YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexander Taubman

lines on the record: 25
first: 2026-05-11
most recent: 2026-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Customers, it changes the whole mindset of the organization. Now you're growing, you look like a software company now, where you're now growing with high incremental margins, and that allows you to invest more in growth, be more growth-oriented. And that actually is one of the most interesting and exciting things about sort of this whole AI flowing through the ecosystem is we're seeing our partners. And you could call any of our CEOs, and some of them have been running their businesses for decades. I think they'd tell you they're having the best time of their career now with us because we're actually growing like a software company and we're seeing our team members are getting paid more and are happier and our customers are happier. So it's been a lot of fun.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's interesting. I'll tell you, this is kind of a non obvious thing that I've observed, which is actually most of these service companies are growth-oriented, and most of these founders built these companies from their bootstraps over 20, 30, 40 years by knocking on doors and figuring out how to convince people to use their service in a certain market. But it's actually now, it's really painful to grow because in these industries that are very labor intensive, if you grow 20%, you might need to go hire another 20% people. And then you got first, you got to find them, you got to train them, then you have to manage them. And if you're already making a lot of money and you're kind of, you know, you don't, you know, it's this. And then by the way, so you do all that work to hire those people. And then you only keep 20 cents on the dollar of every incremental dollar of revenue that comes in because, you know, most of it goes to incremental labor. So that's like a very high marginal tax rate, essentially, on the growth activity. So what we've done with AI is when you make your existing teams 30, 40% more efficient and they can handle more.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. We're very open to that, and we've been encouraging that we like to win together. I mean, this goes back to super positive song about AI. We think we can make everyone happy here. Customers, team members, you know, and the business founders and management who participate alongside us in the productivity increase. And so that's why I think we've been a differentiated partner. And my view is as we prove this out more and more over time and the capital markets start to understand kind of our vision and what we're doing, I'd like to think our cost of capital will keep coming down as well, which then further makes us a better partner to these folks because we can actually pay more than anyone else. Because, you know, and this is sort of what Danaher proved and transdime and all these great operators over many years is that, you know, if you can establish a currency, you can actually not have to lose deals over price because you can operate the deals better. And then you have a diversified platform that's more valuable and growing faster with better financial metrics.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a pretty good value prop. And so, and then we also encourage rollover and equity alignment from existing shareholders or management and founders. And so in our first four verticals lines that we've gone into, we have significant rollover participation from the original founders and leaders.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have to, you know, AI is very, very underpenetrated. It's probably around 1% penetrated in terms of real enterprise AI use cases. And when you think about sort of the overall economy, first of all, 99% of businesses in America are small businesses and they don't have access to the resources of big companies. But even big companies are having a hard time figuring out how to drive maximum impact from AI. We are sort of, we're solving many needs. And in terms of the philosophy I mentioned before of we've kind of tried to design the product you want to use as if we were a seller or if we were a management team to be the optimal partner and that's how we've designed Long Lake. And so we have this cross-functional team. They become your partners day one. I mean, you get to partner with Varun or you get Varun Terasse Pritique and Jason and our extraordinary engineering team will basically live in your office for the next two years helping you fix all your problems.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, thank you. We have had a really good success. Our message has really resonated with business owners and management teams, I think, because I think it is solving a really important need, which is having a long-term permanent capital partner is already a wonderful thing. But having that partner with deep applied AI engineering expertise and a platform that you can deploy day one.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I'd love to know that the next steward of that company is going to be a long term investor and a long term steward of the employees and the customers. And so that's part of our vision as well. We've designed Long Lake. Part of it is, you know, I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and we had a family business that my grandfather started my dad and uncle ran for a 75-year-old company that we recently exited actually. When we designed Long Lake, I designed it with that mindset of sort of build the product you yourself would want to use, which is I would love to be, you know, if I was a seller of an asset partnering with Longlake. And that's our ambition.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the long term nature of what we're doing, you know, it's really hard. What we're doing is actually really hard And doing it, you can't do this in a year. You can't do this even in two years, three years. This is a multi-year transformation. These are sort of compounding effects where as you, as we talked about earlier, as you sort of give your people better tools, you get better people. And then you can pay them more. And then they can deliver better customer outcomes. And then you can grow faster.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, I think it's a really big market opportunity. This is 20 plus trillion TAM, like I said before. And I think we'd like to be the market leader in every segment that we're operating in. And I think there's a lot of segments to potentially add value to. So part of what inspired us always about the Danaherz of the world is they were able to compound. They developed a differentiated operating model. In their case started manufacturing and then life sciences, but they were always able to drive better growth, better customer satisfaction, better employee retention, and ultimately better productivity. And that allowed them to continually consolidate all these industries over a long period of time with a lot of outperformance. And so our vision is to sort of follow in the footsteps of some of those great companies within and do it within the services sector and with our sort of AI platform as our advantage. And I do think that there's something.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I've said this publicly in the press release that our vision is to really double down on the company's existing AI transformation strategy. And we see it as any industry that we operate in, we see our Nexus platform as giving our team members superpowers, deliver better customer outcomes, faster response times, faster disruption resolution. Imagine basically your travel counselor with AI superpowers. That's kind of the future we envision for MXGBT's customers.