· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Okay. [00:00:00] S1: 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- [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, I want to hear about this. What do you think AI is going to do to this business? [00:00:00] S1: 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, is like our friend Scott Wu, obviously, like his Devin and things like that, integrating messy systems. And this is what we've built Nexus to do. So Nexus and our co-founder, Rasmus Wisman, comes from a data... He was the top computer science PhD at Oxford. He won the prize for the best thesis, and he's 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 do we make this a better experience? [00:00:00] S0: Hold on. Let's not move on because I know what Nexus is. The person listening might not. Explain what Nexus is.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Hold on. Let's not move on because I know what Nexus is. The person listening might not. Explain what Nexus is. [00:00:00] S1: 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 scale's 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 capabilities. [00:00:00] S0: Why does it make it better?
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Why does it make it better? [00:00:00] S1: So as an example, about 70, 80% of the infrastructure is shared across the verticals, and that's kind of like 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 complete 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 workflows of the business, mapping the workflows, integrating with these different data sources, it's a very hard technical challenge. It's why you need a world-class AI team to be able to actually use AI in the real world because you have all these systems. [00:00:00] S0: Hold on. This is a really important part, too, because again, I hear other people talk 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 in right now? They're not fucking just sitting in New York.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Hold on. This is a really important part, too, because again, I hear other people talk 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 in right now? They're not fucking just sitting in New York. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. 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 today is probably sitting with a team member in the field across 15 or 20 states. [00:00:00] S0: And they're working on that last 20%, correct? [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. Sitting with our team members, understanding the pain points, what's breaking, what's useful, what's not useful, and iterating. And we- To your point about learning from history's greatest entrepreneurs, like Kelly Johnson, very inspiring on this. The Skunk Works, like you want the engineer sitting in the factory, and that's actually kind of what Long Lake is. [00:00:00] S0: There's a book on the counter behind there that's unreleased, and it's all about like 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 and the way he operated Skunk Works, it reads exactly like what SpaceX is doing." These ideas are not new. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, 100%. [00:00:00] S0: We just use it over and over again.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: We just use it over and over again. [00:00:00] S1: The other great motto that I love on this point is from Danaher, who was a big inspiration to us also, the Rales brothers, is their motto was, "Common sense rigorously applied." [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, it's excellent.
· Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S1: And so that's kind of what we do too. If you can take some of the world's best AI engineers, and 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 HOA 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." Then 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 sort of 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. And so this is like a capability that we built for HOA management, but is now applicable to every other business. 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 HOA management, Nexus is now better, has this tool built in. It's going to day one have a huge impact in Amex GBT, and I could give you 10 other examples of this.