Bringing AI to the Real Economy | Alexander Taubman

David Senra (0:03)

I want to start with the fact that you just bought a public company, you took it private, it's over 100 years old, and you paid, what, six and a half billion for it?

Alexander Taubman (0:09)

Yeah.

David Senra (0:10)

This is Amex Travel.

Alexander Taubman (0:11)

Yeah.

David Senra (0:11)

Can you tell the story?

Alexander Taubman (0:12)

We announced that we're buying American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion, and it's just an unbelievable business. We've always respected this business. It's a 111-year-old company over a century of customer excellence, and it was actually started in 1915 by American Express to help get their travelers, Chex customers out of Europe during World War I.

I've been a customer of this business. Most people have, they do, they manage to travel for some of the most iconic customers and businesses in the world, close to half the Fortune 500, a huge percentage of the Global 2000, a lot of the US government and military governments around the world. It's a really remarkable franchise, and the opportunity to partner with them, take the company private, invest in growth, invest in technology, and bring AI into the travel experience for millions of travelers per year that they're supporting. It's a big scale of impact for us to pursue the Long Lake mission, which is to deploy AI into the real economy. And travel is a huge multi-trillion dollar global sector growing better than GDP, and we just think that we can have a massive impact here.

David Senra (1:21)

So let's step back, because me and you have been friends for a long time, Long Lake has always been a company that it's like an if you know, you know thing, where you guys had basically no public profile. I don't even think you have a LinkedIn or anything.

True. Yeah. So no public profile. I know everybody involved actively were not seeking attention, yet ton of people were starting to copy your idea. And then I've seen some of their financials and they're just copying it way worse than you guys are. So for the people that have never heard of Long Lake, explain the thesis and explain why you think right now is the best opportunity to pursue that thesis.

Alexander Taubman (1:59)

We formed the company three years ago with the mission of basically bringing AI into the real economy. What we saw was incredible revolution happening on the intelligence frontier, you know, dating back.

If we had talked to each other four years ago after ChatGPT launched and you told me that four years from now, back then, if you remember, the models were amazing, but they couldn't do addition. And recently, the last couple of weeks, you know, the model solved some of the 10 most difficult, you know, unknown math problems in history and may win a Fields Medal. And if you had told me that that level of frontier intelligence was going to, you know, many people would have thought you were crazy. It couldn't happen that fast. But a lot of people in Dworkesh was talking about this recently. You know, you would have thought in that world, everybody would be using AI everywhere, the economy would look totally different, GDP would have doubled or tripled. What we saw is we'd been working a lot with small businesses and in the real economy prior to founding Long Lake. That was my history for 10 or 15 years, working with founder-owned businesses.

Deploying technology innovations in the real economy is actually really hard. There's tons of legacy systems, tons of legacy data, workflows, change management. And so being able to deploy these innovations at scale in the economy is actually really hard. And so we saw that with Long Lake and the mission of Long Lake was really to be, you know, to help pioneer the, you know, bringing those frontier intelligence innovations and breakthroughs into real businesses and partnering with real American entrepreneurs and important verticals and important businesses where we could help diffuse the technology at scale. We never wanted much publicity. We just want to be known for our work. I think, you know, my chief of staff, Kim, who, you know, she was in a leadership program and the mantra of the leadership program was talk less, do more. And so that's kind of been, you know, our ethos. We just keep our head down and just focus on executing. It's a lot of work. It's really hard.

David Senra (3:45)

Hold on. I got to tell you a funny story about that. So I've spent a few times with a lot of people that know, like, these European private family dynasties, right? They never had, like, the companies aren't public. They don't see publicity. Like, you just, they're essentially hidden, but they're extremely wealthy. And somebody who told me one of their family mottoes was to be, to not be seen.