The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 47 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Cannon-Brookes: The idea that software is dead is ludicrous
“The idea that software as a category is dead is ludicrous to me.”
Cannon-Brookes: Technology's fundamental role is to change and expand TAM
“Our whole job in technology is to change TAM, actually.”
Cannon-Brookes: VCs back OpenAI at huge valuations for logo marketing
“One thing that they don't say is a lot of VCs want the loose side on the wall, so when you walk into the office, on the wall is a nice logo that says, oh, you invested in OpenAI. You invested in Anthropic. Well, if you put money at three hundred fifty billion,…”
Cannon-Brookes: Being public makes Atlassian a better company
“We're a better company because we're a public company. Like we have become a better business, right? We're better at forecasting. We're better at planning. We're better at executing.”
Cannon-Brookes: Most tech assets are currently vastly overvalued
“One of the only predictions I think I would make accurately is 10 years from now, we'll look back and say, man, you remember that era? That was crazy. Most of the things are vastly overvalued.”
Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian will employ more software engineers in 2030
“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.”
Cannon-Brookes: Co-CEO success requires equality in age, life stage, and equity
“Having two equal parties, I think, in motivation, experience, we've always talked about this, is a really important part of what made it successful. And by equal, yes, equal, I don't know, shareholding-wise, equity-wise, but equal in terms of age, life stage, …”
Cannon-Brookes: Outlier AI Winners Will Outweigh Overvalued AI Losses
“Most of the things are vastly overvalued, probably true. Some of the things will be worth far more and are undervalued, and the far more is probably overweight all of the things that are overvalued, like as classically happens, right?”
Cannon-Brookes: Anyone claiming to know AI's long-term business model is lying
“Where the monetary value and the fundamental value lies on the far end of it, in terms of how the business models shake up, if you think about the search era and advertising and all these things, right, I don't think that's known. I think anyone who tells you …”
Cannon-Brookes: Specialized apps won't be replaced by a single AI agent
“I don't think we know in the AI era if all those apps just disappear into some godlike Siri agent that we just talked to. I, I'm not a believer in that world view. I don't think it's likely to happen. I do think AI is going to have to change all of those appli…”
Cannon-Brookes: Tech industry will hire far more entry-level software engineers
“I think we'll have far more of them. Maybe that's a bold bet.”
Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian won't pay 10x for AI tools without 10x productivity
“No, probably not. I mean, maybe if they gave me 10 times the productivity.”
Cannon-Brookes: Proliferation of AI software will scale startup services tenfold
“If you have far more technology, you're going to have, 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 fin…”
Cannon-Brookes: Enterprise AI deployment will take longer than expected
“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 ca…”
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.”
Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian gross margins increased over the past six quarters
“Our cogs has gone up, or rather cogs has gone down, right? Our gross margin has gone up. Last six or seven quarters.”
Cannon-Brookes: Only four public CEOs remain from 2020 SaaS peer group
“In COVID in 2020, we formed a group of SaaS CEOs. I think there were 16 of us that got together, we'd meet on Zoom every single week, right? At one stage, 10, 11 of us were public, maybe more, we all had earnings calls, and you know, it was a really good thera…”
Cannon-Brookes: Software engineering is output-constrained as roadmaps never end
“The difference with something like software or engineering is it's creation, right? It's how much can you make, right? The roadmap is never finished. You can keep creating more.”
Cannon-Brookes: Public software firms neglecting AI R&D are in trouble
“I would argue if you're a public company today and you're not spending a lot of money on fundamental kind of new R&D around AI and your product category, you're probably in trouble.”
Cannon-Brookes: Spending 100% of your time working causes worse decisions
“I think if you spend a hundred percent of your time at work, you make worse decisions.”
Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian decided early on against training foundational AI models
“Firstly, very early on, we thought there would likely be multiple foundational models that were competing. And hence we've built our technology to be multi-model on purpose in almost every way, and that we were not going to make foundational models. It's unlik…”
Cannon-Brookes: AI interfaces will evolve far beyond simple chat boxes
“I don't believe the world will just end up as a chat box. Otherwise, we'd all just use the terminal on our computers, but it is an entry point, and so there's a lot of foundational design being done, really fascinating, good design all over the place.”
Cannon-Brookes: Design becomes the primary software moat as AI explodes output
“There will certainly be far more software. It's probably a fairly safe assumption. Far more technology. What differentiates it is probably how it feels and how it works. And that's very hard to copy, right?”
Cannon-Brookes: AI Software Will Not Dynamically Regenerate Every Screen Interface
“In theory, AI can generate some code, write the code to create a new interface for every single screen you look at, right? 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 mov…”
Mike Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian is currently launching a vibe coding environment
“I'm in Barcelona and we're launching one at the moment.”
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?”
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.”
Cannon-Brookes: Fast-growing businesses cannot possess high switching costs immediately
“You cannot build a business fast that has high switching costs.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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%.”
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.”
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…”
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?”
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, …”
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.”
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?”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”