Amit Sharma

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.