Julien Bek

@carl_eschenbach @sequoia @gradypb @Alfred_Lin Welcome back Carl! Joined right after you left, felt like you never left the building though. Let’s go.

It’s time to return to the place where I know I can have the most impact. I am beyond excited to be rejoining @sequoia as a Partner. Here is what I shared with @gradypb @alfred_lin on how I am approaching my next chapter.

In 2025, we had copilots. In 2026, we’ll have autopilots. Copilots sell to workers. Autopilots sell outcomes. @SierraPlatform may be the first hybrid player. Who is next?

Sequoia (@sequoia) Partner @JulienBek tells us why the next $1Trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm: "Ultimately, if you look at the TAM today, for every dollar that you spend on software, $6 are spent on services". "If you sell the tools, the models are getting better and better and so you're at risk... whereas, if you sell the services, you're actually delivering outcomes." "Until now, we could really just go after the $1, but now with services first and human at the centre, we think you can capture the six".

@DinBisevac @sequoia 🔥

@JulienBek @sequoia Buena for property management, insurance brokerage & real estate closing :)

Turns out there were a lot more great founders building autopilots than I thought. At @sequoia we’re pulling together a map of the top ones. Who should we include?

@qui_rins @sequoia Love that, great work!

@JulienBek @sequoia build a map a couple of months back - maybe a good starting point: medium.com/point-nine-new…

@tbpn @tbpn great convo thanks for having me 💚

Sequoia’s @JulienBek says many of their founders are now wondering if they’re “just an iteration away” from AI labs destroying their business. He says the most defensible companies - and potentially the next trillion-dollar company - will be “a software business that masquerades as a services firm.” “If you sell tools today, you’re really in the line of sight for the models and you’re effectively competing with the next generation that they’re going to launch.” “Whereas if you sell the work, you’re actually benefiting from what the models are doing and all the billions of dollars that are going towards AI.”

Prediction from #1 Midas List, my partner @Alfred_Lin explains why we will soon see $10T companies👇

@FelixCheng12578 Love RaaS 🎯

Really enjoyed this article from @julienbek from Sequoia Capital. The big takeaway: the best AI companies don't sell software — they sell services, outcomes and results: SaaS → RaaS (Results as a Service). Your customer doesn't care about your model; they care about the outcome. At Forest Vision, we help the timber industry to autopilot the log scaling first, and then eventually to autopilot the log transaction moment. Services: The New Software sequoiacap.com/article/servic…

@joburgai @AndrewCurran_ Exactly right

@JulienBek @AndrewCurran_ the annotation and RLHF layer is exactly where this plays out in practice. you can't automate judgment — you have to teach the model what good judgment looks like, one labeled example at a time. that's still deeply human work.

Striking image from the new Anthropic labor market impact report.

@levie Thanks for the RT @levie 💚

“If a task is already outsourced, it tells you three things. One, the company has accepted that this work can be done externally. Two, there’s an existing budget line that can be substituted cleanly. Three, the buyer is already purchasing an outcome. Replacing an outsourcing contract with an AI-native services provider is a vendor swap. Replacing headcount is a reorg.” Some of the biggest opportunities in AI agents will be building the agentic versions of existing services categories. By doing so, it’s incredibly easy for customers to switch, as many of the reasons for outsourcing this work have not changed just because of AI. The opportunity is that many incumbents will take too long to transform their workflows, and there’s now a new way to be able to do more, better, cheaper, or faster than existing players. But equally, this is a good alarm bell if you’re an incumbent; it’s probably important to factor in this risk and do it to yourselves first. And if you’re in one of these companies, there’s a huge opportunity to be the one to drive this change.

@jfikrat @levie 💯

the "vendor swap" framing is spot on. seeing this firsthand building agent infra. wired 16 services (email, calendar, CRM, browser, docs) through a single agent gateway. once an agent can touch the same tools a human outsourcer uses, the switch becomes trivial. the bottleneck isn't model capability anymore. it's connecting agents to real business tools securely. that's where the infrastructure gap is.

@TomZschach @levie There is still a human in the autopilot but they are the front end and AI is the backend

The post has a blind spot because it treats the transition from copilot to autopilot as primarily a business model question (sell the work, not the tool). What it doesn’t address is the accountability vacuum that opens up when you remove the human from the loop. A copilot has a built-in governance mechanism the professional who clicks “approve.” An autopilot that “just closes the books” or “just adjusts the claim” has no such backstop. So the question becomes: how does the insurance company, the hospital the bank prove to that the autonomous system operated within authorized boundaries, applied the right rules and had proper authority to act?

@AstasiaMyers Catchy 🔥

@JulienBek Onshored, offshored, AI-shored

@Trece30y7 Sequoia will invest 💯

@JulienBek This is why I’m pushing Tacos as a Service (TaaS) 🌮 Every model release makes my tacos that much better/tastier.

@brian_a_burns @justindross Thanks @brian_a_burns we look up to your team at @harvey will you guys become the first copilot + autopilot company?

@JulienBek @justindross Excellent article

@OlgaMegorskaya @Tendem_AI 🎯 what are you building and how did you go about building it successfully?

@JulienBek Every autopilot in this list will hit the same wall: a task that needs real judgement. We built @Tendem_AI for that moment. Human experts, on demand, callable by any agent. The intelligence is the model. The judgement is the expert. Now they work together.

@sarahtavel @CedricVanDuffel @fabiankamberi @sarahtavel is thoughtful and has done great work. I enjoyed reading that piece when it came out.

@CedricVanDuffel @JulienBek @fabiankamberi 🙏🙏