Incumbents

Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee

Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee

Michael Lee, co-founder and CEO of Sequence Holdings, details his thesis on transforming large incumbent businesses with AI through a permanent holding company structure. He discusses the $7.7 billion take-private of Baldwin, an insurance brokerage, alongside the Dell Family Office, and explains why traditional consulting or software models fall short for deep enterprise AI transformations. Lee also shares insights from Sequence's work with BankSouth, the technical architecture of their Atlas platform, and their unique approach to integrating frontier engineering to drive long-term compounding and organizational change.

Software finally eats services - Aaron Levie

Software finally eats services - Aaron Levie

In a dynamic discussion, experts debate the merits of pricing H-1B visas versus the current lottery system, questioning what the policy should optimize for. They explore the real-world impact of AI on developer productivity, with Box reporting that 30% of its code now comes from AI, and highlight how small, senior teams are achieving superhuman results by shifting from writing code to reviewing it. The conversation also covers why bottom-up, personal AI tools are succeeding where top-down corporate pilots fail, and analyzes the platform shift, arguing that AI-native startups have a unique advantage in a landscape where incumbent scale is being neutralized by AI agents.