20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble | Do Margins Matter & Does Defensibility Exist in an AI World | Is Per Seat Pricing Dead & The Future of Vibe Coding with Mike Cannon-Brookes

24:11I think that's usually someone talking their book. I very much buy into, I think it's Alan Roosevelt's statement that kind of bad discussions are about other people, mediocre ones are about events, and smart discussions and good discussions are about the future and ideas. When we look forward, you said that you don't believe the chatbot is kind of the interface of AI in the future. What do you think is the interface for AI in the future with that in mind? Ah, that's a good question. Look, I think that's what we're all trying to create. One of the fascinating questions around today. It's the reason why fundamental design is such an important skill and talent, I would argue, in the next few years, maybe forever.

24:49But right now, it's hugely important. I think that interface is going to be probably, it's safe to say, far more evolutionary. So I don't know if there will be an interface. It might be that AI is rewriting the interface. In theory, AI can generate some code, write the code to create a new interface for every single screen you look at. I don't think we'll probably see that. It'll be too discombobulating for users. They'll get lost. They'll be like, wait, everything's moving all the time. If you watch users in any user study, they like knowing that I go to this button, I click the thing, that happens, and I go to this thing, and that happens.

25:18So they're going to want stability in their interfaces. They're not going to want this dynamically changing always interface, but we can generate new interfaces pretty quickly. I suspect it might look a lot more like today than we think, but it will be a lot smarter. It will do very different things and there will be a lot less click to value ratio. There is no doubt that a lot of software requires you to click or type to indicate what you want to do a lot. Take the other extreme, prompting and writing into a text box. At some point, my prompt gets so long to be specific to the thing I want. I'm like, just give me a damn button that I can click and a slider move and some UI interfaces.

25:55Somewhere between the two is probably where it is, right? It may be a combination of modern existing software UI and prompt-based layers, right? We've seen lots of people playing with this sort of terminology where you can customize software with a prompt. Imagine you had Microsoft Word, has a lot of buttons at the top of it. And you said, you know what? I want to be able to edit a prompt in Microsoft Word that says what type of person I am. And that changes the UI. I don't understand the whole, some of the toolbars there. I'm just like completely lost as to what they do. I never use them, but I'm not a lawyer.

26:25I don't live in that world. And I'm like, well, just turn all that stuff off because I'm going to tell you who I am. And then I'm going to, it's going to redesign the interface for me. I can see that totally happening. But again, this is back to all where we need fundamental design in so many of our day-to-day applications and what makes it such an exciting era to be building technology. Does the democratization or the cheapening of software creation make software more or less valuable? Does it make design more or less valuable? How does it change discovery with an infinite supply? I do think it makes design more valuable.

26:58Good design. Scarce resources probably get more valuable. And I think good design is quite scarce. There's no doubt in my mind that we will create far more technology, right? We often get asked this is, do you think all software developers are going away? I said, no. I was on a panel with, or speaking right before, I should say, Matt from AWS. And we both violently agreed that five years from now, we'll have more engineers working for our company than we do today. more software developers working for our companies. We will create far more. They will be more efficient, but technology creation is not output bound.

27:30The demand supply is very off the charts. We don't have a shortage of ideas for new technology that we want. Find me a software company or a technology company that gets to the end of its roadmap. Like the roadmap is unlimited in length and we will keep coming up with new ideas. Human creativity, we will come up with new ideas for things that we want to build into our software, maybe crap ideas, maybe good ideas. We'll have to build them and test it and see. I like to be an optimist and think we will end up with far more technology, firstly, and secondly, far better technology because I can afford, if things are cheaper to build, quote unquote, or more efficient, maybe I can build them two or three times to get it right.

28:08Plenty of technology is built once and you kind of use it. It doesn't really work very well, but it works well enough. And some team somewhere was like, man, I've got to move on. I'm out of time. I'm out of budget. I have to move on to building something else. Maybe if they'd had three attempts at it, they would have made it better, right? So we'll all live, I hope, with a world of better technology and far more technology. I do want to jump on a lot of that, but we see your Cloudflare, your Salesforce, Microsoft even, adopt Vibe coding environments that replicate a lovable or a replet. Have you internally discussed doing the same with Atlassian?

