Long Lake buys the businesses it automates: 35 acquisitions and a $6.3B take-private
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-08-29
An interview with Varun Shenoy of Long Lake, which doesn't sell software but buys and operates services businesses: 35 companies so far across property management, architecture and HR, plus a $6.3B take-private of the world's largest corporate travel platform. His point: when the AI fails, there is no customer to blame, because they are the operator and owner.
His framing is diffusion: electricity was demoed in the 1880s but Ford's electrified assembly line only arrived in 1924 — having the technology was never enough; you had to rip out the motors and retrain everyone. He wants the services equivalent of an asynchronous coding agent: engineers happily run 10 parallel jobs and accept out-of-order completion, while nobody clears an inbox 10 emails at a time. The valuable tasks (closing books with missing receipts, scoping a building from a blueprint, coordinating a roof repair) aren't on the internet, but they come with real ground truth — did the roof actually get fixed — which makes the evals meaningful. None of this can be codesigned over Zoom; it requires showing up, running a trade-conference stand, and asking questions on a mountain bike.
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