· 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.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Has anybody tried to buy Nexus as a separate tool? [00:00:00] S1: You know, it's funny. 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 and 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.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: We've talked a bunch about all these other "Founders" episodes, and I love that part of your onboarding at Long 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 like on the investor side, it's like, "Oh, yeah, let's just sell the software." It's just like, well, I go back to like Larry Ellison. I've done like, I don't know, six episodes on him, and he has this great line about this. He's maybe the best in the world at understanding this. He's like, "It's not a software problem, it's a human problem." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: It's like, there's no point in me selling something if the way you work doesn't change. It's like, then 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. [00:00:00] S1: 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. [00:00:00] S0: That was Larry Ellison's point. You can't force them. [00:00:00] S1: If we have to force someone to use our Nexus platform, then the platform's not good enough. We take an approach of the customer are our team members, and we're now going to have 30,000 team members operating globally across all these sectors. And so- [00:00:00] S0: Wait, explain this to me.