Sequoia partner: Founders are worried if they're 'just an iteration away' from AI destroying their companies

• Venture capitalist Julien Bek has some words of warning for current founders.
• "If you sell tools today, you're really in the line of sight for the models," Bek said of AI advancements.
• Instead, Beck, a partner at Sequoia, said founders should focus on selling outcomes.

Founders can sense the major AI labs breathing down their necks. A partner at Sequoia says the answer is to pivot, not try to outrun the billions being spent.

"The reality is 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 they're going to launch," Sequoia partner Julien Bek said during Monday's episode of TBPN.

Bek said the founders he works with are "wondering if they're just an iteration away from the models replacing what they're doing."

It's why Bek said the best bet is to focus on services. In a recent article he posted on X, Bek laid out why he thinks the next "$1 trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm."

Bek's comments come as AI disruption fears continue to move financial markets. Last month, advancements in Anthropic's Claude triggered a sell-off and fears of a SaaSpocalypse that wiped out more $1 trillion in tech valuations before some companies began to rebound. Other industries are also concerned that leading AI models will soon disrupt their business models.

By focusing on services, Bek said founders can ride the wave of AI advancements rather than trying to carve out an area that is likely ripe for takeover.

"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," Bek said. "So, part of that prediction was saying for every dollar that's spent on software, $6 are spent on services. Until now, we could only really go after the $1, because we were building tools."

Bek said that Sequioa is putting together a map of the best "autopilots," companies that couple the output from AI models with human judgment. Models are great "at everything intelligence-related," he said, but still can't fulfill some very innate niches where humans excel.

"Judgment is everything humans really spike at, which is more harder to define," Bek said. "It's instinct, people call it taste, call it experience. And those things are things we think humans will remain really good at for a very long time, until intelligence is able to absorb these skills into it."

In his TBPN interview, Bek highlighted Sierra, the enterprise customer service startup cofounded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, as a good example of a company moving toward an "autopilot" mode. On X, Bek namechecked a long list of other newcomers, including Harper, Rillet, Anterior, Harvey, and Juicebox.

In terms of industries ripe for disruption, Bek wrote on X that insurance brokerage, accounting and audit, and healthcare revenue cycle are all ripe for "autopilot" companies to dominate.

"We think that in the immediate, the ones that require more intelligence, will be actually really interesting for these autopilots, because you can have — instead of having 10 humans and one AI, you have one human and 10 AIs," he said during the TBPN interview, "and just that ratio is just going to shift as the models get better."