The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:37:52 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:37:52] S0: Spirit Airlines data. $30,000,000 for a million emails and a bunch of other sort of corporate data. I don't know if that will become a trend, but I think the value of that data inside a company is very much the same. The important part is that it's alive. So the social graph of a company is valid today and only today. Tomorrow, there will be different people in a company than there were today. Some people left, some people joined, and the social graph is gonna continue to shift and change in terms of who works with who on which projects on which areas. Our job actually is to be very fresh with that graph. It's to take history and to infer learnings from it, but that has to be fresh and constantly built on top of. I say this all the time when it comes to our our memory and our dreaming and how we understand the history of an organization. Knowing that I wrote Java code in 2003 and what code I wrote is totally useless to Atlassian in 2026. Knowing the fact that I used to be a programmer, a bad one twenty plus years ago, is kind of useful because you may explain a concept to me in a way that a technology savvy person would understand. That's about as useful as it is. Right? Today, I'm a full time manager of people. I am a full time storyteller. I am a part time dabbler in design and experience and products. Right? That... That's that's my job, and I love my job. But the history of it is very different. If I looked at your history for the last ten years, I'm sure stuff you did ten years ago, some of the echoes and memories of that are useful for you as learnings today, but the actual facts and figures of what you did aren't very useful. So an organizational graph has to be very fresh and current with facts and very historical in its learnings and memories to help the organization as best as possible. McCore is a little different. Those type of companies are looking for large scale generated generic datasets to sell at scale to many other providers, right, to make those broad intelligence platforms valuable. Trying to think of a good analogy.
00:39:38 · Mike Cannon-Brookes, Harry Stebbings
Maybe if you think about self driving cars, a self driving car needs to understand all of the bits of a road, and it's a very specialized dataset about roads, you know, corners, signs, traffic, babies in prams, cyclists, all this sort of stuff has to be able to identify them and understand their dynamics and physics and these types of things. Know that a cyclist is not gonna jump into the road. Right? And and it has to understand all this. It doesn't have to know when Albert Einstein was born. It's totally useless to a self driving car to know when Albert Einstein was [00:40:08] S1: Mike, if you could acquire one company and their data would have the most transformational impact on your context graph, what company would that be? [00:40:16] S0: I mean, acquiring companies for data isn't particularly important to us. [00:40:20] S1: So there's no hole in your context graph, so to speak?
00:40:20 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:40:20] S1: So there's no hole in your context graph, so to speak? [00:40:24] S0: It's not so much a hole in the context graph. It's the customer's context. It's not our context. We are helping them put it together. We are helping them learn on the knowledge and the work they've accrued communications. We're helping them connect meaning, connect the dots across that. We're helping their agents connect those dots. We're putting it into a giant graph. We're building a big lexical and semantic search engine on top of the graph. And then we have a query language that makes sense to agents through MCP and CLI. And we're helping them add their own custom data to that. Right? An investment firm cares about stocks. A manufacturing firm cares about, you know, supplies of materials. Health care firm may care about hospitals and beds and things like theirs. There's specific data, and then they all have meetings and documents and knowledge and code and these things. We're trying to put it all together in a way that they can retrieve it and the learnings from it. Right? We're building an index for them. It's not the data that makes a a difference to us per se. Can I [00:41:16] S1: ask you a weird question that I don't know the answer to? As we see, like, OpenAI protrude more and more into Docs and Microsoft Office, you're a student of the Internet, Mike, in a brilliant way. How do you think about Anthropic and OpenAI's intrusion into traditional applications that you and Microsoft provide? And what does the voice in your head say when you think about that at night?
00:41:37 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:41:37] S0: Look. It's it's an interesting question. Both of them are deep Atlassian partners, and we really value our partnership with them. I think they're probably partners with a whole lot of firms. Right? Their business is in some ways selling computing services, if you wanna think about it. Right? They're also in the business of applications to some level. Where those lines emerge, I think, is gonna be a highly fought over variable future. I don't think anybody knows the answer to that question. I will say if it comes to things like docs, we faced this question with Confluence for a long time. Confluence is north of a 1,500,000,000 ARR business. That was our last disclosed number a couple of quarters ago. It would be a public company in and of itself. It is still growing well north of 25% per year and at a very large scale. So it would be a very good public company just on itself. And ostensibly, it's just content that you could put 15 other ways into your computer. You probably have 20 ways on your computer right now to write down a piece of text from ones that come with your operating system to ones that come with your, you know, workspace provider. In and of itself, writing content is not a definitive advantage. It comes back to design, experience, purpose, integration into other workflows. So there's a lot of other things that I I think go into that that's helped us build a very successful business there. I think that will continue to be the case.
00:42:58 · Harry Stebbings
[00:42:58] S1: Can I ask a really hard one? And you can tell me how, please. Sure. I don't I don't want to, and that's just rude. I love your focus on design, and I love your craft, and I feel it in your voice. Carrie and Linear always talk about, like, the craft of design too, and I do feel it in theirs. People seem to feel the craft of the linear design maybe more than they do in Jira. How do you think about that? And is that unfair? And say if it's unfair.
00:43:24 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:43:24] S0: Yeah. I think it's unfair. I think there's always gonna be changes in those types of things. I think what's important is never to rest. What has made Atlassian successful for two decades and hopefully will for many decades to come is to continue to invest in up leveling every part of our software experience. The standard of what, as I said, was good design 10 ago is totally different to what is good design today. And it will be totally different ten years time. The ability to sustain that year on year for a long time is quite different. It's a totally different way of thinking about continual progress and delivery. Jira and the Timor Collection have had an amazing year of growth, and accelerating and growing faster than they ever had at massive scale. And that is in the number of users and attention. And a large part of that is because of the design experience. We're showing off really foundational design changes, speed, performance, and efficacy of what it is we can achieve for customers. And in those areas, I think we we just we just run our own race. I think that's the best thing. Ultimately, it's about customers' experience of the quality of the software in a whole. And it's it's a long race. So would say that to anybody. We've been here for a couple decades, and we intend to be here for a couple of decades still. I'm in my mid forties. I don't consider myself to be middle aged, but I love what I do. So