Amex Global Business Travel：全球首宗AI私有化交易——对话Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman

Sarah Guo

At Dana Priors, we're joined by Alex Kopelman, the co-founder and CEO of Long Lake Management. Long Lake recently announced its intent to acquire American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion in what I believe is the world's first AI take-private. They have previously bought around 30 companies and transformed and optimized them with AI. We're very excited to have Alexander here today. Alex, thanks so much for joining us at Dana Priors.

Alex Kopelman

Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sarah Guo

You just announced what I believe—and I could be wrong on this—but I think it may be the world's first-ever AI take-private. You've agreed to acquire American Express Global Business Travel, the world's largest corporate travel platform, for $6.3 billion, which is pretty amazing.

Before that, you've already done 30 acquisitions under the premise that you can buy businesses and transform them with AI—what some people are referring to as AI-driven roll-ups, or AI-driven buyouts. It's very exciting to have you here and learn more about your business.

You mentioned that you have this Nexus platform, which helps your employees serve their customers better and automates a lot of their work. Could you give examples of some of the things that it automates or how it helps them in the context of HOA? I know you're now in three other verticals, so what you do crosses the different businesses you're involved with.

Alex Kopelman

Yeah, that's right. Since the beginning, we've taken an approach of investing very heavily in our horizontal AI platform, which we call Nexus. I'd say roughly 80% of the infrastructure is shared across the verticals, and then there's a lot of work to take it and deploy it into those end markets.

The deployment involves mapping workflows, understanding data sources, cleaning up data sources, and integrating with them to make them easier for the models to access. Our Nexus platform sits between the models on one side—we're model-agnostic—and the data sources, skills, and workflows of the business. That takes a lot of customization and significant applied AI engineering capabilities, which we've built at Long Lake.

Once we have that platform, we can buy a company or partner with a company very quickly. In the beginning, it took us over a year with our first acquisitions to find the real potential of AI and see it in the business outcomes. Now, within days of partnering with a company, we can deploy this very quickly and see an immediate impact.

Sarah Guo

So, you buy a company and then, within a couple of weeks, you have instant margin lift because the employees of that new acquisition just go onto a platform you've already built for similar businesses.

Alex Kopelman

Yeah, what we see is instant time savings. Then the question is how we grow to give our team members more capacity. We're not focused on cost savings. We're focused on driving growth and customer experience.

What we've seen is that it's a much more powerful model because our view of AI is that 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. If you have more productive people, you want more of them.

Sarah Guo

Mm-hmm.

When your customers are happier, you grow faster. You actually create jobs, and everybody wins. We're seeing this in our companies. We're now the fastest-growing company in the HOA industry. We're growing organically.

When we invested in the businesses, they were typically growing 0% to 5% a year in terms of volume. We're now growing 20% or more a year, and that's because we've given our team members 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 costs with better products and services. We've been able to take the software-style go-to-market playbook and apply it to these sleepy industries. I think it's a win-win-win.

Sarah Guo

It must be hard for your employees to go and work anywhere else in the industry if they're dramatically more productive and doing less busywork. Have you found that you've decreased employee churn? What other things have you seen?

Alex Kopelman

That's right. We've seen very, very high retention of our team members across all of our acquisitions. This is the long-term vision: We want to basically be the best place to work in every industry that we operate in, so we can give the best people the best tools and the best customers.

That flywheel becomes self-perpetuating because if you leave Long Lake or one of our partner companies to go to a competitor, you have to start doing all this mundane work again—the work that took up 25% or 30% of your day. You have to go do that again.

The thought of it is like giving up email. You're not going to do that. We've started to become a real talent magnet in these industries and in our companies.

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. We can pay you the most, give you the best tools, and grow the fastest. That's part of our vision: It's really making things better for team members and customers.

The other important thing is that when you give your team members superpowers with AI, the customers are much, much happier. We're seeing customer retention go up, response times get much faster, and errors go down in things like board reporting, budgeting, and email. That's driving up customer retention.

Sarah Guo

Mm-hmm. That's so cool. Why do this via acquisition versus just offering software to people?

