A three-part series by Paul Hsiao on the agentic software shift forcing every vendor on the register to reinvent itself, the PE software book already breaking under it, and the public locked out of the biggest software wave in history.
Across 75 years of the Software Register, 2,406 companies and $26T of combined value, one metric travels cleanly: value per employee. It just moved from $4.6M to $17.8M in seven years. Boris Cherny ships 20–30 pull requests a day. Anthropic at $160M per employee. IBM at $0.7M. The public column is already being marked down in plain sight.
The Software Register splits into four ownership columns. Public ($18T, marked down in plain sight). PE-owned ($1.14T, breaking on the Medallia mechanic). Private ($5.2T, trapped behind a velvet rope). Acquired ($1.77T, failed independence dressed as validated value). Three of the four are in a structurally different position than their owners realize.
Software has moved through eight technological waves over 75 years against a $650B-a-year tool-buyer wallet. The ninth, AI, is being priced against the $10 trillion services-and-labor revolution Sequoia is anchoring — an order of magnitude larger than the prior software market, with a wider speculative band that reaches toward $50T. The verticals visible today already sum to $5T on their own.