The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:00:00] S0: If you're giving up on your user interface, if you're giving up on evolving your experience for a customer, I think that's a brainless bet. I don't think agents will replace all the interfaces. For the first time in a long time, we're solving foundational design challenges again. There is certainly some customer pushback in some places to, quote unquote, Chinese models. There is not customer pushback to open models. The jury is really out on the benefits of building specialized models at the moment. Right now, the production of technology is faster than the consumption of technology. We're moving from a world of information asymmetry to imagination asymmetry.
00:00:36 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:36] S1: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. So in today's show, we sit down with Mike Cannonbrooks, founder and CEO at Atlassian, to discuss what happens to traditional software in a world where agents are able to extract information from databases. Do they still carry value? Where is enduring value in a world of agents? How does Atlassian think about building the context layer that will power enterprise AI agents? And what does this mean for the next generation of enterprise software? This and so much more in an incredibly revealing, but also just awesome discussion with Mike. I've known him for years. He's an incredible dude, and this was so much fun to record. But before we dive into the show today, base 44 is one of those products I used, and I just thought straight away, man, I wish I'd had this when I started 20 VC with $50 and no contacts in venture. I wanted to see what it could do, so I built a guest research hub for the show. Upcoming guests, company notes, previous interviews, sponsored contacts, follow ups, all in one amazing location. I described it in plain English. A few minutes later, I had the product open in front of me. Database, login, back end, and hosting already handled and just all in one. It made it so easy, and that's what I loved. I didn't write a long spec. I didn't stitch five different tools together. I built the thing, and I started using it. For any founder listening, that's the point. The faster you turn an idea into something real, the faster you launch. Apps, dashboards, internal systems, AI agents, whatever you need to build, Base forty four gets you there. Go to base44.com/20vc. That's base44.com/20vc. While base forty four helps you build faster, LARADIN helps you measure AI impact. Every company now runs two workforces, humans and AI agents. Is the first unified dashboard across both workforces that measures their work and optimizes their impact. Laredon answers four questions. Who's using AI? Which tools? What is it costing? And was it actually being produced for every team across every vendor? AI ROI stops being a guess and becomes a number that you can consistently and confidently measure. Gainsight, Vertiv, SurveyMonkey, and many other enterprise organizations run their AI programs on Larridin. Thousands of AI tools and millions of dollars of AI spend are measured. You bet on AI.
00:02:59 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
Larridin proves that it's working. Visit larridin.com to learn more. That's larridin.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Mike, dude, I love our conversations. They are always my favorite. So thank you so much for joining me today. [00:03:14] S0: Oh, thanks for having me back, man. It's appreciated getting invited back. I must give those interesting answers. I saw you a little rant the other day. I loved it. [00:03:20] S1: You give honest answers, which I don't always get. The thing that I really wanna start on is we see a world of agents, and agents remove a lot of human need and interaction with data providers or data sources. How do you think about a world where value shifts as agents retrieve and do tasks for us and the potential for an Atlassian to be a data provider, not a doer?
00:03:45 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:03:45] S0: I think there is some premise of the question that's slightly incorrect. Go on, heavy. I think... Look. I can see for certain tasks that is the case. Where the tasks are very functional, that is the case. Where the tasks have a lot of taste and interaction and collaboration involved, I don't think that will be the case, certainly not in the same way. So it's very hard to give an answer across all types of tasks. You know, one might ask, there are certain types of shopping. If you take a consumer task, not something that we do, obviously. So so a previous safe example, there are certain types of shopping. I just wanna get the thing and move on. If I'm buying, I don't know, charging cable off Amazon, just give me the charging cable. I don't I don't care. I don't need anything. Right? And if there are other types of shopping where I may enjoy the experience, I may wanna go to the store, I wanna do a lot of research, I wanna do it myself, there's gonna be a whole range of things. And so, yes, for some tasks, it's gonna get rid of the pedestrian. I just wanna get the thing done. But in the enterprise collaboration world and in the business workflow world, agents are going to help and are already helping, I would argue, in in in a lot of cases, move the work forward to let people honestly focus on higher value creative parts of the job. I think that will change a lot of jobs, but I don't think it's necessarily negative nor do I think it's bad for Atlassian. I think it's great for Atlassian. So we wanna help be a part of that agentic world, but the experiences of how we do that is a long way from from solved and settled in in enterprise software.
00:05:12 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:05:12] S1: If I were to ask you on the flip side of that, what is the core strategic decision that will determine the success of Atlassian in the next twelve months? What would your answer be? [00:05:22] S0: Yes. I'm I'm well on record. Headless is brainless by definition. Look. I think, again, we're continuing [00:05:28] S1: this before, Mike. You stand by that. [00:05:30] S0: Absolutely. Because when people talk about headless in that way, if you're giving up on your user interface, if you're giving up on evolving your experience for a customer to solve the problems that you set out to solve for them, you are not a significant part of that experience, yes, I think that's a brainless bet. That does not mean we're not big on MCP. We're not big on CLIs. I think we have one of the top five, top three MCP servers in the world. Like, we're hugely big on MCP and its ability to allow agents and harnesses to contribute data to our platform and to the Teamwork graph and to read data from the Teamwork graph. And it shows off... To be honest, MCP and harnesses show off the results of our graph, right, how great quality our our context graph is to solve all manner of problems for our customers, and that's great. But if our interfaces and our design is not evolving to solve some problems or some significant part of the problem set better for the customer, then, yes, I think you're going to be in trouble. [00:06:25] S1: So then you fundamentally disagree then that in the world of agents, interface and design becomes less important.
00:06:25 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:06:25] S1: So then you fundamentally disagree then that in the world of agents, interface and design becomes less important. [00:06:31] S0: Absolutely. I think it becomes more important. I think design and experience is one of the keys to success in the AI era. Like, we are massively invested in design and experience at the moment in a way that we we we never have been before, and we've always been quite a large investor in design experience. We have continued to upgrade our experience in a way that I would say few enterprise software vendors have done over the last twenty years. It's really easy to make an app. Always think with a current, you know, say, better than 90% of apps out there today, that's easy. But in five years' time, that app will be better than 20%. You know, experience degrades as we have higher and higher standards. To upgrade app experiences is really hard. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of r and d. It takes a lot of difficult craft work to continue to do that. We're in an era where we're all gonna need to uplevel our experiences to handle the AI era. But I do think design experience is even more important in the AI era. I think it will be the differentiator. If you argue that technology creation is increasingly cheap, technology creation is abundant and verdant, The differentiators, to me, clearly, one of them will be design and experience, will be what makes you stand out as an application or as a product or a service.