28:40Do you mean using those Vibe coding environments? No, in terms of creating an environment where within an Atlassian home, people can vibe code within large enterprises. Sure. I'm in Barcelona and we're launching one at the moment. So yes, I don't think this is going live in the next 24 hours, so that's fine. Yes, there's no doubt that that's there. But again, it's about focusing. What was the thought process behind that? Because you've got to then believe that vibe coding as a category will be a sustainable and enduring category in software creation. Do you believe that? It might depend on our definition of vibe coding.

29:09I believe that there is a large group of people who we may or may not call software developers who will want to be able to create technology of a certain quality or level or that meets a certain set of standards. Maybe the design standards, software security standards, whatever it is. I'm not sure whether we'll call these people software engineers. I don't think it really matters. I think it becomes one of these annoyingly not useful debates. If you ask me in Atlassian, I will end up with far more generalists. I will end up with a wider organization and people will do far more things and their jobs will hopefully be more fulfilling because of it, right?

29:44I will have people in finance who are quote-unquote vibe coding an application to solve a financial problem for themselves, where previously they might've tried with Excel or they might've filed a ticket with IT, or they just wouldn't have bothered. They're writing Python code to do crazy complex analysis. The cost of that code is so small that they maybe do it three or four times, maybe throw it away it didn't work, right? That is not what I would argue is software development. That is a financial professional who's trying to get their job done and has a new set of tools to go get it done. Marketers making websites, you might argue, is kind of the same thing.

30:15There's lots of these examples where it's like people whose job wouldn't say I'm a developer, but I'm now making technology. That's a great thing. I don't think it means there's less role for the core technologists to do. In fact, they're probably building more and more platforms. So we are trying to build for our maker audience. Again, we have a huge community of app vendors and creators and customers who make technology apps that run on top of the Atlassian platform. We want to help them make high quality applications that solve business problems on top of the Atlassian platform at the lowest cost possible.

30:46Now you can do that by writing code for a very complex application that does a lot of things, or you might vibe code something really simple. If by vibe coding, you mean largely writing prompts and spitting out an application. If it fits into the design language of Atlassian and it runs well and it's secure and it's compliant, that's great. It'll probably mean our customers make far more apps or more apps per customer than they ever did beforehand. But a lot of them, maybe they throw them away, right? And that's okay. That's fine. That's great. It's going to be a big spectrum. The spectrum is a barbell in some respects between what we wouldn't consider traditionally developers and then the really valuable engineers and developers.

31:21The question becomes, you said, we will have more software engineers. Will we? Will we have the entry level? Will we have the kids studying CES who come in? They're decent, but they're definitely not a 10X engineer and they're not specialists. What does the future look like for them? I think we'll have far more of them. Maybe that's a bold bet. We're hiring more grads this year than we did last year, more than we did the year before. If you think about it, it's purely an economic question, which is dangerous when it comes to talent. If someone was going to be a 10X engineer 10 years ago, I would argue that person is probably still a 10X engineer today.

31:52Maybe they're a 100x engineer because they've got all these new tools. That's probably down to the person, their learning style, their ability to ingest information and how they solve problems, et cetera. Maybe the average engineer is going to be a 10x engineer and those 10x engineers are now 100x engineers. It will come down to how they solve those problems, firstly. Secondly, I still have a bandwidth constraint of the number of people I have in R &D and engineering to build the ideas that the business could profitably build. That is still a constraint that I think will be, I believe, forever, but it's certainly a constraint that we've lived with for a long time.

32:24It's not going away today. Lastly, we've seen this with Loom, fascinatingly, in a very different context. There's a good chance that those graduates come in with a different view on what it means to be a software developer and shake up the existing world of talent in a positive way for my business, where the existing talent either figures out, man, these grads are doing things better than me. I better copy that, or maybe I should go do something else, right? The reason I say we saw this with Loom is one of the ways that Loom gets into businesses, Loom being a video and communications tool, is through graduates.

