Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee
Episode publishedPodcast: No Priors: Artificial Intellig...No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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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, 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 That is just a very different framing for how we think about technological transformation and what what are the investments you're willing to bring to bear here. What we do is scarce. We're trying to do one deal per year.
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Michael Lee, cofounder and CEO of Sequence Holdings. They just announced the largest AI take private to date with the Dell family office of Baldwin for $7,700,000,000. 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. 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. 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 twenty 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. The brokerage space is an area that we've been spending a lot of time on since the founding of 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. 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 exci
I want to 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 I was 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. 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, GANs, 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 you scaled these architectures, there were degrading effects over time to scale. You know, I share that context because, you kn
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