The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:07:37 · Harry Stebbings
[00:07:37] S1: So you don't think we'll have horizontal agents which stretch across a number of different vertical providers and do functional work for us, you think the design and the experience of those vertical providers will remain incredibly strong? This is not a leading question, by way, sir.
00:07:52 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:07:52] S0: I don't... I I... It's a too simplistic view of the world. I think we will certainly have some horizontal agents that handle a breadth of tasks. I think you will also have vertical agents that go very deep in a singular task. I don't think agents will replace all the interfaces. I think all three of these can be true at the same time. So as an example, we have lots of agents that run-in a lot of platforms from, you know, obviously, Claude and Codex and and Cursor and places like this, Teams and Slack, that access the Atlassian platform and contribute data back to the Atlassian platform. That does not mean that's the best interface to do all the jobs on the Atlassian platform. It can be very useful for a lot of different things. And vice versa, we're announcing a lot of features with our partner at Figma, for example, and another set of features with our partner Databricks. In both cases, allowing you to get to Figma functionality and Databricks functionality from within the Atlassian platform is really powerful. If I'm reading a conference page and I wanna just select a piece of text and say, can you check this number for me? And it goes off to Databricks or to Snowflake through the Timographs data context and gets you back the answer or gives you a small chart, that's great. That's not saying Confluence is a BI tool. Like, it's not gonna be the power of what you need. But sometimes when you want a quick answer retrieved from somewhere else, it is a very different experience than if I want to live in that world doing that thing. Same with Figma as an example. Right? You can interact with the Figma agent inside of the Atlassian platform in lots of places. You can interact with the Atlassian platform from inside the Figma interface in a lot of places. It's the definition of a to a. I think it's one of the best examples of a to a across multi craft teams. But both those interfaces have strengths in their area of doing things. Right? I don't think there'll be one Uber agent that sort of just does everything magically. I'm I'm a big a big bear on the magic button thesis of AI, that there'll be one button we press, and it does it all for us. I don't think that's how it actually is going to work.
00:09:40 · Harry Stebbings
[00:09:40] S1: So if I go back to that question for you, which is the core strategic decision that will determine the success of Atlassian in the next twelve months, what would you say it is?
00:09:48 · Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:09:48] S0: Well, one of the top handful would certainly be continuing to invest and have the best enterprise context graph in the world, continuing to stay ahead. I do think what we talked about before, continuing to evolve the design and experience in the agentic era is going to be a really interesting challenge. Like, I love spending time with our design team at the moment. For the first time in a long time, we're solving foundational design challenges again. Right? I I would say the mobile era is the last time where we had to think about completely new design paradigms. A lot of the features we're announcing here in Amsterdam are really foundational design breakthroughs. How should agents appear in a broad collaboration platform? How should I interact with them? How do I deal with the problems of humans interacting with agents, agents operating on behalf of humans, knowing what is AI and what is not AI touched content. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's like one thing for a 100% generate a piece of text. There's nothing for it to help you write something. Right? And and, like, how do we explain all this to somebody, and and where does it matter? Provenance and accountability are incredibly important. Speed and understanding. Do I wanna see everyone's agent traces? No. But do I need to understand what they are and learn from them? Yes. Lots of foundational design problems that I think will improve customers' results, but that's... It's a really... It's an interesting time for that.
00:11:06 · Harry Stebbings, Mike Cannon-Brookes
[00:11:06] S1: What is the foundational design problem with agents that we have not solved yet? [00:11:10] S0: I mean, text boxes suck, firstly. Giving you a little text box and saying, here is a one line piece of text that you can type characters into, and it has unlimited power. And it's just a blank white line. And you're like, well, that's a terrible user interface to start with. Right? And we're trying... We're seeing lots of attempts at changing this problem. It's an incredibly powered agents and and and chat in general and LLMs are so powerful, and most users just stare at them and kind of use them like Google search. Right? Like, that's the reality of what they do. But how do you explain the power to them? How do you give them the right power at the right times? There's a lot of talk about agentic UI, you know, the sort of word ribbon that changes which functions it gives you at which times, and how does it take that as those functions evolve? There's a lot of this that's a challenge, firstly. Secondly, agents doing things on behalf of users is an increasingly common pattern. Again, I think software teams are really at the forefront of a lot of this, but I think it'll come to legal teams and HR teams and marketing teams. It's all gonna be the same. You know, if I'm using Codex and it does something for me, for example, if I'm just writing code and Codex creates a pull request, Did Harry do that, or did Codex do that? Or was that Codex on behalf of Harry? How much of that was Harry? [00:12:21] S1: Why does it matter?