32:57Because young people coming into businesses use a lot of business tools and are like, man, this is so inefficient. Young people, the TikTok, Snapchat generation, I can't count myself, unfortunately, in that generation, I don't think anymore. I've never really understood Snapchat, but I try. They are natively used to FaceTime and video calls and voice notes. this is a very common communication factor for them that maybe you might argue someone who's been in the workforce for 34 years is not used to. When they come into a business and they use Loom to communicate, the business goes, man, those people are more productive.

33:30And the entire business starts communicating that way or a majority of it becomes a norm and a standard, right? Because they come in with a different expectation. I do wonder if the grads, if you're a grad today, say you've been in, you're halfway through your university degree, you're about to finish computer science. You're surely using all of the coding, AI assistance, and everything else. You are hyperproductive compared to what a grad would have been 10 years ago. You're going to go into a business. That business is going to say, well, that talent is amazing. I need to do more like that. So they're going to bring in those skills to businesses.

33:57When you look at the engineering team today in Atlassian, what are the dominant tools that have changed productivity meaningfully? I have to talk my own book, but RovoSearch. Look, we use our own tool, RovoDev. We have many, many code creation tools. So we use rovo dev, we use cursor, we use copilot. We use a lot of things. We've been very liberal. They're quite cheap, these tools. Would you pay 10x the price of those tools? No, probably not. Why not? I've asked 10 CEOs this at least, and you're the only one who said no. Because I think the competitive vector between them is not going to let you do that, firstly.

34:31In terms of the switching costs? If one of them charged 10x, you just switch to the other one. Secondly, they're all good at different things. So there's a reason our engineers have access to all of them and they choose to pick up a tool for certain reasons. Sometimes it's preference. Sometimes it's for the task at hand or the type of thing they're trying to do. Most of them are pretty good at greenfield development. I'm blank and I want to start something. Some of them are very bad at long form. I want to manipulate this piece of code across 500 repositories around my organization. Some of them are very bad at ingesting a large code base and they will all get better at different things, but there will be like anything preferences and styles and strengths and weaknesses.

35:08Secondly, coding is a pretty small part of a software developer's job. Like different surveys, 10%, 20%, 30 % of the week is spent writing code, right? You might argue in the best companies, it's close to 50 % of the week spent writing code. There are meetings and finding things and finding people and finding APIs and understanding the code base. Search is probably about the same amount of time as writing code for most software developers as a professional. debugging, quote unquote, at the large scale. Something's gone wrong in production, getting an alert, an error. Okay, let's figure out what's going on.

35:43Yes, there'll be AI tools for that as well. There are plenty of AI ops tools. We sell one. There are many others that are trying to help you with the operation of software, the running of systems and services. And I think that will get even more because if you have far more technology, instead of running, I don't know, say you're a medium-sized startup and you have a hundred different services running, you're going to have a thousand services. So the permutations and combinations and finding problems and gremlins is going to get that much more complicated. The answer to all these questions can't just be throw more AI at it.

36:11You end up in this weird gaudy loop of just like, AI is going to solve the problems AI created with AI that continues down the AI path. Well, that's what venture investors are telling our LPs at the moment. So just don't ruin, don't ruin the money train for us if that's okay. We've never had a technology disruption or generation before that wasn't going to solve every problem in the world. You mentioned the switching costs being low to the extent that you wouldn't pay that 10x there's a great book by hamilton helmer uh seven powers if you haven't read it please let me send it to you as a gift it's the best business book you'll ever read and bluntly one of them is that it's incredibly difficult to switch from a service as a core trait of a great business so it could be you know salesforce it's a fucking nightmare to switch from salesforce that's why no one does despite it being shit mark's a friend so if you're listening Mark, I'm so sorry.

37:00Don't kill me. But it's true. He's built a great business then, right? He's built a great business. Right, seven pounds, yeah. Yeah, but if this is true that switching costs is actually incredibly low, are these fundamentally good businesses? Look, I think like a lot of things in AI, most of these businesses have been built very fast, both in terms of the creation of the technology behind the business and the customer base and everything else, which almost by virtue of that means the switching costs are quite low at the moment. You cannot build a business fast that has high switching costs. It doesn't logically make sense.

