Bringing AI to the Real Economy | Alexander Taubman

I want to start with the fact that you just bought a public company. You took it private, so over 100 years old and you paid what, six and a half billion for it? Yep. And this is AMEX Travel. Yeah. Can you tell the story? We announced that we're buying American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion and, you know, it's just an unbelievable business. We've always respected this business. You know, 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 checks customers out of Europe during World War I. I've been a customer of this business. Most people have, they do, you know, 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, you know, pursue the long-lake mission, which is to deploy AI into the real economy and, you know, 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. So let's step back because we knew you've been friends for a long time. Long-lake has always been a company that it's like, if you know you know thing, where, you know, you guys had basically no public profile, I don't even think you have a LinkedIn or anything. True. Yeah. So, no public profile, you, I know everybody involved actively, we're like not seeking attention, yet a ton of people were starting to copy your, your idea and then I've seen some of their financials and they're just like copying it way worse than you guys are. So like for the people that don't have never heard of long-lake, explain the thesis and explain why you think right now is the best opportunity to pursue that thesis. 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 and, you know, dating back. If you had, if we had talked to each other four years ago, after Chattu Petit launch 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 models solved some of the 10 most difficult, you know, unknown math problems in history and may win a field's 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 Door Cache 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. But we saw it's 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 on businesses. And 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 like in 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 came who, you know, she was in a leadership program and the mantra 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. Oh, I got to say 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, there's the companies aren't public, they've done some publicity. Like you just, they're essentially hidden, but they're extremely wealthy. And somebody who told me one of their family models was to be, to not be seen. So like we want to be, but not be seen. I just love that idea. Yeah. Like I was very inspired, you know, growing up in Michigan in the Midwest, like there's some unbelievable entrepreneurs and businesses that have been built that are worth, you know, billions of dollars doing, you know, unsexy things like construction or distribution or whatever you might. And people are very low key. They're totally normal people. You don't, you know, so our view is we want to be the best possible partner to those kinds of business owners, you know, we want to, they've built, in many cases, I mean, them actually be too great example, it's an iconic franchise. It predates the invention of the airline. That's the brand, you know, that we want to sort of partner with and let them shine. Long Lake is just here to be sort of a deep, long term permanent capital partner who's going to help you bring AI into the company, make your team members faster, better smarter, make your customers happier. But say specifically why you think there was such an opportunity even three years ago to bring AI into the real world. The sort of diffusion problem is a really hard, hard problem. And several years ago there was this question of like, will intelligence work? And obviously it's worked. And we're seeing that now in crazy levels and faster. And I'm super AI-pilled always have, that's why I, you know, left my old job to co-found the company. But it's happened even better and faster than, you know, even I expected. It's no longer a question of does the technology work. Now it's a question of, now the markets are very concerned about how are we going to finance all this? And, you know, I think the real answer is we need to demonstrate, you know, you can borrow against future cash flows in order to finance this stuff and people, you know, running into the trillions of dollars of investment to be able to scale the models to really where we want them to be in 10 or 20 years. In order to finance all of that, you need to see a return in the real economy. So actually one of the things Long Lake was formed to do is actually take those frontier innovations, deploy them into really high ROI use cases, taking away toilsome work from our team members, you know, mundane work, data entry, you know, process-oriented stuff that really a lot of people don't like to do. And that, taking that away and freeing up human capacity for, you know, more impactful work dealing with the customers, focusing on growth, that's super high ROI. Focusing on growth is really important. People think, oh, you take some technologists, matching with some PE guys, they're going to buy a bunch of existing businesses, gut it, replace all the humans with AI, you know, essentially cut costs, and that's like the value creation. And that's not the thesis of what you guys are actually doing. You actually think that, and you're demonstrating that you're increasing revenue growth, and you're actually not cutting people. Yeah, absolutely. So this is like a contrarian take that we had in the beginning as well. We're very positive some, you know, we really believe in this concept of like AI abundance. And if you look throughout history, you know, most innovations that lead to big productivity gains are actually good for the economy, good for wages, good for consumers. And we think this is like, you know, just a sort of like a mega productivity gain, it's going to be good for everybody. And so what we're seeing in our companies, and we started in HOA management, and we've now bought, I think, 20 something companies in that space, we've bought close to 40 companies now in total across, this travel makes it our fifth service line. And what we're seeing across industries, and in our businesses that we've owned for longest like HOA management, what we're seeing is significant job growth, we're actually adding heads, because if you think about it, if your people are 50% more productive and can handle 50% more clients and with better customer service, so you're retaining customers better, you're growing faster, you know, so the people are much more valuable. Do you want more of them or less? You obviously want more of them, it's like a salesperson, you know, if you have a sales person with AI that's now doing 3x quota, do you want to have like one third of the sales people? No, you obviously want, you know, as many of those people as you can have. And so I think this is all going to be very good for jobs, and very good for USGDP and the economy. And that's a big part of our mission as well, is basically bringing this positive some, you know, AI revolution to the economy, 20 trillion plus dollar services economy in the US, and, you know, obviously, you know, millions of people. Wait, so you said you're in five different verticals now? Yeah, what are they? So we started in homeowner association management, which is a actually really big business that people, you know, don't pay a lot of attention to, but there's tens of millions of homes managed in association. And so we're providing, you know, now market leading service and one of the fastest growing companies in that space. We then moved into HR services, specialty tax, infrastructure services now as a big area for us. So we have architecture, engineering, we're looking at other sort of businesses in that broader infrastructure space and now travel. 