The traditional Silicon Valley playbook would be that you find that niche industry, realize that there's a need in terms of software, build software for the industry, and then sell it as a vendor. In this case, you could sell it as a sort of AI product or tool. Why not do that, or why did you decide to go down the acquisition path?

Alex Kopelman

We think that you can drive better, win-win business outcomes with deeper alignment. 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 care what happens with the business outcomes, you just don't see the same business outcome.

Sarah Guo

So, you're just viewing your employees as their customers in some sense, then? Is that correct?

Alex Kopelman

That's right. Our team views our employees—our team members in the field—as the customer. That internal feedback loop is the other point: We have a much tighter feedback loop.

The old skunkworks idea is that you want the engineers in the factory to be co-located so you can have more innovation. That's what we have at Longview. Our team members and our engineers are together in the field all the time.

Our engineering team is probably in 20 different states right now, sitting with team members across our architecture business, our HOA business, our HR services business, and our specialty tax business. There's also a deep amount of change management involved.

This requires a lot of sitting with team members and understanding their pain points. There's a real solutions orientation: How do we take the pain point and then build a tool within Nexus to solve it? That feedback loop is really important so you get to better outcomes this way.

Sarah Guo

That's pretty amazing because I think one of the biggest issues for actual adoption of AI is change management: changing processes and changing our organizational design. I guess if you own the actual company, then you can make those changes.

In general, in order to do this very well—and I've talked to dozens of people trying to do different forms of AI roll-ups and things like that—you really need 3 competencies, it seems like. You need some folks who are great at the private-equity-style motion of purchasing things. You need somebody who's great at engineering and building out the AI stack, and then you need really good change management.

How were you able to pull those 3 disciplines together? It's very rare, and again, I've seen very few companies in this area who've done this. Was it a magic initial founding team? Was it just how you hired? I'm curious how you did it, because you've also gotten exceptional engineers, which most folks aren't able to get in this industry.

Alex Kopelman

Well, thank you for saying that. Because we were purpose-built from day 1 to be this cross-functional company with technology DNA, change management, and M&A, we were able to attract the right type of people from our network.

I think 100% of our first 20 people came through our network. We knew them really well, and they came from places like Palantir, Ramp, Robinhood, and some of the top modern AI and data companies. Rasmus, our co-founder and CTO, and I were connected through one of our early investors and board members, whom we've all known for 15-plus years.

We all started our careers together.

Sarah Guo

It’s really rare, by the way, for many business people to have those deep technical networks. What I’ve observed is that these are often separate worlds, and technologists are very bad at hiring business people early in their careers, and vice versa. Business people tend to be awful at hiring engineers, so you end up with these mismatches on early teams. It’s pretty amazing that you were able to pull people out of some of these great companies.

Thank you. I think it’s a really exciting project. The idea of bringing AI into the real world is extraordinary. What the labs are doing is extraordinary, obviously, and they’re enabling all of this, along with the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment going in. Models are going to get better every day. There’s going to be a tremendous amount of investment—in the trillions—and part of our thesis was: who’s going to take all that and actually make it work in the real economy? There felt like a huge gap.

A lot of the people who came together for our founding team were founders in technology before. Many of them had their own startups. On the engineering team, they were either the co-founder, CEO, or CTO of an applied AI company. What people realized, though, is that it’s really hard to sell software into these services industries for the reasons we talked about earlier. If you can’t beat them, join them. We’re building 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.

Sarah Guo

You’ve also pulled some people out of great private equity firms.

Alex Kopelman

Mhm.

Sarah Guo

What are some of the places those people have come from?

Alex Kopelman

Our private equity team comes from top private equity firms, and our M&A team comes from those firms as well. Manny, one of our co-founders and our 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 by my saying this, but I think he was named employee of the month at GTCR the month he resigned.

GTCR is one of the top-performing large-cap buyout funds. We have people from Blackstone, TPG, and H.I.G. The main reason they come to Long Lake is that, even though these firms are extraordinary at what they do, they’re not AI-native. For that subset of M&A professionals who really believe in our thesis, there aren’t many places that look like Long Lake today. We can provide a unique environment for them to deploy AI into all these companies.

