Key Takeaways

  • Long Lake built Nexus as a model-agnostic AI platform where 70 to 80 percent of the core infrastructure is shared across every vertical.
  • The hardest technical challenge is the remaining 20 to 30 percent: mapping complex workflows and integrating directly with legacy systems.
  • Roughly 70 percent of Long Lake's engineering team works on-site in the field across 15 to 20 states, sitting directly beside frontline operators.
  • Taubman models his deployment playbook on Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works philosophy of keeping aerospace design engineers on the factory floor.
  • Long Lake tests and proves this architecture across large-scale assets, including its $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel.

The Shared Infrastructure Split

Most software teams build either narrow vertical point solutions or generic wrappers around API endpoints. Alexander Taubman takes a different path at Long Lake. His firm buys established, real-economy service companies and overhauls them with Nexus, a proprietary horizontal software platform.

Taubman splits the technical build into two distinct layers. “About 70 80% of the infrastructure is shared across the verticals,” Taubman explains. “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.”

The shared core gives Long Lake economies of scale that single-vertical startups cannot match. Nexus connects frontier AI models to the underlying software plumbing, switching models depending on cost, latency, or reasoning requirements. But raw model access solves almost nothing on its own.

The Skunk Works Deployment Rule

The real friction begins when software meets the messy reality of industrial and service workflows. Taubman notes that the final stretch is where traditional tech companies fail: “That last 20 or 30% which is embedding Nexus into the workflows of the business, mapping the workflows, integrating with these different data sources, that is a very hard technical challenge.”

To solve that last mile, Long Lake borrowed a playbook from Kelly Johnson, the legendary aerospace engineer behind Lockheed's Skunk Works. Johnson insisted that design engineers had to sit directly on the assembly floor where aircraft were built.

Taubman applied that exact model to enterprise software. “Our engineering team will be, you know, I'm guessing 70% of the engineering team that today is probably sitting with a team member in the field across 15 or 20 states,” Taubman says. “The Kelly Johnson [philosophy is] very inspiring on this. The Skunk Works, you want the engineer sitting in the factory. And that's actually kind of what Long Lake is.”

Instead of filing tickets from a remote office, engineers watch dispatchers, travel agents, and back-office staff handle edge cases in real time. They see the awkward spreadsheet exports, the forgotten menu options, and the unwritten workarounds that never show up in product specs.

What to Do With This

Pull your senior engineers off feature roadmaps for two consecutive days this month. Send them on-site to shadow your frontline operators or customer service agents in person. Have them document every moment a user copies data between windows or uses a physical notepad. Build the automated fix for that single manual bridge before writing another line of speculative product code.