The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:12:22 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:12:22] S0: Because if you've been heavily involved, it changes the nature of the content. And we need to understand where that comes from because people are gonna wanna see, I just want the human comments here. I want just the agentic comments. And then put valid reasons to see both. This is a really interesting design challenge. Right? The provenance of where content has come from is a non simple question. Right? We see this with the anthropic watermarking features. It implies that watermark text in AI is bad. That's not true. The question is, did I contribute one or two ideas? Did I say, hey. Write me an essay about agentic design, and it wrote me 3,000 words? Or did I say, here's my essay on agentic design. Help me make it better, and it just helps me refine it. Completely different, same set of text, same watermark. How do we help you solve this problem? Right? And then you have a lot of business processes. Every company is just a system of processes put together, a big organic system that's constantly trying to improve its processes. How are we thinking about improving the process versus working on what is flowing through process, and how do we evolve how we how we run that. We see a lot of this in the software factory thinking that is very prevalent at the moment. And it's not a great analogy, I think, always because a factory is a very mechanistic defined edge thing, and software is fundamentally very creative. Right? But the idea of it is I'm working on the factory as much as I am watching what's going through the factory, but I'm not stirring or chopping or doing the things anymore or stamping out steel. Right? That machines that do that, but I still need to operate the factory. I still need to initiate. I still need to handle exceptions. I still need to steer and cocreate and coguide often. The interfaces for when I jump in and when I don't is a real challenge. Right? As there are more things going on in a company, how do I have confidence that when things go wrong, I will be notified? And when they're going right, I'm not notified. But if I need to get into the detail, I can. But I don't have to see all the detail because it's just a sea of things going on. So there's so much of this that's it's just really... It's really exciting. Right? A a field of of change in design and experience right now.
00:14:25 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:14:25] S1: You spoke about kind of the watermarking of different content types that we've seen. I think in five years' time, we'll have watermarked content for human created content because it will be 90% AI created content. That sounds very strange to a lot of people today. What do you believe today that is quite spooky today that will be incredibly common in five years' time? If you think of parallels, finding your wife online would have been crazy twenty years ago. Now 60%. Putting your credit card online. I remember when I started buying on eBay, my parents wouldn't let me put my credit card in. [00:14:57] S0: And when we, when we started selling software, you wouldn't believe it. We would have... We had a fax machine, and you would download a PDF off our website. It was a PDF. I think we had a word version as well. You could download the word document or the PDF. You would write in your credit card number, and you would fax it to us. And we would come in in the morning with these rolls of paper on the ground, and we would punch it into a physical machine. That is how we originally put payments [00:15:18] S1: for Internet. Scott, get off your fucking honeymoon, dude. We got another one. [00:15:23] S0: We we never, like, have shipped a disc ever. So we're, like, in the Internet era, but still payments back then were fax numbers. That's how companies wanted to pay you, and you would bang it into a physical machine, like, type the number in. [00:15:36] S1: So, dude, what's your kooky thought that you think will be actually incredibly prescient for five years' time?
00:15:36 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:15:36] S1: So, dude, what's your kooky thought that you think will be actually incredibly prescient for five years' time? [00:15:41] S0: I think in five years' time, maybe the watermarked AI... I think there's a good chance that the whole watermarked AI, the reverse of what you said is probably true. We don't know what is an AI touched content. And we also don't think that is good or bad. We don't attribute quality or subjectivity to AI affected content, AI improved content, AI in... Of any form. Just like today when you go to the movies, we don't say which... I wanna see films that aren't color graded. Like, it's not a thing. You just go and watch a film. You want a great film. There's CGI in all sorts of films you don't expect. You know, they they film in Sydney at nighttime, and they make it daytime with CGI and stuff. And does it matter to me? I don't think so, really. Right? I I care about the quality of the story. I think where their text is... How many people are like, I don't want to read your content if word helped me with the spell checking and grammar checking. There's some version of that that's similar. I guess there's some version where it's entirely AI generated slop. And so it's like, will we think about this spectrum? I suspect we all just get used to dealing with the fact that it may be entirely synthetic content and, hence, artisanal crafted things will stand out more. I still think we'll probably have human judgment that makes things stand out.
00:16:50 · Harry Stebbings
[00:16:50] S1: EWO is some of the biggest companies in the world. I was chatting to Jason Lampkin the other day, he and was like, dude, I tell you, I tell you, none of them wanna work with the open models that are Chinese. They just don't want it. And I'm a big investor in fireworks. I believe in open models. I think it's a great thing for the ecosystem, but I am fearful that enterprises don't wanna work with largely Chinese open models. Do you see that, and how do you think about that statement?
00:17:18 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:17:18] S0: Jason's increasingly trying to run one of the smallest companies in the world, I think. So for good or bad, I always find his takes amusing. I think that is something that will probably evolve. We want to be very customer led in our decision making. And there is certainly some customer pushback in some places to, quote, unquote, Chinese models. There is not customer pushback to open models. We use a lot of Neemotron in our platform, for example. We have a deep partnership with NVIDIA. That is fine. Right? We use some Mistral. We use a bunch of other open models in different parts. Our job, again, is to apply AI on behalf of our customers. It's not to pick a model. It's to use the best model for the best job, blending all the models for the best price for the customer, and to get the outcome they want. Right? Applying the AI is our job. But if there is customer pushback to something like a Chinese model, quote, unquote, that is something that we have to be very careful of. And so we don't use any Chinese models in production. We're very clear about that. I think what people don't understand is the distillation and the back and forth where knowing it's a Chinese model is kind of really interesting. But a lot of The US models are increasingly using Chinese models to train themselves, but they don't say that. And so you end up with all these weird loops where I'm like, I don't know if that disappears over time. I suspect it does, but I think we'll have to see and watch. I do talk to customers sometimes and say, do you use Linux? And they say, yes. And I say, is that European? And they say, yes. And I said, well, I think it's, like, 40% of contributions or something like this is quite high nowadays come from China because there's amazing software engineers in China doing all sorts of things. But because it's open source, we think, oh, well, someone's, like, checking all of that and actually with AI, we can check that even better than we ever have been able to before, and they're happy to use Linux. So
00:18:55 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:18:55] S1: So you think this skepticism is overwrought? [00:18:57] S0: I think there's a geopolitical issue around who has this sort of strategic control of the world. That is a different issue from should we use a model that was trained in China or by Chinese nationals or by... Like, some version of these two are very different questions, if you know what I mean, in terms of who's run the world, America versus China. That's a big question. It's out of my my league and [00:19:18] S1: my I... I'm sorry. This is why, dude, you you know, years ago, you remember when you first met me, I was at Harry Potter. But they're not... They're kinda one and the same because the people building the models are not able to leave, and their families are not able to leave without letting the government know where they are going, when they are going. And so they are actually merging.