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What I understand about you, just from being your friend, is that you kind of have a map of all-- how do you think about this? Is like, just say a way that buff it. You couldn't tell him about an asset. And he'd be like, surprised. Oh, I didn't know I wanted that asset. He's like, no, I kind of like mapped out everything, just waited for the right time. If I could buy that company or could buy that asset, I already knew about it, I already studied it. You guys do the same thing, correct? We do. OK, why? And explain this. Yeah, so we want to be doing this for a long time. Still relatively young. I like to think I'm still young. And our friend's act tells us we're going to live to 150. So hopefully I could actually be doing this for at least 50 years, maybe 100 years. So in the fullness of time, we want to bring A.I. to huge swaths of the economy. We're now operating in roughly $3 trillion of the $20 trillion Tam, so-called 15% of the economy in the US, and now we're global. And we just want to keep adding to that. So over time, we'd love to have a market-leading business platform in many more industries. But there's moments in time when you can find a great asset with a great team at the right price. And then there's other times where certain industries are not attractive for long periods of time. And so we take a prepared mind approach where there's our top 15 or 20 industries that we think are interesting for our strategy at any given time. We're constantly force-ranking those industries based on what we learn, based on how market dynamics are evolving. And the best way to learn about is look at deals in the space. And so we've built a really powerful sourcing engine where we're seeing 4,000 or 5,000 deals a year across all these sectors. And we'll literally do one or two new industries per year. So it's a big, big funnel, very tight filter. And I can talk to you about how we select industries and assets. That's literally what I was thinking. I was like, OK, when you're select-- I assume this is an operating at the founder level that you guys are the ones selecting. OK, this is the next industry we're going to enter. Correct? It's more based on opportunities coming our way to go back to Buffett, like the better chance of getting a date if you're bi-sexual, public, and private. That quote, if you're twice a chance of getting a date. So we like to keep an open mind. If you're open to 20 industries, you're more likely to find a great business and a great team to partner with. We just keep that funnel going all the time. We're constantly looking. And when we see something, it's kind of like when you see it. If there's a great business, like MXGBT with high '90s, logo retention, logo retention, 100% kind of dollar retention with tremendous customer relationships with the best companies in the world, built average of 15-year relationship with their top a couple hundred customers, deep, deep embedded partnerships where we sort of managed a mission-critical service for all these companies travel. I mean, it's a small cost, and it's mission-critical. You don't want to screw it up. We talk about that century of customer trust, but it really means something, especially in travel, right? If you have like thousands of people traveling in the Middle East and a war breaks out, or you have like a huge snowstorm in Chicago and your entire team gets stuck in the middle of the night and two in the morning, like things have to work. Somebody's got to be able to answer the phone and know what to do. This is an amazing business. You just kind of know when you see it. So was AMX your first entry into travel? Yeah. OK. We'd been building a thesis in that space for like a year, meaning looking at several other assets. It was on our whiteboard of industries that we thought was really attractive. For reasons, I'm happy to go into. And I want to hear about this. What do you think AI is going to do to this business? I think it's going to make the travel experience much more seamless. I think things can be much more personalized, more proactive. Right now, there are a lot of legacy, messy data issues, and systems issues in the travel space. You have these supplier systems and customer systems and distributor systems, and it's a longstanding industry. So over many decades. And so it's kind of complicated. But one thing, as an example, AI is really good at this. It's like our friend Scott Wu, obviously, like Devon and things like that, integrating messy systems. And this is what we've built Nexus to do. So Nexus, and our co-founder, Rasmus Visman, comes from like a data. And he's like, what's the top computer science PhD at Oxford, he won the prize for the best thesis. And he's like amazing at building simplifying complex messy data structures. And so Nexus, our AI platform, is built specifically for this use case. And so we think about how we make this better experience. How do we make this better experience? I know what Nexus is, the person listening might not explain what Nexus is. Yeah. So Nexus is our horizontal AI platform that we've been building across verticals. And so we've been investing. And part of the reason we're in multiple verticals is I think scales increasingly important in an AI world. In general, you're competing for the best talent. Being able to leverage innovation and building a platform across 5, 10, 15 different scaled industries allows you, I think, every single industry we go into, it makes Nexus better. We add additional-- Why is it a bit better? So as an example, about 70%, 80% of the infrastructure is shared across the verticals. And that's kind of like our-- it's our platform where on one side, we integrate with all the models. We're model agnostic. And we kind of use different models for different tasks. Or even one task might be using several models just to create one task. On the other side, you integrate with the data, the workflows, and the different software systems of the business. And you have to build that deep integration. So Nexus sits in the middle. A lot of that intelligent model routing, security, sort of agentic orchestration layer, things like that, that's reusable across all the industries. That last 20% or 30%, which is embedding Nexus into the work flows of the business, mapping the workflows, integrating with these different data sources. That is what takes-- it's a very hard technical challenge. It's why you need like a world class AI team to be able to actually use AI in the real world because you have all these systems. And this is a really important part, too, because again, I hear other people talking about long-lake. And I'm like, oh, they don't actually understand what you guys are actually doing. How many different states are your engineers operating? And right now, they're not fucking just sitting in your-- I mean, we're operating in probably almost every state at this point. And our engineering team will be-- I'm guessing 70% of the engineering team, but today is probably sitting with a team member in the field across 15 or 20 states. And they're working on that last 20%. Exactly. Sitting with our team members, understanding the pain points, what's breaking, what's useful, what's not useful, and iterating. And we know we-- to your point about learning from greatest history, greatest entrepreneurs, like Kelly Johnson, very inspiring on this. The skunk works. You want the engineer sitting in the factory. And that's actually kind of what long I guess. There's a book on the counter behind there that's unreleased, and it's all about SpaceX. What's fascinating to me is I just did an episode of founders on Kelly Johnson, because in the preface of that unreleased book, he talks about-- he's like, if you just go back and read Kelly Johnson's 14 points in the way he operated skunk works, it reads exactly what SpaceX is doing. Because ideas are not new. You just use over and over again. The other great motto that I love on this point is from Danahar, who's big inspiration to us, also the Rails brothers, is their motto was common sense rigorously applied. Yeah, it's excellent. And so that's kind of what we do, too. If you can take some of the world's best AI engineers, they can sit with your team members, understand the problems, and we can use common sense to fix them. It makes Nexus better. So Nexus now integrates better with all those various systems. And each different industry needs different things. So for example, in H.O.A. management, it turns out a lot of the work is done in email. So you're taking in emails from homeowners and boards and responding, and they're complex emails. It'll be like, what's going on? We need to find a snow removal company. And so it's not just a simple response. You actually have to go map out. Here's