Cloudflare CEO: The Man Deciding The Internet’s Next Business Model

0:00Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. All right everyone welcome back to Empire. I got the CEO of Cloudflare Matthew Prince on the show today Matthew. Welcome on. Thanks for having me. How's life? It's good. I'm in Park City, Utah. It's fall in Park City is beautiful so it's great. Yeah nice. Well very excited to have this conversation. I think there's a couple big topics looming on my mind. One is you know you've been running this company for 17 years, 16 years now. So I want to hear what it is like to be in year 1617 running in there. It feels like very AI first company but before that I and we should definitely talk about all the work you guys are doing in crypto but I think maybe the best place to tee up this conversation is around the evolution of the internet. I think you have had a better view into how the internet has evolved than nearly anyone standing on the earth right now. So maybe just give me your take on like past two decades,

1:00give me the run through of like the evolution of the internet and taking us up to this really weird point in time that we find ourselves in today. Yeah definitely is definitely a weird point in time. So you know I feel incredibly lucky that I was born at a time where I got to experience the internet and kind of grew up on it. You know back in 1993 when I was in college you know helped create what was what was one of the first kind of online only news publications and and you know wired gave us an award and we were supposed to be one of the first thousand kind of websites that was publicly accessible those out there and to see then today where you know there are literally hundreds of millions of sites and and the internet is just exploded and even this conversation that we're having is being carried over the internet you know something like this that it was just a few years ago would have cost you know tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce we're able to do you know very very efficiently today which is which is just you know an incredible miracle.

2:02I think what's been interesting though is that if you look back over the last you know 20 years of what the internet's been it's really been driven by a business model that is that is really around advertising and you know ads have been a huge and incredibly successful way to make content available online and you know if an ad served to me I've got a lot of disposable income and I buy stupid stuff from time to time and and so you know it's there's a really high cpm for for having those basically a price that you pay for those ads but if there's a kid in Sri Lanka you know even though they may not get the same the same same kind of payments for that they're still going to get something and so ads have really been the only micro payment system that is worked at real scale and it's carried the internet to what it is and I think the hero of the last really 27-28 years of the internet has been Google which has really built that ad ecosystem and and without you know the

3:06economic engine that they created and we all think of search but they also built you know Google Analytics they built you know that all of the double click infrastructure everything that really powers that ad ecosystem without that we really wouldn't have the web in the in the form that it is and we really want to have the internet in the form that it is and so I think that that's been you know just an amazing you know transformation and so you know last last November I was at the web summit and in in Lisbon and someone asked me like when do you think that automated traffic you know that that agents and the various things that run around on the internet when do you think that that will pass human traffic and so I went back to my team and we pulled all the data and we looked at it and and based on everything that we saw we thought it was going to be the second half of 2020-07 fast forward to March of of of 2020-06 I was at South West got the exact same question and we had pulled all the data again and I'm like oh wow it's it's moved up right and and now it

4:10looks like it's going to be in the first half of 2020-07 and so it was really wild when the team came to me and and said hey you won't believe this and this was in May he said but we've actually already passed automated traffic over over human traffic and and it's just it's just wild that it is continued to grow like that and so I think you know if and with the big caveat that I've been wrong in every every prediction so far but if we see the current trends continue at the rates that they're they're going you know we now think that automated traffic agent agent traffic will be a thousand times as much as human traffic in five years in just five years and and that's just incredibly you know remarkable that that in in in in the not so distant future not because humans are going to decrease how they use the internet but because bots are just going to increase so much that that that that humans are really going to just almost be a rounding error online and and I

5:10think that's just wild to to think about and and the implications of that are pretty substantial because if the internet was really built on ads previously problem is bots don't click on ads and so the entire business model of the internet is about to change radically and what that what it changes to I think has not only amazing and and profound implications on you know what the internet looks like but it's going to have really deep implications on media generally how society is organized a lot a lot of that sort of polarization that we are experiencing today and and I think the most interesting question in the world is what's the future internet business model going to look like and that's that's where I'm spending a lot of my time yeah the the thing that I find so interesting about this is not I mean there's obviously great questions to be had about you know what businesses will do well what businesses will not do well how do you position your company but from a societal societal perspective you know we have this open internet you were talking in the 90s then kind of a well comes around starts to centralize the internet and then social

