No Priors Ep. 126 | With Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince

(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're joined by Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of juggernaut Cloudflare, a company that quietly underpins a massive chunk of the internet. From stopping the largest cyberattacks to moving more compute to the edge, Cloudflare sits at the intersection of infrastructure, security, and the future of the web. We talked to Matthew about the economics of AI for publishers, how quickly chat is replacing search, the evolving architecture of the web, what's broken about how it's funded today, and what he wants to force Google to do. Matthew, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So I, I want to get, like, right into the, um, juicy topics, but make sure our listeners understand, like, the scale and, like, current role of Cloudflare first.

Mm-hmm.

So, um, correct me if I'm wrong in any of this, $66 billion market cap company today, um, about 1.8 billion in trailing revenue, and then, like, the biggest CDN by far with a bunch of different products now in security in particular. Like, what else should our audience understand about the role Cloudflare plays?

Not to nitpick on, on one thing, but we've never really thought of ours- ourselves as a CDN. We started out very much as a security company. The whole thesis was, could you put a firewall in the cloud? Um, we saw that servers were going in the cloud. We saw that software was going in the cloud. It seemed inevitable to us that the networking equipment would go to the cloud. And the big objection that everyone had was you were gonna slow things down, and so we worked very hard to figure out how could we not slow anything down, and the goal was just to get back to parity. Turned out we were a little too good at our jobs and everything got a lot faster. And so, so yes, we've ended up competing in the CDN space, but really what Cloudflare is, is we're what the network should have been, what the internet should have been had we known in the '60s, '70s, '80s how important it was going to be, so how can we make it faster, more reliable, more secure, more efficient, more private? And, and that fundamentally is what we're working on every day at, at Cloudflare.

Uh, how long has it been since you guys started the company?

We launched in, uh, September of 2010. So we'll be coming up on our 15th, uh, year in, in September of this year.

Amazing.

And I, I don't think there's a way to ask this question without, like, somewhat trivializing the journey, but, like, how did you become so dominant?

I don't know. I, I mean, I think we just focused on how did we do the right thing for our customers? How did we solve the problems that were there? And, you know, at some level, the story of Cloudflare is that our... we have been customer zero along the entire journey. So every, you know, thing that started from, could we take a firewall, put it in the cloud? How would we get the data to populate that firewall? We had to have a free service. Once we had a free service, all of a sudden we had to be able to figure out how to scale, um, you know, enormously across, you know, millions of customers, uh, in, in an efficient way. That meant that you had a whole bunch of, you know, weird stuff that was using us. We got attacked by every which direction.