Teledyne

From HOA Management to $4B in Revenue & $6.3B Deal for Amex GBT | Alexander Taubman, Long Lake

Sep 30, 2026 · 1:02:10

Long Lake co-founder and CEO Alexander Taubman tells David Senra how his company bought American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion, expecting over $4 billion of combined revenue the next year after close to 40 acquisitions. He argues AI models are proven but diffusion into the real economy is the hard problem, so Long Lake buys profitable businesses and deploys its Nexus platform, with engineers sitting in the field, rejecting software sales because only owners can change how industries work. He contends productivity gains create jobs rather than cut them, cites his grandfather's 'threshold resistance' plus Danaher, Henry Singleton and John Malone, says Long Lake never sells companies, and argues decades of compounding could build a trillion-dollar company.

Inside Bending Spoons: Finding Talent, Leveraging AI & Driving Operational Excellence | Luca Ferrari

Sep 13, 2026 · 2:01:29

Luca Ferrari, co-founder of Bending Spoons, argues the company aspires to build "the best company there ever was" by favoring raw talent over experience. He explains how a centralized talent team screens candidates using over 100 signals, why hiring managers get trust instead of bonuses, and why the company abolished job titles. He describes extreme ownership and saturating capacity—giving people more work than they can complete—and a 50-plus tool operating system that lets him run Evernote, bought for about $200 million, with 20 people. The group reaches roughly $3 billion in run rate revenue; Ferrari says it buys to hold and transform, never to sell, and bids high and firm, trusting logic over blindly following data. He also explains why Bending Spoons is going public.