· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Work 90% more? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. No, you don't want to do that. This is a big part of our vision too, is that 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, 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 this manual road, responding to emails, data entry, da, da, da, da, da. What they want to do is they want to focus on getting more customers, understanding that, helping the customers more, interacting more with them. 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 dull parts, they love their job more, they can make more money. And so then think about having to leave a Long Lake partner company that has these tools and this setup and go to a competitor down the street. [00:00:00] S0: You're not going to.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: You're not going to. [00:00:00] S1: It's going to become really powerful. We're 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 sum vision for us of AI deployment, is you can really create a better mousetrap in all these industries. [00:00:00] S0: 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 like, you have a ton of experience, right, in finance. What you were just telling me and my partner before we started recording, it's just like you blew his mind because 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 want to talk about. But 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. Everybody's like, "I want to do what Long Lake does." Yeah, but you're not Alex and you're not Zach. Am I wrong about this?
· Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S1: 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, who he was at Oxford with at the same time as I mentioned was top student there. The sort of team came together through network. And so, the first 20 people, I think, were all from network and people that we knew deeply from both an investment acquisition side as well as applied AI technology. We're growing much faster now. We're closer to 60. We're still small. At Long Lake level, we're only about 55, 56 people now. We'll probably be closer to 100 people by the end of the year. It really is a world-class team. It's, I'd say, 90% AI engineers and operations deployment folks, and then 10% sort of acquisitions, M&A finance. But yeah, I do think you need to be able to do three things really world-class to be able to deploy this technology. You need to be able to buy great companies 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 the labs or some of the best applied 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 really kind of help change the whole economy, I think we were able to attract much better people, and that's been starting to compound now. And 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 filter, as you can imagine. I think this quarter, 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 I think one of my biggest learnings is just high bar in everything is really the key. And so high bar in talent, high bar in acquisitions, high bar in technology, and that's kind of what I think you need to make this work.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: What initially got you interested in finance to begin with? [00:00:00] S1: I just loved it. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My grandfather, who was a big inspiration to me, started a real estate business after World War II. [00:00:00] S0: He essentially invented the strip mall. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, the shopping center. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. He didn't actually do strip malls. Well, he did probably earlier in his career, but he eventually did- [00:00:00] S0: There's a great quote that you gave me about him called "threshold resistance." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Can you talk about the idea? Why would it be called threshold resistance?
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Can you talk about the idea? Why would it be called threshold resistance? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, so the concept, by the way, 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 be more likely to go into the store. So he was sort of an early pioneer of retail. He just thought he could make things better, and actually that was a big inspiration to me, try to make things better in life. And so one of the ideas was the threshold is the entrance to the store. And 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 merchandising in them, and you'd have to go through the windows in some dark alley in order to get to the door in the back. Nobody fucking wanted to go in them. So his idea was bring the door to the front, have no threshold, have it be the same, like that over there. You can't see, but that, you want to walk through that. [00:00:00] S0: Because even a step, he broke it down almost like a math equation. [00:00:00] S1: Yes. [00:00:00] S0: Even like half a step up reduced it by like 20, people coming by like 20%.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Even like half a step up reduced it by like 20, people coming by like 20%. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. He did a lot of really creative things that I can tell you more about it. He was very innovative, and he always brought this kind of continuous improvement mindset, similar to like the Danaher continuous improvement concept. And honestly, it's all a 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, 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 want to minimize threshold resistance on AI adoption. [00:00:00] S0: This is exactly what you're talking about. It's like, hey, the reason we can have this horizontal AI platform is because 70, 80%, it's like every business deals with the same shit. [00:00:00] S1: Yes.