· Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I basically just really grew up kind of with a tremendous respect for the American entrepreneur. And growing up in Michigan, I mentioned earlier, but all these incredible entrepreneurs in businesses you've never heard of. The people in Michigan in the community, in the business community you looked up to, there's no finance scene there. There was no tech scene there. It was people that built these what people on the East 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 bootstrapped their way in to build what could be a huge business over time that provides an unparalleled service in that market. Like, 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 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 seeing this and around 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 American entrepreneurs across industries deploy AI into their business to make their team members, employees happier, make their customers happier, improve their bottom line, 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. 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 distribution.
· Alexander Taubman, David Senra
And so part of the mission of Longlake was- [00:00:00] S0: Oh, your distribution for the labs. That's hilarious. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. We generate ROI in the real economy on the intelligence to reinvest into scaling the models. [00:00:00] S0: That's funny. [00:00:00] S1: And someone's got to do this. And by the way, you're seeing the labs start to dabble in deploy codes and things like this. But I think somebody, and many people, it's not going to be one company. You talked about other people. People often ask me about competition in the space, 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... This is a big economy. And by the way, it's a global economy too. [00:00:00] S0: And it's going to happen slowly. [00:00:00] S1: Very slowly, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Like the technology changes way faster than human nature does and human behavior does. The bottleneck is changing actually what people do.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Like the technology changes way faster than human nature does and human behavior does. The bottleneck is changing actually what people do. [00:00:00] S1: And there are real hard technical problems, and like Rasmus and a bunch of our co-founders like Varun and founding engineers are Prateek, Taras, these are some of the best engineers. 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 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 take 100-year-old businesses' systems and data and problems that are global with each customer having some different optimization that it needs, like in AmexGPT, for example, and somehow scaling that with Nexus and diffusing AI into that whole stack.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Deel 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 that 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, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel 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 ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel 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." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. Okay, so you're meeting all these entrepreneurs growing up. You grew up in an entrepreneurial family. These are family businesses. When did you start paying attention to finance, though, and that aspect of it?
· Alexander Taubman, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: 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 because 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 and best use, and the whole concept of capitalism, I just kind of fell in love with it, and 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 get to sort of invest right away. 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 like getting to manage risk at a young age, which was a very unique experience. [00:00:00] S0: Young age is what, early 20s? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I think I was like 22, 23. [00:00:00] S0: Okay.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Okay. [00:00:00] S1: And actually, I had a great mentor there who I later partnered with and worked with at Oaktree, a guy called Patrick McHaney, 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 take real risks early in my career, and that was very formative for me. And I realized I loved investing. I loved allocating capital, and I loved businesses and learning about how the world works. To me, 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 of just learning more about how different things work. [00:00:00] S0: So wait, then you go to Oaktree. [00:00:00] S1: It's funny. 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- [00:00:00] S0: Did you think you were going to found your own company, or you thought it was going to be a fund? Like, what'd you think it was going to be?