the 10 other communities we manage. Here's the five vendors. Here's what they charge you. Here's how people reviewed them. Here's the schedule that you might need to actually send an email to the vendor, get schedules, and then respond. That email could take 45 minutes or an hour or longer to actually craft a thoughtful response and proposal. If Nexus has access to all that information and can draft an email for you before you even wake up in the morning, you have a draft in your inbox to respond with a 99% accurate. And then you can just edit it as the manager. So now instead of spending an hour, you spend five or 10 minutes putting it in your own voice. And by the way, the voices are getting better and better now. This is something we're working on to each of our managers now can have Nexus drafting emails in their own voice. So this is like a capability that we built for a joy management, but it's now applicable to every other business. It turns out pretty much every business works a lot in email. Travel, for example, 55% of travel agent inbound queries from travelers is in email. New bookings, changes, cancellations, it's all in email. So because we solved that problem in a joy management, Nexus is now better. As this tool built in, it's going to day one have a huge impact in MXGBT. And I could give you 10 other examples of this. Has anybody tried to buy Nexus as a separate tool? You know, it's funny. We do. It's because we haven't been very public. Not a lot of people really know about what we're doing. But a lot of our investors have asked us, can we partner to use Nexus and maybe for them we would do it. But we've never wanted to sell software. First of all, software obviously is a great business. We partner with tons of software companies in all these industries with the labs, et cetera. But the problem with selling software is you don't actually care about what happens in the outcome. So for us, we're very outcomes driven. We want to really actually change the way these businesses operate. Change the way these industries actually function. And to do that, you need to be an owner. You need to really be an owner operator. And so taking Nexus, taking the AI breakthroughs that are happening at the frontier, deploying them into the businesses for real outcomes, i.e. faster growth, better customer experience, better team member experience, being able to pay your team members more because they're more productive. And then ultimately, to your point, shareholder returns, that's what we're focused on. And I think the vertical integration of owning your own platform and deploying it only into your own companies creates a lot of alignment. We've talked a bunch about all these other founders episodes. And I love that you're part of your onboarding along Lake is listening to specific episodes of founders, which I think obviously is fucking genius, but I'm biased on that. But I think this is because I think again, especially on the investor side, it's like oh yeah, let's just sell the software. It's just like well, I go back to Larry Ellison, I've done like I don't know six episodes on him. And he has this great line about this, you know, if he's the, maybe the best in the world at understanding this. He's like it's not a software problem. It's a human problem. It's like you can't, like there's no point in me selling something if your work, if the way you work doesn't change, it's like that I can't build a good business. Around that. And it's like okay, so how do you get over the human problem? Well, you own the goddamn company. You control the workflow. It's interesting because a slightly non-obvious thing with this is we don't actually force anyone to use our tools. So owning the company is really valuable in a lot of ways, but not because we force people to use the tools. That was the Larry Ellison's point. You can't force them. If we have to force someone to use our Nexus platform, then the platform's not good enough. We take an approach of our, the customer, our team members and we're now going to have 3,000 team members operating globally across all these sectors. And so- You say this to me? We're 30,000 people working at- You said your customer or your team members? Yeah. We think of our team members and we now have 30,000 of them globally as our customer. Okay. And so the whole idea is we want Nexus to be so magical. 30,000 employees. Yeah. In the business agenda. That's right. Okay. And I have to always convert. I love you, but you're like an East Coast finance guy. And I always have to convert the way you talk. We think of them as partners, you know, design partners and that's our customer. And so the whole idea is we want it to be so magical that when you introduce the tools to them, it goes viral inside the company. And we've now seen that and each we are, it's happening where as the models get better, as our products get better and as our deployment, playbooks get better, we're seeing the cohorts of adoption going crazy. Like it used to take us like maybe, I don't know, six months or something to activate a cohort. Now it's like you give them the tools and in like, you know, days and wait a minute. Hold on. So you're targeting these services. So they say, HOA is mandatory, right? And let's say I work there and now I'm using Nexus and all the other tools that you guys are building, right? And we'll talk about how you got elite technical talent too, right? My job is now, fucking 90% better. That also protects you for retention because like another HOA service company doesn't have these tools. Yeah. I'm going to go over there and it would be more of 90% more. Yeah. No, you don't want to do that. That's, this is a big part of our vision too, is that we want, we really want to be a talent magnet. We want to be the best place to work in every industry that we operate in. And part of that is you, if you can build people the best tools, make them more productive so they can make more money and have a better job. And by the way, we have these amazing quotes now from our team members. They're saying like, I don't feel like I'm working anymore because there's so much mental friction that comes from that 30% of work that's, you know, this manual road responding to emails, data entry, data, data, what they want to do is they want to focus on getting more customers, understanding that, you know, helping the customers more, interacting more with them, you know, there's a lot of fun parts of the job that keep people going. If we can do more of the fun parts, less of the, of the doll parts, they love their job more, they can make more money. And so then think about having to leave a long like partner company that has these tools and this setup and go to like, you know, a competitor down the street. You're not going to. It's going to become really powerful. I've already starting to see this. We're obviously only a couple of years in, but if you think forward, and this flywheel then, if you then have the best people in every industry using the best tools, creates a much better customer experience, and then you grow faster, you retain your customers better, you make more money, you can pay your people more. That's the positive some, you know, vision of, for us, of AI deployment is you can really create a better mouse trap in all these industries. Why should you be the one buying these companies, right? So we'll talk about that in one second. So the way I think about it is it's like, you have a ton of experience, right, in finance, what you were just telling me in my partner before we started recording and it's just like, you blew his mind because he didn't even, he was thinking about the same thing you were thinking about, and you're like, hey, you didn't think about this other part, this missing piece, which we'll, we want to talk about. But like, that's another example I've seen you do this a million times. And then with Zach, it's just like, he's going to be able to recruit the best technical AI talent in the world. And that's how I see the combination that, like, everybody's like, I want to do a long link does. Yeah, but you're not Alex and you're not Zach. Am I wrong about this? Well, thank you for saying that. We've got an amazing team. We go back a long ways, Zach and I first met at Goldman when he was a summer analyst, I was an analyst. He introduced me to Rasmus, our co-founder and CTO, he was at Oxford