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know this is a customer trust that this franchise has built over 100 years is really extraordinary. And I think, and the company actually, and publicly reported, has done a really great job charting its future with AI transformation. And we just think we can double down on that and drive a lot of customer excellence”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, these are businesses that have navigated a century plus worth of technology transformation. And so, and we think they're going to be, it's going to be an extraordinary franchise for another century to come. But the way we came up with the thesis is we'd actually been, you know, we have a prepared mind approach at Long Lake. We have a whiteboard of call it 15, 20 industries that we think are very high value for us to focus on and travel was always one of them. And the reasons are, you know, it's a mission critical service. It's high cost of failure. Most trips are revenue generating. And, you know, if you miss a podcast with your favorite podcaster, for example, tragic. Right.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, That's right. Yeah, this is a 111 year old company. It was started in 1915 by American Express as a way for them to get their travelers text customers out of Europe during World War I. And actually, some parts, Carlson Wagonleet, which they acquired late last year, was founded, I think, in 1876. Wow.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've admired this company for as long as I, you know, I think I've been a customer, many of us involved in some of our investors that have traveled a lot in their careers, have used this company as a customer. And by the way,”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our private equity team comes from our MA team comes from top private equity firms like So Manny, one of our co-founders and M&A lead, came from GTCR. He actually worked on the most profitable deal in their history the month before he left to come to Long Lake. He might get embarrassed for me saying this, but I think he was named Employee of the Month at GTCR, the month he resigned. But GTCR, one of the top performing large-cap biofunds. We have folks from Blackstone, TPG, HIG. And mostly the reason they come to Long Lake is because even though these firms are extraordinary firms at what they do, they're not AI native. And so I think for those subsegment of those M&A professionals that really believe in our thesis, there's not many places that look like long-like today. And so we can provide a unique environment for them to deploy AI into all these companies.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's going to take all that and actually make it work in the real economy? There felt like a huge, huge gap. And so a lot of the folks that came together for our founding team actually were founders before. And technology, many of them had their own startups on the engineering team. They were either the co-founder of the CO or CTO of an Applied AI company. But what people realized is it's actually, for the reasons we talked about earlier, it's actually really hard to sell software into these services industries, much better to, it's like if you can't beat them, join them. And so what we're building sort of a team of founders. And we want Long Lake to be a place where entrepreneurial applied AI engineers can come and do some of their best work”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, thank you. I mean, I think it's a really exciting project. I think that's the idea of bringing AI into the real world. There's a lot, I mean, what the labs are doing is extraordinary, obviously, and they're enabling all of this and all the hundreds of billions of investment that's going in the models are getting part of our thesis was the models are going to get better every day. There's going to be a tremendous amount in the trillions of investment.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, thank you for saying that. Yeah. So because we were purpose built from day one to kind of be this cross-functional company with technology, DNA, change management, and M&A, we were able to attract the right type of people from network. And so I think 100% of our first 20 people were through network. We knew them really well. And people from places like Palantir. And so Rasmus, our co founder and CTO, he and I were connected through one of our early investors and board members who've all known each other for kind of 15 plus years. We all started our careers together.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Our team views our employees and our team members in the field as the customer, and that feedback loop internally, that's the other point is we have a much tighter feedback loop. So the old skunk works thing of you want the engineers and the factory to be co-located so you can have more innovation. That's what we have at Long Lake. So our team members and our engineers are together in the field all the time. I think there's of our engineering team, they're probably in 20 different states right now sitting with team members across our architecture business, across our HOA business, across our HR services or specialty tax business. And so they're sort of, and there's a deep amount of change management that's involved. So this is a lot of sitting with the team members understanding their pain points. And so there's a real solutions orientation of how do we take the pain point and then we build a tool within Nexus to solve it. And that feedback loop is really important. So you get to better outcomes this way.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think that you can drive better win-win business outcomes with deeper alignment. And so by actually owning the companies and owning those customer relationships directly, we can drive better results. Software companies are wonderful. We partner with many of them. But when you're just selling software and you don't actually then care what happens with the business outcomes, you just don't see the same business.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can pay you the most, give you the best tools, and we're growing the fastest. That's part of our vision is it's just really making things better for team members and customers. And by the way, the other important thing is you give your team members superpowers with AI. The customers are much, much happier. So we're seeing customer retention going up. We're seeing response times much faster. Errors going down in sort of things like board reporting, budgeting, email. And that's driving up customer retention.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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. It's just so actually we've started to become a real talent magnet in these industries and our companies. And by the way, we can pay people the most because they're the most productive. They're actually making more money. And we're delighted about that.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 fastest growing company in the HOA industry now. We are growing organically. When we invested in the businesses, they're typically growing zero to five percent 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 cost 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.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, it's 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 and we have more productive people. You want more of them.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're involved with. Yeah, that's right. So 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 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, 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. You know, 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.”
2026-05-11 · No Priors · Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT