“Right now, the production of technology is faster than the consumption of technology. It is ahead. We've reached a tipping point. We can build features faster than customers can consume them in a realistic way that changes their business.”
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Harry Stebbings argued that cheaper inference will simply mean far more of it gets used. The Atlassian CEO agrees usage explodes when something is near free, but says there's still an economic curve. His comparison: nobody runs their phone's CPU at 100% all the time.
Transcript
…Like there's lots of the overall progress of that, I can't believe doesn't bring our price per performance unit of an LLM. We don't have a good term for this, down at a precipitous rate, just because the volume of capital being applied, the volume of brain and talent being applied is so large.
Is anyone arguing that that's the case? I think they're just arguing that Chevron's paradox means that we will use so much more inference. You know, I have instinct running about 50 different searches continuously in real time, every second of the day. We just use more.
We will, but it'll still mean the cost comes down. So where the cost is near free, yes, it will explode. If something's free, you use an unlimited amount of it, right? And you don't care. You throw it away, whatever, like if it's not got a waste component to it, which is ostensibly a cost, then yes, that will be the case. I think there's always going to be an economic curve to that, though. Right now, the production of technology is faster than the consumption of technology. It is ahead. We've reached a tipping point. We can build features faster than customers can consume them in a realistic way that changes their business. There has got to be a point where that just, it doesn't stack up anymore, right? There's not going to be an infinite usage of all of this stuff, right? Your phone has amazing superpowers. It's a supercomputer in your pocket. Do you burn the CPU 100% all the time? No, you don't. Not even close, right?
So what happens to this inference layer of value and talent cohort where you mentioned the verticalization of chips, the different providers? What happens to it, Mike, in the next few years? Look,
I think it's just incredibly positive. I suspect for those who want to use those models to achieve things, whether you're coding, doing architecture, improving business processes, whatever it is that you are doing, creating art, I think we should see that as a very positive thing. We are going to…
If we live in this imagination asymmetry and you were to review the last 12 months, where do you think you have not shown enough imagination where you needed to more?
More from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