37:32Do they have high switching costs in the future is a very different question than are there high switching costs today. One of the fascinating things for me about AI is we navigate this disruption, this period of creativity. The large language models have been dropped on the whole world at the same time. It's like someone just went, you can all have these for free, go, which is something I don't believe we've seen in technology before. It's very unique. It took a long time for mobile phones to permeate the world. It took a long time for PCs to permeate the world. It took a long time for these things.

38:02It's very different to have a billion technically literate people get access through cloud providers to, it doesn't matter, open AI, Anthropic, Gemini, Llama, go. That's why you're seeing such a burden of creativity, which is fascinating. it also means again the switching costs of almost everything being built right now are quite small they will have to build up one would argue to build sustainable businesses how those switching costs build up though is much harder to see we don't really understand that because if everyone can copy everyone really quickly you're going to kind of keep those low the switching costs are going to end up being value delivered to customers data to some extent workflows familiarity maybe the interface like similarity you know again why do you use a certain app on your phones like i'm just used to it.

38:46Do I go look for a better one? No, it's good enough. And so I don't think we really know where the switching costs are yet in some of these particular AI driven businesses, like the old sort of, was it, does HBO become Netflix before Netflix becomes HBO kind of a loop? You've got a lot of these existing businesses like us. I think we're arguably an existing business at 20 plus years in existence that have a high R &D investment and the same access to all the models. And it's about how much we can infuse AI into our core platforms and experiences to the 300 ,000 customers and tens of millions of end users we have faster than these new companies can come along, right?

39:21It's again, a classical technology race. The best statement ever is, you know, can the startup acquire distribution before the incumbent acquires innovation? And I think that's kind of continuous cat and mouse game that I often think of. People often throw that, oh, there's no switching costs between X or Y. Once you get past that and go, okay, well, then the fundamental question is how do you build defensibility post that phase. The next criticism is, well, Mike, come on, they've all got shit margins. They're all negative margin businesses. They're crap. They can't be good businesses. How do you respond to the critique of the low margin nature of relatively all of the AI tools that we're using?

39:57We're too early to really understand what those margin profiles are. We don't understand the monetization models for a lot of them yet. They keep changing pricing schemes every three months. So not understanding the monetization model, not understanding really where the relative value is, the time degradation of model value. So the whole sort of like, hey, I've trained a model, it cost me a billion dollars. Am I going to get that billion dollars back in the nine month period before the next model is better and it cost me another billion dollars to train? These have all got to be sorted out. I can't tell you how the world's going to sort them out, but I can tell you that they will be sorted out in some form.

40:29And margins are probably built in these businesses with customer value delivered. There is a partnership and a relationship with your customers and a faith that you will continue to deliver value that in some ways build margin over time in different seven powers manners than just pure switching costs, which is often about a somewhat a captivity kind of a notion. And then you get to, well, where does the fundamental value live? In any technological change, the value can shift around. You might argue, well, the chip vendors are going to capture all the value. Some investors believe this at the moment, possibly.

41:00You might argue the power producers that are upstream from the chip vendors are the people doing really, really well, right? If you're selling electricity right now, it's kind of a good business to be in. I don't suspect it all ends up flowing all the way up to like the power companies kind of making all the money in the world. That doesn't seem to make any sense to me because there will be, again, design, aesthetic, style all the way down the other end that do build switching costs, right? There are lots of applications I use that maybe I pay more than a sheer economic value because I prefer the design of that application.

41:27I prefer the way it makes me feel. I prefer the way it makes me productive. It's not all down to kind of, I think, spreadsheet value, like some of the people would have you say. The old classical, if you're just an open AI rapper as a startup, I do think you're in trouble. But we might look back and think that was a good way to start some of these businesses, but they end up being very different. Plenty of businesses made money on mobile without being iOS and Android. In terms of the making money, I think the core question and not picking on Salesforce, but picking on Salesforce, the question that remains is like the pricing model.

