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Mike Cannon-Brookes

Co-Founder and CEO, Atlassian · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@mcannonbrookes ↗LinkedIn ↗atlassian.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

He co-founded enterprise software giant Atlassian in 2002 alongside Scott Farquhar, scaling products like Jira, Confluence, and Trello globally. Outside of software, he is an active climate-tech investor known for backing Sun Cable and driving shareholder campaigns to accelerate decarbonization.

47statements → 17claims → 5claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 3.81/5average certainty → 2.34/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources → 83said about them ↓

4 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 11 not checkable as stated how the 17 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

10 predictions · 7 assertions · 7 opinions · 16 insights · 7 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 17 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 11 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Mike argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Cannon-Brookes: Some Atlassian AI features are 1,000x cheaper to run today
“Some of our features are a thousand times cheaper to run than when we introduced them today.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Feb 12, 2026 ▶ 19:02 Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
75% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.3 · precision 3.8 · compression 3.5

redirected or did not address 2 of 38 assessed questions (5%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

280 words/min while actually speaking · 12.6 um and uh per 1k words · 12.5 false starts per 1k · 27.2% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 10,576 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 2 rated episodes:

host pushback ▾ 5/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 4.5/10
setup questions received 40%

Everything Mike Cannon-Brookes said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
Mike Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian is currently launching a vibe coding environment
“I'm in Barcelona and we're launching one at the moment.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 28:39 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cannon-Brookes: AI vibe coding will lead to far more generalists at Atlassian
“If you ask me, in Atlassian, I will end up with far more generalists. People, 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?”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 29:35 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Cannon-Brookes: Software developers spend only 10% to 30% of their week coding
“Coding is a pretty small part of a software developer's job. 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.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 36:06 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: Fast-growing businesses cannot possess high switching costs immediately
“You cannot build a business fast that has high switching costs.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 38:40 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Cannon-Brookes: OpenAI wrapper startups are in trouble long-term
“The old classical, if you're just an open AI rapper as a startup, I do think you're in trouble, but that might not, we might look back and think that was a good way to start some of these businesses, but they end up being very different.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 43:24 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: Enterprise customers generally dislike consumption-based SaaS pricing
“Go talk to customers about how much they love consumption-based models. Generally, they don't love them very much, because they're not quite sure how much they're going to consume, they don't want to be in control of their employees, so the world does trend to…”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 44:17 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cannon-Brookes: Per-seat SaaS pricing will persist alongside consumption models
“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.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 46:13 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Cannon-Brookes: Anthropic is one of Atlassian's largest AI models
“We use Anthropic a lot. It's one of our biggest models. We use, you know, multiple models which I think is what most good SaaS vendors are doing within their customers' choices, right? Like we use a lot of Gemini, a lot of Anthropic. We have a whole bunch of L…”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Feb 12, 2026 ▶ 2:42 Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian cloud revenue grew 26% past $5B with 44% RPO growth
“We're accelerating our cloud revenue, which did a 26% quarter growth rate at well north of five, six billion at the moment. And we grew our RPO by 44%.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Feb 12, 2026 ▶ 15:37 Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Cannon-Brookes: Accel's $60M Atlassian investment in 2010 was 100% secondary
“When the Excel guys invested in Atlassian, right? It was all secondary. They put sixty million bucks in 2010. And they bid highest of the five VCs.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Feb 12, 2026 ▶ 33:16 Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: VCs waste capital following tech trends for five to six years
“That means a lot of capital is raised and deployed and a whole bunch of it turns out to be torched because VCs are very individual thinkers that they pile into the two winners and then the next 10 companies and probably the next 15 and a whole bunch of those d…”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Feb 12, 2026 ▶ 59:37 Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: Co-founder partnerships work when both feel outmatched by the other
“I think it really helps to think the other person is just far better than you are at pretty much everything, because you're both stretching to try to be as good as the other person, if that makes any sense, right?”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 5:22 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: Effective Co-CEOs require 60% to 80% overlap in context
“Scott and I are probably somewhere between 60 and 80% overlapped. If we're a hundred percent overlapped, like we do exactly the same thing well, there's not much point in having two of us. If we're zero percent overlapped, you're gonna have a lot of conflict, …”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 7:18 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: Strategic ideas you cannot convince your co-founder on are usually bad
“If I can't convince him that something's a good idea, it's probably not. That is a really good marker that something is probably not a good idea and vice versa.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 9:11 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cannon-Brookes: AI will lead enterprises to build significantly more disposable apps
“It'll probably mean our customers make, I think, far more apps, or more apps per customer than they ever did beforehand. But a lot of them, maybe they throw them away, right?”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 31:20 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cannon-Brookes: Engineering bandwidth remains a permanent constraint on profitable ideas
“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, and I think will be, I believe forever, but it's certainly a constraint that we'v…”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 32:44 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Cannon-Brookes: Developers spend as much time searching as writing code
“Search is probably about the same amount of time as writing code for most software developers as a professional.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 36:29 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cannon-Brookes: Simultaneous global release of LLMs is unprecedented in tech history
“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.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 39:00 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: Unconstrained thinking is useless because constraints drive progress
“I think unconstrained thinking is not particularly useful, right? Constraints are what makes everything happen.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 49:40 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: Unreasonable people are required to drive progress
“Reasonable men live within the boundaries, and so you need unreasonable men to change things and move the world forward.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 0:00 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Cannon-Brookes: A founder's job is fighting the entropy of ambition
“My favorite quote of Tobes is, he once told me that the founder's job is to fight the entropy of ambition.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 0:22 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Atlassian's first shareholder agreement had a rock-paper-scissors tie-breaker clause
“Our first shareholder agreement did have Actually in there that if we couldn't agree on something, we'd go to a game of scissors, paper, rock. Best of three.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 8:28 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Atlassian is hiring more university graduates than in previous years
“We're hiring more grads this year than we did last year. More than we did the year before.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 32:07 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

The other half of the tape: Mike Cannon-Brookes's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 81 times in 26 episodes on 20VC. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 31Jason Lemkin 15Scott Farquhar 9Jeff Lawson 6Miles Clements 5Rory O'Driscoll 2Jean-Michel Lemieux 2Heather Fernandez 2

Statements about Mike Cannon-Brookes, by other people (2)

Opinion
Clements: Never bet against Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes
“Never bet against Mike Cannonbrooks. Absolutely not.”
Miles Clements Mar 9, 2026 ▶ 41:48 "Cursor is Dead" is Total BS: Here is Why | Miles Clements · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lawson: Atlassian and Mike Cannon-Brookes will stay aggressive on acquisitions
“So I think Mike will be one of the more aggressive on the acquisitions front because they've always been and so I think it's in the DNA of Atlassian, so I do think we are looking at one of those, even if I am not fully on board with the most recent.”
Jeff Lawson Sep 11, 2025 ▶ 1:10:05 OpenAI’s $10BN Secondary Sale, Ramp Hits $1BN ARR & Brex Hits $700M · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00208401520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions
081520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodes it came up in
00137.5251520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions per episode
2026 36 mentions in 15 episodes 2 per episode
2025 17 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 21 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support To Feb 12, 2026 35m
Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubbl Oct 13, 2025 45m
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