Last Week in Venture - 3/15/2026

AI Capex Goes Industrial, Google Closes Wiz, and the Policy Trap Tightens

Atlassian cut roughly ten percent of its workforce this week. The company was explicit about why: it is reallocating toward AI and enterprise sales. Not disguising the layoffs as belt-tightening, not blaming the economy. Just stating that the bar for what software headcount is supposed to do has moved, and a meaningful portion of the existing team does not clear it anymore.

That is an uncomfortable thing to say in a press release. It is also the most honest framing of what is happening across enterprise software right now. The companies that built the last decade of SaaS are renegotiating their cost structures around the assumption that AI handles more of the work. The ones that are slow to do it will be outrun by those who are not.