41:58We've got so used to per seat pricing. It's what predicates Salesforce's growth now. It's just an expansion in seats, bluntly. Does the per seat pricing model die in the next wave of SaaS? And how do you think about navigating that successfully? I think the only logical replacement out there, well, there's two logical replacements. One is per value delivered, some unit of value. And the other one is some sort of consumption-based model. Back to my prior point, go talk to customers about how much they love consumption-based models. They don't love them very much because they're not quite sure how much they're going to consume.

42:28They don't want to be in control of their employees. The world does trend to a non-consumptive based model in many areas, not in all areas, right? AWS is obviously consumption-based. At some point, those consumption-based models tend to flip where it's not clearly transactional, like a stripe or something, or where you can clearly measure consumption into another form of payment. We give away kind of unlimited storage. Many vendors do. It doesn't mean the storage doesn't cost us money, but it's our job to get enough money from a customer that we can on average pay for the storage and we have the right controls of exception limits and stuff like that.

43:03I do wonder if AI ends up that way around. Value-based pricing, I think, is fascinating on a delivered outcome basis. Pay me for every X I deliver. The problem with that becomes twofold, I suspect. Number one, you've got to measure X very accurately that both the seller and the buyer are prepared to agree with the measurement of X, which is a big problem in a lot of these scenarios where people give these pricing schemes. And secondly, if it's I can do X cheaper than you could, that works for one loop, one lap of the world. As soon as it's cheap, I'm going to cut your, I don't know, let's take a classical support argument.

43:39The cost per support ticket is$100. If I could get it to$80, you'd give me$10. You'd say, yes. In year one, I would. And I'd pay you$80. I'd pay you$90 to get the$80. And in year two, I'd be like, but it only cost me$90 now. I already gave you the$10. as ergo, I can't keep charging you for the discount because we're going to end up at negative, you know, you're going to pay me for support tickets. So I think we'll end up with some blended model. The answer is probably a nuance and subtlety, like always. I don't believe per seat or singular models like that are going to go away, but we'll probably have to get used to a little bit more of a consumption-based pricing.

44:14I think it's the safest world at the moment. Imagine I'm Scott. We're sitting down together, okay? By a fireside, you've got a a whiskey or a brandy or whatever it is. And we're talking about the threats to the business. Again, we mentioned Salesforce. I think the Percy is a big threat for them. That's a Southern Comfort, by the way. So you're drinking a Southern Comfort right now. I'm drinking a Southern Comfort. We're in a beautiful pad. I'm really trying to visualize this one. And we sit down, we go, what is the thing that we have to protect against? This is mine and your thing that we've built for 20 years.

44:43It's a new world. What do we have to protect against together? That's a great question. I'd probably thank him for the size of his brain and his great question. I can sip of my beer or Negroni and think a little bit. I think the thing that we have to protect is, from an Atlassian point of view, our creativity. One of our earliest maxims about the business is we wanted to be a multi-decade technology company. Some of the companies we looked up to the most as nerdy students of technology were like Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, because they survived multiple decades. Now they're all still around. We have fantastical Adobe and Intuit people on our board, maybe not coincidentally.

45:24And we still look up to these companies. They're still competing today, 20 plus years after we made up this maxim. The reason you want to be a multi-decade technology company, I would argue, is you have to survive technological disruptions just like now, right? We started kind of, you'd argue, at the very beginning of the internet kind of SaaS era. We survived the transition to SaaS and we survived the transition to mobile, whether crypto happened or didn't happen. I don't know. Other people can debate that. And now we're in this AI transition, right? Those are kind of our three decades put super simply.

45:54You look back to Adobe or Intuit, well, they had to navigate DOS to client server to Windows, to the internet, to mobile, to all these things. What sets them apart, I think, those type of companies is they are always creating. It's very hard in technology to survive multiple decades with just like a really good thing that you can sort of protect and defend. You have to create, which means you have to destroy. You have to move on. You have to change and adapt. that I think Atlassian's done pretty well for 23 years. If there's something we have to protect, it's doing that. It's not going to be like winning in AI.

