Summary
Sequence Holdings co-founder and CEO Michael Lee joins the No Priors podcast to discuss the company’s announcement of the largest AI take-private to date: a $7.7 billion deal for insurance brokerage Baldwin, backed by the Dell family office. Lee explains how Sequence, a permanent holding company founded about 20 months ago, buys established businesses and works with management and an in-house frontier engineering team to re-found them as AI-era market leaders.
Lee traces the idea to his early years covering AI as an investor at Lumpine, the arrival of the transformer architecture, and the shift he saw when ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022. He argues AI will affect the economy unevenly: some industries, such as restaurants and golf courses, will barely change, some, like coding, favor startups, and others favor incumbents with brand, scale, network effects, or regulatory advantages. The conversation covers why Sequence looks for dense, centralized organizations where anything built at headquarters can be spread across a large base, and why insurance brokerage, a market of more than $2 trillion in annual premiums that has been hard for startups to crack, fits that thesis.
Listeners also hear how the model differs from traditional private equity, with its typical three-year exit horizon. Lee describes doing roughly one deal per year and building a culture in which engineers become the celebrated persona inside a company.
📺 Source: No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups · Published September 24, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
