Co-Founder and CEO @ Long Lake
Joined February 2012
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Today, Long Lake completed our $6.3B acquisition of Amex GBT.
Long Lake acquires and transforms generational businesses with AI across the American services economy.
Amex GBT is the travel partner for 17,500 businesses in 140 countries. Last year, Amex GBT booked 35 million trips for 10 million travelers.
This marks Long Lake’s 40th acquisition, and our family of companies now employs nearly 30,000 people.
We founded Long Lake three years ago with the thesis that AI is going to change every company, but there’s a large overhang between AI capabilities and how most businesses leverage AI tools.
We partner with strong, profitable, and growing businesses to help them deploy AI and improve their customer service.
Our first cohort of companies has doubled their EBITDA in less than two years through topline and productivity growth, all while increasing headcount. (We’re proud to say that we’ve never conducted a layoff.)
We’re excited to share a bit more about what we’ve been up to.
“You have to embed in the organization and collaborate with the people doing the work to understand what great work actually looks like.”
This is why we founded Long Lake.
@prathiknaidu explains a bit more about our strategy:
David’s Founders podcast is a required part of onboarding for every new Long Lake employee. It was a privilege to sit down with him and tell the Long Lake story in full for the first time.
My conversation with @AlexTaubman, co-founder and CEO of Long Lake.
Long Lake is 3 years old, has 30,000 employees, $4 billion in revenue, and just took Amex Travel private.
Alex and his partners have spent the last three years building Long Lake with almost no public profile. They started in HOA management and expanded into five service lines. Their latest deal: $6.3 billion for American Express Global Business Travel.
Long Lake buys great businesses and makes them better with AI. Their engineers sit alongside the people doing the work, understand what slows them down, and build tools that give them more time to serve customers.
We talk about what he learned growing up in a family of entrepreneurs, why Long Lake built its own AI platform, what Henry Singleton and the Rales brothers taught him about compounding, and why the best partners make you more ambitious.
Alex wants to spend the next 50 years on this. We talk about how far it could go.
0:00 The $6.3 billion Amex GBT deal
1:21 Bringing AI to the real economy
6:17 Why greater productivity can mean more jobs
11:29 A prepared mind and a tight acquisition filter
16:01 Nexus and the AI platform behind Long Lake
17:32 Put the engineers where the work happens
20:36 Why own the businesses instead of selling software?
22:28 Build tools people want to use
25:24 A high bar for talent, acquisitions and technology
28:03 What his grandfather taught him about removing friction
36:40 Learning capital allocation at Goldman Sachs and Oaktree
41:01 Buying founder-owned businesses with permanent capital
44:35 How the Long Lake team came together
47:26 The best partners make you more ambitious
49:28 More than $4 billion in projected revenue
53:32 Why going public could expand Long Lake’s ambition
54:23 Henry Singleton and staying flexible
55:57 John Malone and the businesses that will endure
57:57 Why Long Lake doesn’t plan to sell
1:00:13 Could Long Lake become a trillion-dollar company?
Includes paid partnerships.
We're excited to bring these capabilities to @amexgbt at scale.
Amex GBT is 111 years old, with over 25,000 team members serving more than 10,000,000 travelers across 140 countries. As one team, we’re excited to double down on what makes Amex GBT so great: the best inventory and pricing, excellent customer service, and a brand you can trust.
Over the next few years, AI agents are going to transform how we book and manage travel. We are grateful to partner with the industry leading travel management platform to usher in this next era of travel.
Long Lake is a small team of engineers, operators, and investors focused on acquiring and growing the best services businesses in the world, and transforming them with AI.
And we’re hiring. If this sounds interesting to you, I’d love to chat:
llmh.com/careers
AI is one of America’s greatest achievements, and yet 99% of U.S. services businesses lack the resources to deploy it. We’ve built Long Lake to bring AI to the real world, as a true partner, at scale. It’s a hard problem that can only be solved by a purpose-built team of world-class AI Engineers, Operators, and M&A professionals working together.
We’re hiring - join us.
llmh.com