46:28That's going to be the next five to 10 years. And I think we can greatly improve our position, right? I think we're really well set up for the AI era, but we have to go prove that and we have to do a bunch of stuff to actually show that that's the case. But in the long arc of time, it's going to be whatever's next after AI, which seems so far away to think about, I guarantee we're going to need to create our way through it, right? We're not going to be able to defend our way through it. We're going to have to create it. And that probably comes down to people who want to do that creation, who have a place that they want to work, who have culture that they like, who want to defend the place through creativity, who have the openness and the environment where they can say, we need to kill this thing.

47:04We need to go build that thing. What would you most like to do, but because of resource constraints, you're not able to? I don't know that I think unconstrained is useful. I'm not trying to challenge the question either. I think unconstrained thinking is not particularly useful, right? Constraints are what makes everything happen. They're what makes games more fun. A football game with no 90 minutes on the clock that ends would just be boring. We'd just be like, all right, it's 405 goals to 403, and we just keep playing forever. It's called Tass Cricket, my friend. Five days. Five days of the fucking draw.

47:41Pat Cummins is still bowling. Fuck. Well, Ashes was great last time around. Um, I think, look, I think if we weren't constrained, it would be around talent, talent acquisition, finding more and more people. There are lots of constraints when it comes to creative, wonderful people in the world. There are a lot of great places for them to go work, but I don't feel like we are a particularly constrained at the moment as a business. Like I can't, like any startup. I tell people all the time. I'm like, look, we've been here for a while. Think about Atlassian as a company with well over 10 ,000 people, hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of end users, billions of dollars in the bank, 10 ,000 people in R &D who are amazing and can build awesome stuff.

48:23Now let's go build something. Like if you started from that point, you'd be like, oh my God, we can't complain about anything in terms of our ability to get stuff done. I remember being three people and we're like, shit, someone's got to pick up the phone today. Someone's got to write some code. Someone has to take out the trash. So those are real constrained businesses. We don't have constraints in that way. It doesn't mean we the same way, I think. And it's more useful to think that way that we can go and build anything we want to go build, but we still have to trade off and build the right things.

48:50The way that you just said that was incredibly inspiring, like the scale and the size, and then now let's go build something. And it made me think of a quote once that a brilliant founder told me, I think it was Toby at Shopify that said like, this is a game of who can survive the longest. My question to you is you speak with such vigor and energy today, 23 years in, it is a game of who can survive the longest. Has there ever been a time when your energy or enthusiasm waned? And how did you get through that? And what would you say to founders who maybe are waning in energy? Great question. My favorite quote of Tobes is, he once told me that the founder's job is to fight the entropy of ambition.

49:28And I wrote it down and I was like, fuck yes, that is exactly what I have to do. Because at the moment we start being ambitious as a business, all those numbers and things that I just said, we are freaking tiny as a business. We are minute and we have to feel like we're minute. We have to feel like we have to fight for every customer and every user and we should, and we are. On the scale of the global economy, we're like tiny, which means we've got a long way to go. There are certainly times in 23 years for sure where you get tired and exhausted. There's a physical tiredness and a mental tiredness.

50:01Maybe they're a little bit different. Physical tiredness, yes, you've got to take breaks. You've got to be careful on the old classical, you're running a marathon, not a sprint, those types of things. You've got to figure out how to be there, deal with little bits of sleep or whatever it is. Some people are wired for doing that. Some people aren't. I've always been pretty wired to do it. Mental tiredness. I think you have to think about things in sort of eras and you have to take breaks mentally as well. Maybe I'm not a very good person to answer this question. I've liked the best job in the world.

50:29I've always thought I have the best job in the world. I'd go do something else. I'd probably do largely the same thing. It doesn't feel tiring, but I think you have to be, as a founder, you have to be very self-aware about what it is you actually enjoy. And if you don't enjoy canonically the journey, quote unquote, and the ups and downs of the founder journey, it may not be a journey that you want to be on, right? I think there are a lot of people who want to be founders. It's tough. There's no sugarcoating it, right? There are like days, weeks, it's bloody hard. You have to enjoy that, not in a sick, weird way, just in a, this is what you are learning from.