with at the same time as, you know, I mentioned, was top student there. The sort of team came together through network. And so, you know, first 20 people, I think, were all from like, you know, network and people that we knew deeply from both an investment acquisition side as well as apply AI technology. We're growing much faster now, we're closer to 60, I mean, we're still small at the long like level. We're only about 55, 56 people now will probably be, you know, closer to 100 people by the end of the year. It really is a world class team, it's, you know, it's, I'd say, 90% AI engineers and operations deployment folks and then 10% sort of acquisitions, you know, M&A finance. But yeah, I do think you need, you need to be able to do three things, really world class to be able to, to deploy this technology. You need to be able to buy great companies as well, so you need a great M&A function. You need to be able to build amazing world class technology, so you need world class technology that rivals, you know, the labs or some of the best, you know, apply AI companies. And then you need change management operations because we were purpose built. And because we started with the big vision of we want to, you really kind of help change the whole economy, I think we were able to attract, you know, much better people. And that's been, you know, that's been starting to compound now. And, you know, we still, I think 75% of our teams come from referrals, from in network referrals. So, we have a very strong, and it's a very tight filters, you can imagine. I mean, I think this quarter, you know, we, we hired 3% of applicants basically, and we saw, I don't know, close to 1,000 applicants this quarter. So, we have a very tight funnel, just like we do for deals, and, you know, I think one of my biggest learnings and it is just high bar and everything is really the key. And so high bar and talent, high bar and acquisitions, high bar and technology. And that's kind of what I think you need to make this work. What, initially got you interested in finance to be honest. I just loved it. I grew up in a, in a family of entrepreneurs. My grandfather, who was big inspiration for me, started a real estate business after World War II. He essentially invented the strip mall. Yeah, the, the shopping center. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. He didn't actually do strip malls. He, well, he did have probably earlier in his career, but he's a great book that you gave me about him called the rest hold resistance. Yeah. So the concept, by the way, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a fun reference. We have it in our office, but basically the whole concept of threshold resistance is you want the shopper to, to be more likely to go into the store. So he was, he was sort of a early pioneer of, of retail. He just thought he could make things better. And it was actually that was a big inspiration to me, try to make things better in life. And so one of the ideas was, you know, you know, the threshold was the, is the entrance to the store. And you, the more you had to step up steps or go down some dark hallway in order to get. And that's how stores used to be designed. There used to be these big windows with big, you know, with merchandising in them. And you'd have to go through the windows and some like dark alley in order to get to the door in the back. Nobody fucking want to go in them. So his idea was bring the door to the front, have no, have no threshold, have it be the same, you know, like, like that over there, you can't see, but that, that, you want to walk through that. He, he, he, working out almost like, like a math equation, like, even like half a step up or do shit by like 20, people coming by like 20%. Exactly. He did a lot of really creative things that, you know, we can tell you more about it. He was very innovative and he always brought this kind of continuous improvement mindset, similar to like the Dan or her continuous improvement concept. And honestly, it's all big inspiration for me. You want to make it so easy and so magical for the shopper to go into the store that they'll go in and spend more money, ultimately, which is good for the store and all that. And actually, some of those principles, like, I think you can apply more generally, like with technology, for example, we want to make Nexus so magical and so easy to use that our team members just love it and they can just use it. - You wanna minimize threshold resistance on AI adopters? - This is exactly what you're talking about. It's like, hey, you know, the reason we can have this horizontal AI platform is 'cause 70, 80%, it's like every business deals with the same shit. - Yes. - When you were just talking about this, I just recorded this crazy episode of Travis Kalanick from Uber. It was fucking crazy set. Exactly where you are. And we talked for hours. And he was breaking down in like my new detail about even like the, every single page you would see to Uber compared to like Lyft. And he's just like every single little thing. It's like, and there's a thousand things I had to optimize. That if you're just copying me, you like, you copy what you see, but you don't understand the thinking behind it. It's exactly what you're talking about. It's like this guy's just obsessed with shopping malls or shopping centers and realizing that, hey, I'm gonna knock six inches off here in my bottom line, my profit increases by 25% or whatever. - By the way, I think it's very much the same with technology and websites and Amazon that came later and things like that, which is just these little tweaks can really impact behavior. And just by making things by both my podcasts. Like founders has no intro. I just get right fucking to it. And this one has like a six second one. Just like, no one wants to sit through that shit. Like I want, I'm listening to your podcast so I can hear some 30 second melody that you may like, no, I'm just not a concert dude. I can't wait to the point. - Yeah, exactly. So I grew up in this family of entrepreneurs and my father and uncle ran that business for 75 years. And so one of the inspiration we called the business long late 'cause that business was built and lived on long late road for the last 40 or 50 years in Michigan where I grew up. And it was actually funny so I just missively called you in East Coast by that guy, which you know I love you or friends, was like shit, I forgot he's from Michigan. (laughing) - I basically just really grew up kind of with a tremendous respect for like the American entrepreneur. And growing up in Michigan, I mentioned earlier, but you know, all these incredible entrepreneurs in businesses you've never heard of. The people in Michigan and the community in the business community you looked up to, there's no financing there. There's no tech scene there. It was people that built these, what people might, people in these coast might call unsexy businesses, but they're amazing businesses that you've built over 50 years or 75 years in the case of my family. And these people that built them are extraordinary people as you know, they're classic American founders. And you know, bootstrap their way to build what could be a huge business over time that provides an unparalleled service in that market. Like you know, we partnered with an architecture business in Minnesota that's built 50% of the K through 12 schools in Minnesota the last 70 years. I mean, they are like the McDonald's of, you know, architecture for schools. And this is why it's such a great country. You can go to any region in the country in any service line and there's someone that's spent 100 years obsessing over that product and service. And so growing up, you know, seeing this and around, you know, at the dinner table meeting some of these people and it was very inspiring to me. And so I think part of the reason that I was uniquely interested in this problem and mission was how do we bring the best of the intelligence revolution and the best engineers in the world to help these sort of iconic, you know, American entrepreneurs across industries, you know, deploy AI into their business to make their team members employees happier, make their customers happier, improve their bottom line. I mean, and grow faster. And by the way, if you do this in enough industries with enough businesses, you're eventually going to add up