Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
The Dan No Priors were joined by Alex Taubman, the co-founder and CEO of Long Lake Management. Long Lake recently announced their intent to acquire American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion, and what I believe is the world's first AI take private. They have previously bought around 30 companies, and they transform and optimize them with AI. So we're very excited to have them on board today. Alex, thanks so much for joining us at No Priors.

**Alexander Taubman** (0:28)
Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Elad.

**Elad Gil** (0:31)
You just announced what I believe, and I could be wrong on this, but I think it may be the world's first ever AI take private, where you've agreed to acquire Amex Express Global Business Travel, the world's largest corporate travel platform for 6.3 billion, which is pretty amazing.
Before that, you've already done 30 acquisitions under this premise that you can buy businesses and transform them with AI. What some people are referring to as AI-driven roll-ups, or AI-driven buyouts. It's very exciting to have you here and learn more about your business. You mentioned you have this Nexus platform, which helps your employees serve their customers better and automates a lot of their work. Can you give examples of some of the things that that automates, or how it helps them in the context of HOA? I know you're now in four other verticals, or three other verticals, and so what you do crosses across the different businesses you're involved with.

**Alexander Taubman** (1:18)
Yeah, that's right. We've taken an approach since the beginning of investing very heavily in our horizontal AI platform, which we call Nexus.
I'd say roughly 80% of the infrastructure is shared across the verticals, and then there's a lot of work to take it and deploy it into those end markets. And the deployment involves mapping workflows, understanding data sources, cleaning up data sources, integrating with them to make them easier for the models to access. And sort of our next platform sits in between the models on one side, and we're model agnostic, and the data sources, the skills, the workflows of the business. And so that takes a lot of customization and significant applied AI engineering capabilities, which we've built at Long Lake. So once we can take that platform, we buy a company now or partner with a company now very quickly. In the beginning, it took us over a year with our first acquisitions to actually find the real potential of AI and see it in the business outcomes. But now within days of partnering with a company, we can deploy this very quickly and see immediate impact.

**Elad Gil** (2:15)
So you can buy a company and then within a couple of weeks, you have instant margin lift, because the employees of that new acquisition is going on a platform you've already built for similar businesses.

**Alexander Taubman** (2:24)
Yeah, what we see is instant time savings. And then the question is, how do we grow to give our team members? So we actually invest very heavily in growth. We're actually not really, you know, we're not focused on cost saving. We're actually focused on driving growth and customer experience.
That's our big and what we've seen is a much more powerful model, because our view of AI is it's incredibly positive sum. I know this is a little bit of a narrative violation, but we actually think AI makes people more productive. More productive people, you want more of them. When your customers are happier, you grow faster. You actually create jobs and everybody wins. And so we're seeing this in our companies. We're the fastest growing company in the HOA industry now. We are growing organically. When we invested in the businesses, they're typically growing to 5% a year in terms of volume. We're now growing 20 plus percent a year. And that's because we've made our team members, we've given them extra capacity to go and serve more customers. We actually have better, more attractive customer acquisition economics, because we can serve those customers at incrementally lower costs with better products and services. So we've been able to take sort of the software style playbook of go-to-market and apply it into these sleepy industries.
And I think it's a win-win-win.

**Elad Gil** (3:35)
It must be hard for your employees to go and work anywhere else in the industry then, because if they're dramatically more productive, they're doing less busy work. Have you found that you've decreased employee churn or about other things?

**Alexander Taubman** (3:44)
That's right. We've seen very, very high retention of our team members across all of our acquisitions. And actually, this is the vision. This is the vision Long Lake. We want to basically be the best place to work in every industry that we operate, so we can give the best people the best tools with the best customers, and that flywheel becomes self-perpetuating. Because if you now leave Long Lake or you leave one of our partner companies to go to a competitor, you have to start doing all this mundane work again. 25% of your day, 30% of your day, you have to go do that again. And the thought of it's like giving up email or something.