51:03This is the way that it rolls, right? Do you think you've become a better leader? Respectfully, the richer you've got. And the context I give for that actually is like, I don't worry so much, so I'm less emotionally volatile. I'm more neutral now because like downside's a bit capped and I see upside much more. I don't think it's monetarily related, to be honest. I think one of the, you asked what Scott and I had in common. neither of us are particularly monetarily motivated. I used to love the old quote that I didn't become an entrepreneur to make money. It doesn't mean I can't count. And neither of us are particularly, like every time we do those personality surveys and stuff, I remember we did one and some guys like, you're the weirdest founders ever.

51:41And we was like, why that? It's like, well, importance of money to both of you is like off the charts at the bottom. So I don't think monetarily, no. I do think if I twist the question, the richness of my life, I think has made me a better leader. Having kids has made me far more empathetic to employees all sorts of things, wisdom, pain, difficulty, all the suffering, whatever Jensen likes to say, going through all of those journeys, I think as long as it doesn't make you kind of gnarled and hardened, and it makes you wise in a thoughtful way, I think that is what probably makes you a better leader, person, whatever.

52:16It's a richness of the experiences that you've been through than it is some sort of capped downside. I mean, I don't have to look at the right-hand side of a menu great beyond that whatever you said there about jensen jensen said if he knew how hard it was he would never have done it and my my heart broke as an nvidia fan boy and a jensen fan boy it was like you know the shattering of father christmas not being real which he obviously is for anyone listening who's under the age of 10 if i asked you that what would your response be no i would have done it i don't i don't i don't know if i believe people who say that uh maybe look there are certainly times where you may have felt that way i think if i took the average of all of the days in the last 23 years, no, I do it again every single day.

52:54Like we've been, I still say we a lot. I have been, we have been, both of us, incredibly lucky. Like we've had so many lucky breaks go our way. We've worked hard. We've got to work with amazing people. Like I think to your question on the founders as well, I would add that because I do think it's really important. If you don't enjoy the people you work with, all the rest of it doesn't matter. I have an awesome exec team. I have some amazing colleagues at work that I'm inspired by that I love working with, that I love turning up to work with, you know, the old dinner party conversation, I think is really important.

53:25If there's one seat left and you're like, oh, your last person arrived, you go sit down. You look at the person on the left and right and think, oh, I don't want to sit there. Then you're working with the wrong team. And as a founder, it's my job to make sure that there's no seats at the dinner table that I do not want to sit in, right? But at the same time, that's where the joy comes from. Like, what are we doing it for? A company is as a group of people trying to achieve something in common, right? A team, a group that like we have some sort of goal. that's the fun part surely it's like a sports team it's like anything else we're trying to achieve something and at the end of the day you achieve it if your bank balance goes up or down or something happens those are kind of good monetary markers or external scoreboards but as they say you can't take it with you right you're going to enjoy the memories that you made so many of the old timers the last thing we talk about like it's just the the hard times you've been through the teams you things the things you've built the funny things you thought would work and didn't you're like this is going to be amazing and it totally flops and other times you're like, man, we didn't see this one coming.

54:16So that's all about the people you work with, right? All technology is built by people. If you don't enjoy that, man, you're not going to enjoy the founder journey. Dude, I've got to do a quick fire round with you because I know that you have to get on with your day too, but I've got to start with that. What's the biggest flop that you thought would be amazing that turned out not to be? I don't know. A long time ago, we added status updates to Confluence. This is 20 years ago when Twitter was all the rage. We thought it was going to be huge and nobody understood it didn't work it's probably not the biggest i don't know what have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months so for me it was like the magnitude of open ai and anthropic i didn't see them being three to four trillion dollar companies in any world and now i think if you squint you you can look i think that's a good answer i think they will both be very big companies how big i don't think anybody knows but they are they will be big and important and impactful companies.