to really contributing to the economy in a big way. So I think there's a long term over decades opportunity to make a meaningful contribution. You know, I don't want to overstate our role in the intelligence revolution, but I think actually deploying the technology in the real world, driving real ROI, which by the way, and I was sort of starting to get this earlier, but by driving real ROI, we're actually generating cash back into the system to scale the models. And so you actually need this flywheel. You need some, you need distribution. And so part of the mission of Long Lake was, "Oh, your distribution for the labs, that's hilarious." - Yeah, we generate ROI in the real economy on the intelligence to reinvest into scaling the models. - That's funny. - And someone's got to do this. And by the way, you're seeing the labs start to dabble and deploy those and things like this, but I think somebody, you know, and many people, it's not going to be one company. You talked about, you know, other, you know, people, people often ask me about competition in the space, you know, people trying to do what Long Lake's doing. And I think it's great because I think to actually scale the models, we actually need to deploy this technology at scale, which is going to be, you know, this is a big economy. And the, by the way, it's a global economy too. - And it's going to happen slowly. Like the technology changes way faster than human nature does, human behavior does. The bottleneck is changing actually what people do. - And there are real hard technical problems. And you know, like Rasmus and, you know, a bunch of our co-founders like Varun and founding engineers are, you know, Pratik Tharazi. These are some of the best engineers. They all, you know, any one of them could raise money from a top VC tomorrow to start their own company. Any one of them could go get offers at, you know, amazing, whether it's the labs or some amazing software company. You need people like that. These are really hard technical problems. And what they would tell you is it's really interesting work because it's not easy to figure out how to, you know, take 100-year-old businesses' systems and data and problems that are global with each customer having some different optimization that it needs, like an, and I'm actually, for example. And somehow scaling that with Nexus and diffusing AI into that whole stack. - Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand they're recruiting and hiring. The very best talent is your most important priority. A-players recognize other A-players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value deal can give your company. He said we built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers with deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere. We can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/CENRA. That is deal.com/CENRA. - Okay, so you're meeting all these entrepreneurs you're growing up, you grew up in an entrepreneur family, these are family businesses. When did you start paying attention to finance though? In that aspect of it? - Yeah, so I knew I was really interested in business and I wanted to learn about capital markets and I started my career at Goldman. That's where I met one of our co-founders, Zach, who helped introduce me to Rasmus and sort of all this ended up coming together through that. But when I was at Goldman, I worked in the internal investment unit which was called Special Situations Group and it doesn't really exist in the same way 'cause of regulation now. But at the time it was a very cool group which I can talk more about, but I sort of just fell in love with this whole idea of capital allocation and I had some really amazing mentors there. And the whole idea of putting resources of the economy into the highest invest use and the whole concept of capitalism, I just kind of fell in love with the capital allocation across industries. That was one of the beautiful things about SSG at Goldman at the time was the pitch to young people coming out of school was you can, you get to sort of invest right away, you get to, we invest up and down the capital structure from debt down to equity, public and private across all industries. So I just got tremendous exposure at a young age to all these different types of businesses and ended up working on some really interesting investments there learned a ton by sort of not just observing but also getting to manage risk at a young age which was a very unique experience. - Young age is what, early 20s? - Yeah, I think I was like 22, 23. - Okay. - And actually I had a great mentor there who I later partnered with and worked with at Oak Tree, guy called Patrick McKenney, who empowered me very early, I think in my first year to basically manage like a couple of hundred million of invested capital. I mean, he was helping me of course and he gave me a lot of guidance but he empowered me to like take real risks early in my career and that was very formative for me. And I realized I just, I loved investing. I loved allocating capital and I loved businesses and learning about how the world works to me like understanding how these different businesses work and all these industries is sort of like really understanding how the economy in America really functions. And so I love that the intellectual curiosity just learning more about how different things work. - So wait, then you go to Oak Tree. - It's funny, you know, people ask me about Long Lake. I never could have told you at any point in time that I was going to be doing what I'm doing today. But if you think you were gonna found your own company or you thought it was gonna be a fund, like what'd you think it was gonna be? - I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was very focused on just continuing to learn and get better and improve my skills. So after Goldman, I went to business school and I actually, you know, what I was gonna say is my favorite case was Danahar. I've talked about Danahar, their big inspiration for us, the idea of like having that long-term compounding model where you have a structural advantage, you can operate the businesses better, you can have a better cost capital and you can have the best people and all that. - Oh no, let's come back to Danahar. - Yeah, I do, I wanna hear about that. Danahar, which you and I have to go before, but also the other people that you guys look up to and you emulate, but you go to be at school. - So I went to business school. I ended up interning, this is like, I'm just going chronological order, but I ended up interning at a holding company called Lucadia. So I was interested in holding companies and then I spent some time hanging out with Josh at Thrive. So basically I was always interested in technology and holding companies dating back 15 years. None of this clicked for me until much later. So I went to Oak Tree after business school I graduated. I decided I wanted to stick with investing and partnered with the guy I mentioned Patrick and we work directly with him. Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh, two legends of the investment world to build some new businesses for them. We had started Oak Tree's first equity business, we ended up getting involved in some of their credit businesses and helping out with a few things and doing, you know, we started several different products there and worked very closely with Howard and Bruce and just had a tremendous amount of fun learned a lot from them. But the whole time I knew I was not sort of fully expressing myself. I eventually wanted to start something. But I didn't know what it was. Yeah, as a founder, even if it was going to be a fund or investment company. Yeah, I think I just knew I wanted to do something entrepreneur, I wanted to build something and I wanted to, you know, do something on my own. But I didn't really know what it was. But then, you know, when I started really thinking, after I was at Oak Tree for almost 10 years, I started really thinking and, you know, brainstorming with some of the early co-founders along Lake who we've talked about and, you know, the Chatchee PT moment came out and it just became very obvious to me like this was what we were going to say. But where was the Toblin Capital? When did that happen in your life? Yeah. So when I was at Oak Tree, you know, I mentioned, you know, my dad and Grandfather's