning because we are scaling so fast, you have to reinvent what we need to do next. And not a lot of people have seen that type of scale and in order to do it, you have to learn and help others learn and move fast. Well, great to see you. Thanks for coming and sharing the opportunity to give you the final plug for the company. Share what positions you're hiring for, what's your key hires, what are you guys trying to do? Give a quick plug to the company. Yeah, so I mean, we've grown 5X in employees. So we're hiring across the board from a marketing standpoint. I'm hiring in content and product marketing. I'm hiring designers, I'm hiring technical. I love my marketing technologies. So we're building out our tech stack, our website, pretty much any function. All right, you heard it here, trip actions. When you get the product visibility, those unit economics as they say in the VC world, they've got a rocket ship. So congratulations, we'll keep an eye on you. Now that you're in Palo Alto, you can come visit us here anytime. Yes, I'd love to. Megan Isenberg, CMO, trip actions here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.