All episodes of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 2026-10-12 · 55 min · 11,584 words

20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models | Why The Jury Is Still Out On The Benefits of Specialised Models with Mike Cannon-Brookes

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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 solvational 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. Tree to imagination asymmetry. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stabbings. So in today's show, we sit down with Mike Cannon Brooks, 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 contact slayer 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 Vansha. I wanted to see what it could do. So I built a guest research hub for the show. Upcoming guests, company notes, previous interviews, sponsor 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, backend and hosting already handled and just all in one. It made it so easy. And that's what I loved. I didn't write I had 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 44 gets you there. go to base4.com forward slash two zero VC. That's base four four dot com slash two zero VC. While base 44 helps you build faster, Laroden helps you measure AI impact. Every company now runs two workforces: humans and AI agents. Laroden is the first unified dashboard across workforces that measures their work and optimizes their impact. Laroden answers four questions. Who's using AI?

Which tools? What is it costing? And what's it actually being produced for every team across every vendor? AIROI 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 Laradin. Thousands of AI tools and millions of dollars of AI spend are measured. You bet on AI, Laradin proves that it's It's working. Visit Laroden.com to learn more. That's L-A-R-R-I-D I N dot 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. Oh, thanks for having me back, man. Appreciate it. Get invited back. I must give those interesting answers. I saw your little rant the other day. I loved it. You give honest answers, which I don't always get. Um, the thing that I really want to start on is we see a world of agents.

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