Sarah Guo

I think this led to a really unique opportunity, which is taking private a 110-year-old business: American Express Global Business Travel. I haven’t seen anything of this magnitude happen in the AI world up until now, which is pretty impressive. I think it’s a $6.3 billion potential take-private. How did you come up with the idea to do this? I know there are only limited things you can say since this is a public company and it’s going through this transition, but whatever you can share in terms of the thinking behind it would be great.

Alex Kopelman

We’ve admired this company for as long as I can remember. I think I’ve been a customer, and many of us involved in Long Lake, including some of our investors who have traveled a lot in their careers, have used this company as customers.

Sarah Guo

This company got started when the only things you could book on it were railways and boats. Again, it’s been around for a while. I think this predates air travel as a company.

Alex Kopelman

This is a 111-year-old company. It was started in 1915 by American Express as a way for them to get their traveler’s-check customers out of Europe during World War I. Actually, Carlson Wagonlit, which they acquired late last year, was founded, I think, in 1876.

Sarah Guo

Wow.

Wagonlit stands for sleeping cars on the train. It’s French. These are businesses that have navigated more than a century’s worth of technology transformation, and we think it’s going to be an extraordinary franchise for another century to come.

The way we came up with the thesis is that we’ve had a prepared-mind approach at Long Lake. We have a whiteboard of, call it, 15 or 20 industries that we think are very high-value for us to focus on, and travel was always one of them. The reasons are that it’s a mission-critical service, there’s a high cost of failure, and most trips are revenue-generating. If you miss a podcast with your favorite podcaster, for example—

Sarah Guo

An entire travel day. It’d be tragic.

Right. The customer trust that this franchise has built over 100 years is really extraordinary. The company has, as it has publicly reported, done a really great job charting its future with AI transformation, and we think we can double down on that and drive a lot of customer excellence.

Sarah Guo

Is there anything you can tell us about how you’re thinking about where you want to take this? Again, I know you can’t say much because it’s a transaction in progress involving a public company, but is there anything you can share?

Alex Kopelman

I’ve said this publicly in the press release: our vision is to really double down on the company’s existing AI transformation strategy. In any industry that we operate in, we see our Nexus platform as giving our team members superpowers to deliver better customer outcomes, faster response times, and faster disruption resolution. Imagine your travel counselor with AI superpowers. That’s the future we envision for American Express Global Business Travel’s customers.

Sarah Guo

I know there are a few different versions of people who will buy companies to operate or improve them. The traditional private equity playbook tends to be very short-term. They’ll buy a business for a couple of years, load it up with debt in many cases, cut costs aggressively or cut teams aggressively, and then flip the business. I think you’ve taken an approach that I would view as more in the Berkshire Hathaway mold: you want to buy businesses you can own and hold for a very long time, and you want to invest in those businesses over time.

Alex Kopelman

Mhm.

Sarah Guo

Where do you want to be in 10 or 20 years? How do you think about where all of this goes?

Alex Kopelman

I think it’s a really big market opportunity. This is a $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. There are a lot of segments to potentially add value to.

Part of what has always inspired us about the Danahers of the world is that they were able to compound. They developed a differentiated operating model. In their case, it started in manufacturing and then life sciences, but they were always able to drive better growth, better customer satisfaction, better employee retention, and ultimately better productivity. That allowed them to continually consolidate all these industries over a long period of time with a lot of outperformance.

Our vision is to follow in the footsteps of some of those great companies within the services sector and do it with our AI platform as our advantage. I do think there’s something about the long-term nature of what we’re doing. It’s really hard. What we’re doing is actually really hard.

Sarah Guo

Mhm.

Alex Kopelman

You can’t do this in a year; you can’t do this even in 2 or 3 years. This is a multiyear transformation. These are compounding effects. As we talked about earlier, as you give your people better tools, you get better people. Then you can pay them more, they can deliver better customer outcomes, and you can grow faster.

That’s not a 1-month or 2-month cycle. That’s a 2-, 3-, 4-, or 5-year transformation cycle. Then what are you going to do? You’re going to do all that? You’re going to build the best company in the industry, and then you’re going to sell it? That just doesn’t make sense to me. I’d want to own that company forever and compound on that advantage for decades to come, and then extrapolate it into ancillary areas and other service lines.