business and I was helping working with our family to build out Toblin Capital, which is our kind of family investment business, which is all our own money. And we ended up partnering with, you know, we did a bunch of these deals with investments in founder and companies. And we did, I think, close to 50 of them. So that's where you learned how to buy companies. Do you think? Yeah. It was a combination of stuff I learned at Oak Tree and stuff I was doing with Toblin Capital. And Oak Tree stuff was generally larger companies, public companies. Yeah. But the returns you had at Toblin Capital. You don't like talking about this, but I'll just say it and we can cut it if you're embarrassed. But it was like something like 70% IR or some shit like that, correct? We had a very good run. But yeah, it was an eye-opening experience for me because what I realized is we, you know, you know, there's some remarkable businesses out there. And just because something is a small or mid-sized business doesn't mean it's a bad business. Actually, I mentioned that, you know, business in Minnesota we partnered with that's been building all, you know, most of the schools and entire state for the last like 70 years. It's an amazing business. And so my learning was there's some unbelievable entrepreneurs going back to my roots in Michigan. It really resonated with me to be able to partner with some of these folks and help them grow their companies. And so, you know, to your point, we had a very successful run in bringing sort of permanent flexible capital, which was our own internal balance sheet. A long-term horizon being comfortable and not just comfortable, very encouraging of investing in growth. We don't, you know, we're not folks on short-term quarterly earnings, we're not overlevering the companies, you know, like a lot of private equity funds do. We basically are a long-term growth investor in great American businesses, partnered with great founders, and we can bring them things that they may not have, like for us it was helping them get growth resources, helping them get M&A resources, helping them have capital. You know, a lot of folks have built an amazing business, but they've never done an acquisition before. And they may have tons of competitors that they could run the business better than, and we can help them go and consolidate that industry and become a bigger-scale player and get the sort of industrial logic of that. And so, we had a lot of fun. That was sort of nights and weekends for me, over the 10 years, you know, when I was working at Oak Tree. So, that was very formative experience as well. Long like it all clicked. You know, it turns out I was always passionate about, you know, partnering with founders, I was always passionate about technology, passionate about capital allocation. Yeah. And then now, you met the right people where you could actually build a unique partnership that very few people can match. Yeah, exactly. I got very lucky, super grateful to have incredible early investors. I think they've really pushed our thinking and level of ambition, and, you know, obviously our mutual friend Rick, who's an extraordinary investor, and been one of our biggest partners in Heymont, the General Catalyst in Mark, and, you know, it's an amazing group of people at Elad Gil, and, you know, they've basically really pushed my thinking in a big way since the beginning. Rick tells me about you is that you're unusually receptive to both new ideas and criticism. And a lot of founders obviously, you know, are more, like, kind of headstrong and, you know, less, usually they'll listen, but they're running the ship, you know, well, that's nice for them to say, I think feedback's a gift. We want to get better every day, just like, you know, we want our companies to get better every day, we want our team to get better every day. I want to get better every day, and I have a tremendous amount to learn. That's why I love your podcast, actually. I learn, you know, more from you probably than from, from almost anyone from your episodes. And that's why I make everybody. I actually do. It's a true thing. The onboarding includes like half a dozen of your episodes. That's just smart. Okay. So I know you were working on a few deals. You and Zach were working a few deals together before you fell in the long lake. You guys are talking about this thesis for what? Six months a year, like, how long does it actually take to, and then we've got to talk about the fucking crazy growth that you've had in the last three years. Yeah. So, yeah, Zach and I, and we go way back, we started, you know, in Goldman, as I mentioned, and we'd stayed friends a long time and, you know, he's done some amazing things in technology, brought me into some of those things. And then, and then he, you know, he, he was very inspiring on that and, and then he was coming into some of our top and capital deals. And, you know, we, you know, buying, we, we did a funny thing where we, we ended up like, we built one of the largest go-cart track companies in America. We bought, we partnered with, you know, 20 different locally owned go-cart tracks and created a platform. And so Zach invested in that deal with us and, you know, we, we realized, you know, there's some really great businesses out there that people don't spend a lot of time thinking about. And what if we could bring the world class technology expertise of some of the, you know, some of the companies like, you know, ramp and cognition and the labs, and you could bring some of these, that type of world class AI team to, you know, the Main Street American businesses and enterprises. And that was the idea. Was it that idea from the very beginning? It was that idea from the very beginning. So from that, the conversation just, you guys are having about this to, shit, we're going to start the company too. It's founded. What's the time from there? I think it was like nine months from the first conversation until we actually incorporated the company. I was still at Oak Tree at the time. So we were spending a lot of time thinking about it, meeting some of the early engineers who ended up joining us. And I think the thing that got me really excited was when I started to talk about this idea with engineers, it was, the, there was a lot of palpable excitement. People were really excited to work on the project. I knew we could build an extraordinary team. Being able to build the right team at the right time to go and do this was a unique opportunity. I was very bullish on the company and very excited. But I think we just continue to get more and more, you know, excited about what's ahead. You know, our bar for what we want to build and what we want to do keeps going up to the day. I've been there from like the, I think day one. But this is like, when I heard about the AMAC steel, I'm like, why am I not thinking? Like, I know these are my friends. I'm not even thinking like, I didn't even think it was a possibility that you would do a $6 billion dollar, $6 billion dollar acquisition. And I was like, damn, these guys are really good. Our vision is really big. I mean, it sounded kind of crazy when we were a couple of years ago when we were saying, you know, we wanted to play at, we want to be, but it's not just your vision. Like you're, do you guys are executing is even better now? Like you're getting better. I think that's true. You guys are getting, you're already super impressive, but you are literally getting better. Yeah, I do think we're getting much better. This is partly why I have out your feedback from some of our smart friends and, and some of our investors is we want to get better every day. And I do think, I do think it's true. Oh, true. Can we talk about the story? You guys were thinking about like a few acquisitions and we don't even talk about the prices or whatever. We were just like, well, we could do this one over here, we could do this one or you do this one. And you told me the story and Rick's like, why not do them all? Exactly. Sometimes we like to say, you know, I think the, the, the greatest gift that you can have in a partner is someone who makes you more ambitious. And I think our, you know, our, our partners today really make us more ambitious. And when we, when we started the company, we talked a lot about how, you know, if we do this right, we can really help change a lot of industries and