Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman
Episode publishedPodcast: No Priors: Artificial Intellig...No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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Today, know priors were joined by Alex Topman, the cofounder and CEO of Long Lake Management. Long Lake recently announced their intent to acquire American Express Global Business Travel for $6,300,000,000 in 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 running Acid Enterprise.
Pleasure to be here.
Thank you for having me, Elon. 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 6,300,000,000, which is pretty amazing. And 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. And so it's very exciting to have you here and learn more about your business.
Yeah, that's right. So we've taken an approach since the beginning of investing very heavily in our horizontal AI platform, 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 work
buy a company, and then within a couple weeks, you have instant margin lift because the employees of that new acquisition just go on a platform you've already built for similar businesses.
Yeah. What 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, it's a much more powerful model because it's Our view of AI is it's incredibly positive some. I know this is a little bit of a narrative violation, but we actually think AI makes people more productive. And we have more productive people. You want more of them. And when your
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?
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 get 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. You 25% of your day, 30% of your day, you have to go do that again. And the tho
That's so cool. Why do this via acquisition versus just offering software to people? In other words, the traditional Silicon Valley playbook would be you find the HOA industry, you realize that there's a need in terms of software, you build software for the industry, then you sell it as a vendor,
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