55:08That's probably true. I think the, maybe like many people, the speed with which AI can be understood and deployed successfully by companies, customers, is something that is going to take a lot longer to really play through because the delta between magical demos and actual value delivered is quite high in a lot of cases. And that's more work to do. Why is that? Is that adoption and education? Is that data cleanliness and availability? Is that security and permissioning in large enterprises? Why? Every single one of those and more. It's experience. It's understanding. You have to understand your problem well.

55:48You have to change where you look at the problem often, the workflow, the business process. You have to understand the technology and what it is and is not capable of at the current time. You have to have the security, the data. You have to have the cleanliness. you have to have all these things that the magical demo just like a push a button and like some app pops out or this thing happens it doesn't exist it doesn't mean the technology is not useful at all but i think there's a lot there's a lot more work to do to really deliver on the promise like most technical disruptions we've got a hype cycle going on what advice my brothers just had a little baby girl first one what advice would you give to a parent of a first time newborn baby Holy shit.

56:31I would tell them that newborns are pretty hardy, right? So just to relax a little bit, it really reduces your world down to this tiny thing. And then you get incredibly stressed about it. I have four kids. They're all amazing human beings. They're all vastly different. They're all a total pain in my ass sometimes. And other times they're the most amazing people in the world. I wouldn't give them back for anything. So I think just enjoy it. Try to appreciate the ups and downs and don't stress about the little things. It really does reduce your entire visibility to this one little thing. Yeah, they're pretty amazing creatures.

57:01Do you believe your greatest strength is your greatest weakness? Yeah, probably. Yeah, I think it's really, yeah, true. What would yours be? Probably being unreasonable. Full circle. I think almost always your strengths are your weaknesses. They are almost always two sides of the same coin, right? If you're optimistic, you can be naive. If you're unreasonable, you can be, you know, difficult. If you're blindly loyal, you can make it very hard to move on from things. Like, they're always there. It's all about understanding the nuance and subtlety in the middle. Penultimate one, you got an oh shit moment.

57:30Who's your first call? Ooh, what sort of oh shit moment? Give me one more line of context. What are we calling someone for? It's a professional. So this is Atlassian. Something very bad has happened within Atlassian. Scott, if I'm stuck in jail somewhere, it's probably still Scott. Very different problem at that stage. I don't know. One of my kids is having a problem. It's probably, you know, it's probably my ex, I guess. So it's very different, different in the context. But yes, if it's work related, it's probably Scott if it's a real shit moment. A final one. What do you most want to be remembered for?

58:02I have no idea. I can change the question. If we paint a picture for 10 years away, which is Atlassian 2035, where's Atlassian then? Look, I hope we're still fighting. We're still creating. We're still, I hate the American term, but we're still a player, right? We're still fighting for customers, trying to build new things. things if we're still doing all that stuff we've done the right things right if we're still able to attract great talent if we're still doing all those things i'm not sure if you say what do i want to be remembered for i'm not even sure if atlassian's it i probably shouldn't say that probably being a good dad i don't know it's like probably four people i really want to remember me in the long arc of time but sure it'd be nice if they thought atlassian was a great place to work and we'd done some good things from australia and you know put a little dent in the world but on a personal level at some stage atlassian has to live on without either scotter i i love what i do i'm not i'm not going anywhere at the moment right i'm really enjoying things but will i be here in 50 years time probably not probably won't be on the planet 50 years time right so if atlassian lives on and is competing you don't want it you don't want your company to live on as some sort of weird zombie you know what i mean you want it to live on as a a vibrant competitive place that is trying to deliver some value, solve some problems, create things.

59:17And if it's living in that state, then I'm pretty happy. I think you look back and say, cool, it's still going. Mike, I'd heard so many great things, as I said, Miles Clements, Rich Wong, Scott, Heather Fernandez. Dude, I stalked the shit out of you, really. Right. Okay. But I so enjoyed this. Thank you for being so open and for putting up with some very wayward questions. You've been fantastic. No problem. Happy to do it anytime. But before we leave you today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data, and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products, and tools.

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