change the economy. And it sounded kind of lofty. But now that we're operating in 15% of the services tab and, you know, with tens of thousands of, of team members, you know, it's starting to feel like it's coming alive. And so I think that's really exciting, which means we're able to, you know, it's much, I remember in the beginning, like convincing, uh, some of our earliest, you know, founding partners to, to leave their, you know, um, sexy jobs and technology. Like I, I was like, talking to people's parents about why they should like drop out of school and come, and come work on long like and stuff like that. And it was like, you know, it was like a long process because I had to like explain all of this and, you know, but now it's getting much, much easier. So people have seen what we're doing, they're inspired by it, they want to join and be part of the mission. And so I think the team's getting better and better every day. Like our rule is, the incremental hire has to make us better. Make the arrays the average. And we've been able to do that, which is really extraordinary. And so teams getting better, we're getting much more experience. We've now bought close to 40 companies across five industries, like we built a process. We built a playbook. We have the Nexus platform, which we can redeploy. So our ability to drive impact is better. Our team is getting better, you know. And so I do think our ambition level of like, if it's not long like that by as MXGBT, like who should it be? Like it should be us. That's kind of how we think about it. And frankly, you know, we're thinking there could be other big things we can do. We're not going to stop, obviously. We want to keep doing this for the next 50 years. Give us some details about the size of the business today. We haven't disclosed, you know, valuations yet, but I don't need to. You'll get the first exclusive at some point. But we, you know, I can tell you that included, you know, MXGBT's big business and the scale of our other businesses is also compounding and getting meaningful. And so, you know, if you combine, you know, we're expecting to do over 4 billion of revenue next year. You know, it's amazing revenue base. It's very stable, you know, 100 percent dollar retention type business. You know, I mentioned, you know, we have a lot of employees now globally. and we're very profitable as you highlighted because our strategy is to buy established profitable businesses that already are making 20, 25% plus EBITDA margins. And so our view is, we actually never need to raise capital again, which is nice. We're going to be generating enough cash flow on our existing assets that we could compound just on internal reinvestment for decades to come. Yeah, we have a line of people out the door. We've had tremendous support and interest from investors to help inspire us to do bigger and bigger things. I mean, one of the nice things about being able to access capital is it allows us to think bigger and move faster. And I was at dinner last night with Rick and Zach and your main partners. And they made the good point where a lot of founders fuck up because they optimize for valuation. And Zach can recommend the point. And it's just like, well, if we're going to be working together for 20 years, this is a long term partnership. You can't just, this is not a bidding contest. It's like, who can you work with? Who actually, to your point, now that you get along with you actually want to do life with, because we're all going to have more money we can spend anyways. So it's like, who do you get spend your time with? It shouldn't that matter. And then the second part of that is, are they actually helping you on your mission and increasing the size of your mission? No, listen, I 100% agree. I think it's about having the right partners. And so I mentioned kind of growing up in our family in the real estate business. My father and grandfather had partners for 50 years and some of their real estate deals. And so being a partner was almost higher than being family. It was like someone that you treat with the highest respect. You guys are loyal guys. This is what I like about you. You know what I mean? There's an army like, you're fucking way too humble. And you're always going to be like, that's when nothing I'm going to tell you today is going to change that. But there's an army of people trying to put more money into your company. That would probably, you'd get obscene terms. And it's just like, yeah, but I like these guys. These are my already existing partners. My version of this is like every fucking company comes. And it's like, do what you have with Ramp? We want that and we'll pay double. And I'm like, you think this is like a bidding thing? It's like these are like some of my closest friends. They're the easiest people to work with. Like fucking, they backed me and at the time was the biggest deal in business podcasts that the partnership we had. This is like, just because they had intuition that this is fucking valuable. You think I'm going to exchange and destroy that fucking relationship for money? - Yeah, come on. - Exactly, I agree. I mean, one of the things we're super grateful for when we first met with Hey Mont about this. And he was our GC letter first round of outside capital, gave us our first 100 million bucks, basically, when that was, remember this was three or four years ago. That was a lot of money back then. And by the way, they've given us a lot more since then and been incredible partners. From day one, they got the thesis. They believed in us almost in a way, but before we even believed in ourselves. And that's such a gift that will always be grateful for. And, you know, I just want to keep working with these guys, you know, our investors that we have. And obviously we like bringing more people into the mix. And there's been some extraordinary people that have come in recently, like many great people that you know. And so we want to keep building that. I do think like continuing to kind of expand our world a little bit is very valuable. Each time new people come in, they add a lot of, they add a lot of value to our thinking and all that. But yeah, since it's about much more than capital, it's really about how do they help us execute? And the biggest way they help us execute by believing in us and, you know, inspiring us to move faster and think bigger. - Does long life have to be public? - It doesn't have to be public. - No, I think it will be. - I think the maximally ambitious path is to be public. - Why? - Why is that maximally ambitious? - Because I think we'll have ultimately deeper and lower cost of capital, lower cost capital and just, you know, public markets are the biggest stage in terms of deepest pools of capital. And I do believe, and one of the things about some of the great holding companies and, you know, people like Henry Singleton and others and John Malone, they've all proven this over time is that if you execute over a long period of time, you earn a currency that trades at a lower cost capital. And then that allows you to do even more ambitious things. And so by getting, you know, access to that over time, we can think even way bigger. So I think there's some, you know, potentially to scale our impact, to even larger and larger businesses and industries, you know, over time, I think having that currency will be very valuable. - What else did you learn from Singleton? You and I have talked about Teludine a bunch. - Yeah, I mean, he's probably like of all the holding companies, one of the people that's inspired us the most. And first of all, he was a math genius. He was on the Putnam team at MIT. He was an Office of Special Services. I mean, you did, you know, you've read, you sent me the book, I think, just in force, which is a great book. One thing that people don't understand is, Singleton compounded his earnings per share, like over 40% a year for 20, 25 years, you know? People, and Buffett always called him the best capital allocator in America and the best operator. And he was very kind of under the radar. The biggest learning from him, I think, is he used to say, stay flexible. His mantra was, he didn't like detailed strategic plans. He preferred to stay flexible. And he says, he says, I'd prefer to steer the boat a little bit every day. It's a great quote, he subjects all these outside forces. - Yes. - And nobody's