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News of the day
1. Sequoia Capital's new thesis suggests the next trillion-dollar company will sell work directly, not software, disrupting the service economy. → Read more
2. OpenAI may be developing a smartphone with AI agents instead of apps, aiming for deeper user data access and unrestricted AI integration. → Read more
3. OpenAI and Microsoft's deal is rewritten: no more exclusivity for Microsoft, and the AGI clause is gone. OpenAI can now work with other cloud providers. → Read more
4. Meta AI's Sapiens2 model advances human-centric computer vision with 1B images, 1K/4K resolution, and combined MAE/CL training for pose, segmentation, and more. → Read more
Our take
Hi Dotikers!
On Friday we watched Sam Altman release GPT-5.5 seven weeks after GPT-5.4 to catch up with Anthropic on agentic ground, hammering home the super app mantra for the enterprise. The question lurking beneath: what exactly is all this power for. Julien Bek of Sequoia answered a few weeks ago with a thesis that deserves to be taken seriously. The next trillion-dollar company will be a software firm dressed up as a services shop.
The reasoning fits in one sentence. For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services. As long as AI sells itself as a tool aimed at the professional, it is fighting over the poorest slice of the pie. Bek draws a line between intelligence and judgement, the former being what already automates, the latter what still resists. The higher the intelligence ratio in a profession, the faster autopilot will replace copilot. Software engineering got there first because it is almost entirely intelligence. The rest will follow, accounting first, then insurance, transactional law, managed IT.
The opportunity map is what makes the article worth reading. Insurance brokerage at 200 billion, accounting and audit at 80 billion, healthcare revenue cycle at 80 billion, recruitment at 200 billion. The numbers make your head spin, and the proposed strategy is elegant. You start with tasks that are already outsourced, because replacing a subcontractor is a vendor swap, not a reorg. Crosby sells NDA drafting directly to companies rather than tools to law firms, WithCoverage sells insurance directly to the CFO rather than to the broker.
Bek obviously has an interest in pushing this thesis, his fund is invested in several of the startups he cites. That said, the analysis holds up and the timing is credible. If the autopilot wave really does land in 2026, yesterday's dominant copilots will have six months to pivot before becoming the BlackBerry of consulting firms.
G.
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