Sequoia's Julien Bek: the next trillion-dollar company will be a software business masquerading as a services firm

Summary

Julien Bek, a partner at Sequoia Capital based in London, argues that the next trillion-dollar company will be a software business that looks, commercially, like a services firm. For every dollar spent on software today, $6 is spent on services. Software companies have historically captured only the $1 because they sold tools. Now that AI can deliver outcomes, the $6 is in play.

The practical implication is a shift from selling tools to selling work. Bek draws a sharp distinction between copilots, AI that assists human workers, and autopilots, which own a workflow end to end. The portfolio company he points to most concretely is Sierra, founded by Brett Taylor, which handles customer support and charges per resolved ticket rather than per seat. If a company previously paid $20 per ticket resolved by a human agent, Sierra charges $5. The ROI is measurable and the displacement is direct.

Selling outcomes vs. selling tools

Bek's concern for pure software tool vendors is that they sit squarely in the path of foundation model companies, which are building the next generation of capabilities and will offer them directly. Selling the work doesn't fully escape that competition, since a sufficiently capable agent from OpenAI or Anthropic can also perform the task, but Bek argues it puts application-layer companies in a structurally better position. They benefit from the billions being poured into AI rather than competing against it.

Bek hedges on how far that logic extends. Rules-based, logic-driven tasks are already within reach of current models. What humans retain, at least for now, is judgment, including instinct, taste, and the kind of experience that doesn't reduce to training data. A legal autopilot could automate the codified intelligence work while a senior lawyer handles the courtroom read. How long that division holds is genuinely uncertain, and Bek is candid that no one at Sequoia, including long-tenured partners such as Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, has high confidence in the timeline.

Outsourcing budgets as the near-term wedge

Bek sees outsourced labor spend as the clearest near-term entry point for three reasons. The budget already exists and is assigned to an external vendor. The buyer has already accepted the idea of a third party doing the work. Swapping a supplier is operationally faster than reorganizing headcount. Customer support is the obvious early category, with accounting, tax, and insurance next in line.

How Bek uses AI himself

Bek uses Claude to scan his calendar at week's end, pull transcripts from Granola, and surface key questions for due diligence prioritization. His reasoning is that venture capital is a power law business where only a handful of meetings per year are genuinely career-defining, and AI helps him stay attuned to which ones those are.

The core bet is that the human-to-AI ratio inside autopilot businesses shifts continuously, with one human supervising ten AIs today and that ratio widening as models absorb more of what currently requires judgment. Whether that translates into a durable moat, or whether foundation model companies eventually sell the same outcome directly, is a tension Bek acknowledges but does not resolve.