The Shifting Value of Content in the AI Age with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Matthew, thanks so much for being here.

**Matthew Prince** (0:06)
Thanks for having me.

**Sarah Guo** (0:07)
So, I want to get right into the juicy topics, but make sure our listeners understand the scale and current role of Cloudflare first. So, correct me if I'm wrong in any of this. $66 billion market cap company today, about $1.8 billion in trailing revenue, and then 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?

**Matthew Prince** (0:36)
Not to nitpick on one thing, but we've never really thought of ourselves as a CDN. We start out very much as a security company. The whole thesis was, could you put a firewall in the cloud? We saw that servers were going to the cloud. We saw that software was going to 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 going to 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. It turned out we were a little too good at our jobs and everything got a lot faster. And so, yes, we've ended up competing in the CDN space. But really what Cloudflare is, is 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 that fundamentally is what we're working on every day at Cloudflare.

**Sarah Guo** (1:28)
How long has it been since you guys started the company?

**Matthew Prince** (1:30)
We launched in September of 2010, so we'll be coming up on our 15th year in September of this year. Amazing.

**Sarah Guo** (1:38)
And I don't think there's a way to ask this question without somewhat trivializing the journey, but how did you become so dominant?

**Matthew Prince** (1:44)
I don't know. I think we just focused on how did we do the right thing for our customers? How do we solve the problems that were there? And at some level, the story of Cloudflare is that we have been customer zero along the entire journey. So every 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 enormously across millions of customers in an efficient way.
That meant that we had a whole bunch of weird stuff that was using us. We got attacked by every which direction. We had to build a public policy team in order to deal with those issues. We had to build our own security. Someone almost hacked or stole our domain at some point as a way of hacking into us. So the next thing you know, we built our own registrar. And so to some extent, Cloudflare has been about, start with a relatively simple idea, make it as broadly available as possible, and then solve all the problems that become sort of inherent once you've done that.

**Sarah Guo** (2:49)
Now you're in the position that I believe you've described as like the Internet's traffic cop. I think a lot of people feel with the sucking sound of attention toward AI assistance, that the shape of the Internet is changing. What is your, before we go to like point of view on what to do, what is your prediction for what's happening?

**Matthew Prince** (3:10)
So no matter what, the dominant kind of value creation model of the last 30 years of the Web has been search. Search drove everything. It drove all of what you did online. Entire industries grew up around that. And the real three ways that you could drive value on the Web in the past were you either sold a thing, whether that was a subscription or a product or something else, you sold ads against some content, or, and I didn't say the business model, but I said the value creation model, because the third part is really important, which is a lot of people just created content for the ego of knowing that other people were doing. The old adages, there are only two reasons why people create content to get richer, to get famous. A lot of people are just doing it to get famous. And that's a lot of what drove, I mean, that's what drives Wikipedia, that's what drives a lot of content creation that is on the Web.