Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee
episode
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
42 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 2 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Michael Lee and what is Sequence Holdings?
Every company on the planet has a celebrated persona. In a world where you believe that alpha comes from engineering and AI, you need to create a culture whereby the celebrated persona is the engineer.
What was the $7.7 billion Baldwin take‑private deal and why does it matter?
And that's what's required. You think about your typical investment in a fund, and you're typically trying to figure out how do we start to package to sell this thing in three years.
How did the idea for Sequence Holdings originate?
That is just a very different framing for how we think about technological transformation and what are the investments you're willing to bring to bear here. What we do is scarce.
Why does Sequence use a permanent holding‑company structure?
We're trying to do one deal per year. That's it.
How does Sequence attract and retain top engineering talent?
Our job is to do one.
Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors.
What real‑world results has Sequence achieved at BankSouth?
Today I'm here with Michael Lee, co-founder and CEO of Sequence Holdings. They just announced the largest AI take private to date with the Dell family office of Baldwin for $7.7 billion.
What is the Atlas platform and how does it enable AI‑driven transformation?
We talk about this, the Sequence story. How AI transformation is actually going to permeate the economy and what transfers from public investing to private equity to operating.
What are the key takeaways about refounding incumbents in the AI era?
Welcome, Michael. Michael, thanks for doing this.
Thanks for having me.
So you started Sequence Holdings, which is a permanent holding company that works with management teams to buy and refound their businesses to be market leaders with AI. Uh uh we should talk about that and it's a very exciting model but you also announced this big transaction in Baldwin. Tell us about it.
Yeah, you know, we started the company 20 months ago, really with an eye towards can we partner with world class businesses and management teams, working closely with our frontier engineering team to forge market leaders. Um, the brokerage space is an area that we've been spending a lot of time on since the founding the business. We've met dozens of insurance brokers and Baldwin was truly N of one of all the insurance brokers that we've met. Um, it was it's been a privilege over the last few months to spend a lot of time with Trevor Baldwin and the management team. And we could not be more excited about the journey that lies ahead between us, the Baldwin team and the Dell family office that supported us in this transaction.
I wanna zoom all the way out to a little bit about you know, your background, you and your co-founder Alex, how this idea for sequence came about, because you've been You know, an investor now, you know, a hybrid investor operator. Like tell me about how you arrived at the idea to begin with.
You know, when I first joined Lone Pine in 2017, one of the first areas that us asked to cover was AI.
That's actually quite early. Yeah.
It was, you know, as I'm sure you recall, it's kind of when AlphaGo came out. Um, it's actually when the first Transformer paper came out. And there was a lot of excitement at the time around. what would be commercially viable if you scale these architectures. And at the time these were convolutional neural nets, scans, LSTMs, and the like. And you know, I think we all know how the story ends, which is we obviously saw a lot of exciting things come out of it. But as he scaled these architectures, their degrading effects over time to scale. You know, I share that context because you know, when the models came out or Chat GPT came out at the end of twenty two. You know, what became obvious to me at least is that the world had forever changed.
You know, we finally had an architecture that we knew could scale infinitely now. Whether or not that was possible, what will come from that was not clear, but we knew we did know that we could scale with compute that these the architecture would improve. And, you know, like an investor, I started to think about what were the impacts to the world. And I kind of felt strongly that AI would have an uneven impact on the economy. There are certain parts of the economy that I felt that AI just wouldn't impact at all. Right. Take restaurants, golf courses, things like that. There are certain industries that I just feel like a startup would win. Right. Take coding for example. Like Conviction and sequence going to go by an outsource coding services business feels like a terrible idea, which you will give money to cognition or to anthropic.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Michael Lee and what is Sequence Holdings?
0:00–0:09
2
What was the $7.7 billion Baldwin take‑private deal and why does it matter?
0:09–0:15
3
How did the idea for Sequence Holdings originate?
0:15–0:23
4
Why does Sequence use a permanent holding‑company structure?
0:23–0:25
5
How does Sequence attract and retain top engineering talent?
0:25–0:35
6
What real‑world results has Sequence achieved at BankSouth?
0:35–0:47
7
What is the Atlas platform and how does it enable AI‑driven transformation?
0:47–0:58
8
What are the key takeaways about refounding incumbents in the AI era?
0:58–42:42
Speakers
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