No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Can AI transform legacy incumbents rather than replacing them? Sequence Holdings co-founder and CEO Michael Lee joins Sarah Guo to discuss how holding company structures and engineering integrations are reshaping market leaders from the inside out. Michael details Sequence’s $7.7 billion take-private transaction of Baldwin alongside Dell Family Office (DFO), and shares his thesis on why traditional consulting models and software sales fall short for real enterprise AI transformations. They also talk about why permanent holding company structures are good for long-term compounding, real-world results from applying frontier engineering to BankSouth, and Michael’s lessons from his time in public investing, private equity, and operating at the intersection of market incumbents and AI.

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Chapters:

00:34 – Michael Lee Introduction

01:03 – Sequence Holdings and Baldwin

01:54 – Idea for Sequence

04:36 – Incumbents in the AI Era

06:32 – Why a Holding Company

11:21 – Recruiting Top Engineers

13:08 – Investing in BankSouth

17:46 – Why an Insurance Brokerage

20:17 – Atlas Platform Explained

23:53 – Traditional Private Equity Limitations

27:23 – What Sequence Looks For in Management Teams

31:04 – Accomplishments at BankSouth

34:45 – Founder Lessons

36:08 – Story of Dell Partnership

37:10 – Career and Investment Approach

40:00 – Value of Exceptional People

42:23 – Conclusion

As generative AI hits hardware and latency bottlenecks, Stanford professor, diffusion pioneer, and Inception co-founder and CEO Stefano Ermon is betting on a radical new architecture. Stefano joins Sarah Guo to talk about Inception, and how his team is applying diffusion architecture beyond images and video into discrete text and code generation. Stefano explains the limitations of autoregressive LLMs, as well as why parallel token generation in diffusion models offers superior inference scaling and hardware utilization on standard GPUs. He also shares details about Inception’s Mercury models, real-world voice agent applications, the software stack required to serve diffusion-based models at scale, academia’s role at the frontier of AI innovations, and why the next era of AI competition will be defined by efficiency.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Stefano Ermon Introduction

00:35 – Research Background

02:54 – Starting Inception

05:59 – Why Diffusion Beats Autoregressive

11:10 – Discrete vs. Continuous Modalities

13:19 – Inception Today

16:45 – Where Speed Wins

17:31 – Inception Customer Base

18:49 – Interaction with Hardware Landscape

19:34 – Inception and the Broader Industry

21:41 – Data Compression and Structure

24:45 – Controllability of Diffusion Modeles

27:25 – Emergent Capabilities at Scale

29:02 – Future Workload Split Between Diffusion vs. Traditional

30:03 – Adoption Challenges

31:44 – Hiring and Team Organization

32:50 – Recursive Self Improvement

34:02 – Resource Allocation

35:10 – Impact of Academia

38:13 – Conclusion

From the tokenization of real-world assets to funding research on anti-aging therapeutics, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong is focused on solving meta-problems for the benefit of society. Brian joins Elad Gil this episode to discuss the intersections of artificial intelligence, crypto rails, and biotechnology. He details Coinbase’s vision for agentic finance, as well as how Coinbase is becoming the ‘Everything Exchange’, which includes tokenized real-world stocks, stablecoin payment adoption, and prediction markets. Brian also introduces his new venture, New Limit, a company founded to tackle longevity through epigenetic reprogramming, and outlines initial therapeutic programs and the roadmap toward clinical trials.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open Trailer

00:45 – Brian Armstrong Introduction

01:13 – Coinbase and the Everything Exchange

05:52 – Agentic Commerce

10:00 – AI and Crypto

10:49 – AI Inside Coinbase

15:39 – Productivity and Company Size

17:26 – The Everything Exchange and Tokenization

20:53 – Prediction Markets

23:15 – Introducing New Limit

34:17 – Looking Forward Five Years

40:24 – Special Economic Zones

44:26 – Conclusion

From data center orchestrators to AGI and robotics, CPUs remain the heart of modern computing. Arm CEO Rene Haas joins Elad Gil and Sarah Guo to explore how Arm is positioned at the epicenter of AI-driven demands for compute. Rene explains Arm’s position in the chip supply chain, and how Arm transitioned from an IP licensing model to producing physical chips like the Arm AGI CPU for Meta. He also discusses bottlenecks in hardware supply chains, SoftBank’s ecosystem and capital strategy, why US semiconductor manufacturing independence is critical, the future of robotics, and why CPUs remain crucial for executing AI workloads.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open Trailer

00:49 – Rene Haas Introduction

01:14 – Arm and Chip Supply Chain

02:37 – Shift from IP to Manufacturing CPUs

04:23 – CPU IP and Customers

06:55 – AI Adoption at Arm

10:15 – Changes in Chip Time to Market

13:27 – Data Center Buildout Bottleneck

15:13 – Softbank Leverage and Capital Strategy

17:43 – Softbank Portfolio Overview

20:13 – Robotics Opportunities for Arm

24:49 – US Manufacturing Protectionism

28:59 – Data Center Backlash

32:30 – Arm Outlook

33:31 – CPU Opportunity

37:06 – Conclusion

Google’s purchase of Spirit Airlines’ data out of bankruptcy signaled a shift in how the tech world values real-world datasets. Although compute and models get much of the attention, in this landscape, it’s data that is a company’s protective moat. Eon CEO / Co-Founder Ofir Ehrlich and President / Co-Founder Gonen Stein join Elad Gil to talk about how Eon is redefining cloud backup into a secure data foundation designed to power and protect enterprise AI. Ofir and Gonen discuss why historical enterprise data is in demand by AI labs, and how Eon facilitates access to scattered and locked data across business units through providing the mapping, classification, and access controls needed to connect it into AI workflows. They also explore how traditional ransomware defenses must now protect against rogue AI agents with legitimate system permissions, concerns around the influx of autonomous agents and non-human identities, and the implications for the breakneck speed of AI adoption compared to the slowness of the cloud era.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open Trailer

00:59 – Ofir Ehrlich and Gonen Stein Introduction

01:27 – What Eon Does

02:41 – Data as Moat

06:43 – Training Agents with Good Data

09:39 – Data is the New Oil

15:00 – Autonomous Security Threats

18:15 – How Agents Change the Enterprise Stack

22:11 – Re-imagining Data Infrastructure

27:52 – Cloud vs. AI Era Shift

30:26 – How AI is Changing Companies

34:31 – Conclusion