Our vision really is to be a long-term owner and partner to world-class services companies. If I were a founder-owned business that had built a great business over 50 years, I’d love to know that the next steward of that company was going to be a long-term investor and a long-term steward of the employees and the customers. That’s part of our vision as well.

We’ve designed Long Lake with that mindset. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, and we had a family business that my grandfather started and my dad and uncle ran—a 75-year-old company that we recently exited, actually. When we designed Long Lake, I designed it with the mindset of building the product you yourself would want to use. If I were a seller of an asset, I would love to be partnering with Long Lake. That’s our ambition.

Sarah Guo

One of the things I’ve noticed is that it often seems like you win a lot of the companies you’re bidding on in a competitive process. In some cases, you’re the only person people want to sell to.

Could you explain why that is, or how that's shifted over the last 2 or 3 years?

Alex Kopelman

Yeah, thank you. We've had really good success. Our message has really resonated with business owners and management teams, I think because it's solving a really important need. Having a long-term, permanent capital partner is already a wonderful thing, but having that partner with deep applied AI and engineering expertise and a platform that you can deploy day 1—

Sarah Guo

Because these folks never see anything like that in the industries that they're currently in, right?

Alex Kopelman

Yeah. AI is very, very underpenetrated. It's probably around 1% penetrated in terms of real enterprise AI use cases.

When you think about the overall economy, first of all, 99% of businesses in America are small businesses. 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're solving many needs. In terms of the philosophy I mentioned before, we've tried to design the product you want to use if we were a seller or a management team, to be the optimal partner. That's how we've designed Long Lake.

We have this cross-functional team. They become your partners on day 1. You get to partner with Varun, Taras, Pratik, and Jason, and our extraordinary engineering team will basically live in your office for the next 2 years, helping you fix all your problems. It's a pretty good value proposition.

We also encourage rollover and equity alignment from existing shareholders, management, and founders. In our first 4 service lines that we've gone into, we have significant rollover participation from the original founders.

Sarah Guo

The founder of the business gets a piece of the new business, in some sense, so that they benefit from the upside of the change that's coming.

Alex Kopelman

That's right. We're very open to that, and we've been encouraging of that because we like to win together. This goes back to being super positive-sum about AI. We think we can make everyone happy here: customers, team members, and the business founders and management who participate alongside us in the productivity increase.

That's why I think we've been a differentiated partner. My view is that, as we prove this out more and more over time and the capital markets start to understand our vision and what we're doing, I'd like to think our cost of capital will keep coming down as well. That further makes us a better partner to these folks because we can actually pay more than anyone else.

This is sort of what Danaher, TransDigm, and all these great operators proved over many years: if you can establish a currency, you don't actually have to lose deals over price because you can operate the deals better. Then you have a diversified platform that's more valuable and growing faster, with better financial metrics.

Sarah Guo

The other thing that's related to this is that you tend to grow the businesses you buy.

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Guo

You're not really focused as much on how to cut costs as much as possible. You're often focused on how to grow the top line, how to grow revenue, and how to make your employees more productive in terms of sales and serving customers. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you first thought about it?

Yeah. For us, growth and customer experience, growth, and expansion are the top priorities.

Sarah Guo

And by the way, this is very true for tech companies, but I don't think it's very true for many other types of companies.

Well, it's interesting. I'll tell you a non-obvious thing that I've observed: most of these service companies are growth-oriented. Most of these founders built these companies from their bootstraps over 20, 30, or 40 years by knocking on doors and figuring out how to convince people to use their service in a certain market.

But 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% of people. First, you have to find them, then you have to train them, and then you have to manage them.

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 most of it goes to incremental labor. That's essentially a very high marginal tax rate on the growth activity.

What we've done with AI is make your existing teams 30% or 40% more efficient, so they can handle more customers. It changes the whole mindset of the organization. Now you're growing. You look like a software company, where you're 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 this whole AI flowing through the ecosystem. We're seeing our partners—and you could call any of our CEOs, some of whom have been running their businesses for decades—having the best time of their careers now with us because we're actually growing like a software company. We're seeing our team members get paid more and be happier, and our customers are happier. It's been a lot of fun.

Sarah Guo

Thanks so much for joining us on No Priors.

Alex Kopelman

My pleasure to be here. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Great first interview.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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