smart enough to predict them, so you just need to come in and steer the boat every day. So I think that's part of our whole philosophy of staying open to different industries, the flexible capital allocation mantra of, you know, for example, we never would have said when we started the company that we wanted to do travel. It wasn't, it just wasn't something I'd thought about. We eventually built a thesis on it, but that was because we had an open mind. And now we're doing, I think it's one of the most exciting deals we've ever done. I mean, it's like a unbelievable iconic business with a reputation for, you know, gold plated customer excellence with one of the best, you know, AI opportunities to improve the service at a pretty reasonable multiple, actually, when you look at it. And had we not kept an open mind and stayed flexible about industries, we never would have looked at it. You know, I think that's a very inspirational principle to us that we try to embody. - Well, Jammala, anything from him? - Yeah, I mean, he was amazing. I was studying him at Oak Tree, and actually we invested in a number of his stocks over the years, you know, I think just creativity on structuring and creativity on financing and things like that. He was kind of, you know, top of his, top of his class. And another thing, you know, I read in cable cowboy that he liked, he was a very first principle stinger, which, you know, he would, he would do like ask, ask why five times get to the root cause, like he was a big root cause thinker. And that's something we try to also embody in our, you know, in our investment process. Now, capital allocation process, we wanna always understand why is a business good business? 'Cause we do plan on, you know, you talk about permanent capital, we wanna be doing this for decades. And so it's actually very hard to think out 20, 30 years on what's gonna still be a great business, especially now. Yeah, especially now. So first principle is thinking about why a business is gonna be great post-AGI is really important. It's maybe the most important thing in capital allocation right now. And I think stock selection, stock, it's like a, they used to say it's a stock picker's market, meaning there's gonna be winners and losers, a lot of dispersion. I think there's gonna be a lot of dispersion in the next 20 years between the best assets and mediocre assets in terms of, you know, a post-AGI, you think about how industries are gonna shift. The gains of the winners is gonna be even more extreme in a post-AGI world. So it's me. Yeah, I think there's just gonna be a lot of dispersion. I think the gains to the winners is gonna be extraordinary. Yeah. And businesses that, you know, are well positioned that are high quality services that are gonna preserve their place in the ecosystem and expand it, which we think our businesses all fit that mold, you know, can become orders of magnitude more valuable. But businesses that are lower quality, easier to disintermediate, aren't providing a, sort of a enduring value added service and really are more of like attacks. Some of those are just gonna go away. Yeah. And that's good for the economy, by the way. Less friction is good. But I think thinking through businesses holistically and sort of thinking about what makes a business sustainable or not, enduring or not, have you guys bought any businesses that were weaker than you expected? And have you sold any of them or no? No, we've never sold anything and we don't plan to ever sell anything. Never say never. Yeah, of course. It's more about are we adding value to the business? Is it a business that long legs should be in? I think that's the bigger question. You know, if you're gonna invest all this time in energy to get into a great business, with a great team, you know, build that partnership, deploy tech not build, you know, nexus to deploy into that space, create the best technology in the space, the best people, the best team in the space, and then you're gonna sell. Like that, you wanna let it compound for long period of time. I just had a thought. And I don't even know the answer to this question. You guys are acquiring businesses. Have you guys had any acquisition offers for a long week? It's off. Everybody knows we're not a seller. So we haven't really entertained or had any of those conversations. My plan is this is what I wanna be doing forever. Okay, I'm on a run right now. So Torson, there's a bunch of these episodes aren't even out. Torson from housing, he sat in the same chair and he's just like, he's legitimately mission driven. He's just like, I'm building a great European defense company because he's already rich. Like, we just started the company and he's just like, you know, 'cause Europe has to be able to protect itself. So there's just like, there's some mission driven companies. Like, we're not for sale for any price. You know, Scott, ooh, I pushed him on this a lot because billions are getting thrown at that guy's face. And he's like, nope, not doing it. He has this great line. He's like, oh, we'd sell if it was the maximally ambitious thing. Which is obviously a great line. Yeah, it's a great line. Which is obviously his way of saying, no. I'm gonna tell you some of the conversations that I've had with him on the phone, which I was like, I can't put this in the podcast because he's like, you know, definitely like friendly UI, but conquer a spirit underneath that friendly UI. And then I just talked to Zach Del. And I was like, is this the last business? 'Cause what I love about Kareem and Eric from ramp, I ask them both the question, like, this is our last business. It's not like I'm gonna fucking sell this and start another company. Like, this is it. This is the last one. And Zach Del had the funniest thing. 'Cause, you know, he wants to build something like you said. He's relatively young. He's like, I want to work on this for 50 years and go see how far I can take this thing. And he goes, and do you think I'm doing this for a paycheck? And he's like, thinking about my background. I was like, yeah, good point. You're not doing a verbatim. So what would be the point of being selling it again for more money that you're never gonna spend anyways? So I just love this idea. But we never close the loop on your maximum ambition, which is like you guys could be building a trillion dollar company. - I think we can, yeah. If you just think about the power of compounding and this is one of the reasons that long-term thinking and not being a seller is so valuable, is that it's amazing if you just kind of can keep getting a little bit better every year, how that can add up to, well then you're tripling the value of these businesses every five years and if you just keep doing that for 20 years, you're a trillion dollar company. I'm not trying to make that sound easy. That's really hard to keep executing that way over long period of time, over decades and avoid mistakes and continue to retain the best technology talent in the world and deliver the best customer service, customer excellence in the world, across these service lines. That's really hard to do. But if you do it for long enough, the pie here is just extraordinarily big. We're talking about the whole economy basically. This is like the largest town imaginable. And so if we can just keep executing and doing what we're doing for a long enough period of time, I think the potential is pretty staggering. - Well, I have to say, somebody that's been there, like been able to see this from, you know, almost the very beginning. I remember when the first time, Long Lake got name dropped on a podcast and people were like, oh no, like, you know, 'cause it was something relatively stealth, even though you guys were killing and buying everything and doing everything for you to now, you know, I know for a fact and firsthand knowledge that one of the 10 best entrepreneurs in the world, like you got their attention when you did the Amex deal and they're like, hey, what's going on with Long Lake? And how do I get involved in this? So just as a friend and a fan, it's been wonderful to see you, man. And I really appreciate you trusting me with, you know, coming out and telling the history of Long Lake today. - Thank you so much, honored to be here. - Yep. - I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show, first found me through founders. (gentle music)