6:12social networks have basically entirely centralized the internet and Google was at the center of I'd say social networks combined with Google have centralized a lot of the internet and that has all these societal implications like maybe it's driven a lot of polarization like you mentioned maybe it's driven a lot of I mean think of how many small businesses and bigger businesses are just set up on Instagram ads Facebook ads like the whole the whole ad network of the internet how do you think this impacts I mean we'll get into the business component in a second but society as a whole yeah you know I think um you know there are parts of the internet that have gotten really centralized and there are parts of the internet that are still I mean remarkably decentralized and I'm actually really proud of the role the clubfellers played um you know at some point there was an investor early on that said who's your biggest competitor and I said Facebook and they looked at me like I was crazy but I think that's actually kind of true because you know when clubfellers first getting started um you know Facebook was gobbling up a huge amount of of the internet where it was you know it was easier for you to be behind um you know Facebook and then having your own your own website and part of the reason for that was having a website was hard you have to deal with

7:15security problems you have to deal with performance you have to deal with all this you know other stuff and and so people actually you know we're kind of giving up on on creating those those things and so I think to make sure I understand so that in the sense that instead of going and creating like your own website your own app your own blog it's like just launch it on Facebook the disarmament of our Facebook page I mean that's in certain parts of the world in Nigeria you know the internet is Facebook uh largely um and so there there just isn't as much of that that that ecosystem is out there and so I think by you know I would say that clubfellers is to Facebook as like Shopify is to Amazon where you know we're taking some of the parts that are really difficult for people to deal with security and other things um helping make that easy and that actually has as made it easier to to create the internet and I think part of what's I think is really amazing about right now is that if you look from about 2012 through um you know about 2024 2025 early 2025 um the the the the amount that the web grew was was ministerial that in for a period of

8:20that time it actually shrank there were there were more websites being taken offline than they were being created and what changed uh in in really kind of late 2025 was largely because of AI people all of a sudden who didn't ever think of themselves as developers were able to all of a sudden create you know websites and applications and put them online and so we're actually seeing a growth of the internet that looks closer to what the internet growth looked like in the early 2000s uh interesting now and so I think it's actually been a pretty amazing time for for all this to happen back to your question in terms of societal impacts like if you think about like and I get in trouble every time I say this so um so so why not just say it again but um you know I think at some level everything that's wrong with our world today uh is is Google's fault um that's an overstatement um you know Google I think is actually an amazing company they've done amazing things but they did create this business model that was all around just how do we capture people's attention and then monetize that that attention and um you know that that that that

9:24forget other systems like um uh you know tiktok and and and and other things which are really just trying to capture people's you know attention uh and and and really sell that and the best way to capture people's attention is either to you know generate dopamine or cortisol so you know make people kind of irrationally happy or irrationally angry and so a lot of what media is designed for today is to push one of those two buttons uh in your head so that you can then you know sell and add against that and so what I'm actually kind of optimistic about is as we think about you know what the future business model of the internet is instead of it being something around how do we get humans to sort of have a fight or flight response um how how how instead could we reward actual knowledge creation and um and and I'm I'm I'm pretty optimistic about um you know what that what that looks like and and again what the positive impacts on society could be if if we get that right yeah I would love to hear more about your relationship with some of the big labs I've heard I've heard you talk very

10:25publicly about google um I was reading you know earlier this morning but um you're pushed to have them I think it was unbundle uh search from AI their AI crawlers if I understand that correctly um I haven't heard you talk much about your relationship and your view on some of the other labs open AI and throttpeg debatable if you throw a perplexity into there but what is your stance on I don't know if you can bundle all of these together or if you view them in uh you know as separate identities here but yeah they're really they're really quite distinct uh and and all have different personalities but you know the one thing that I think all of the major labs share is a real just incredible fear of google if you think about like how did open AI start open AI started in a dinner after a dinner conversation between Sam, Elon and Larry Page and um and and Larry basically um you know as like listen if AI out of all humans then humans deserve to be extinct and Sam and Elon came to humans defense and said I you know

11:28you have kids we have kids like come on like uh you and and supposedly I think I wasn't at the at the dinner but it's been reported you know Larry called called them a species species um you know you'd be you how how dare you like defend defend humans if if the machines are better and you know I think that that there there was really almost a religious um aspect of the founding of open AI as like we've got to do something because otherwise google is going to run away with this game and google had all of the resources to run away with the game they had the best researchers uh through deep mind and some of their other uh areas they had the best silicon or they had access not only to the sort of chips from people like in video but they'd built their own you know TPUs and their own silicon which were a hyper hyper efficient and then they have the most data where even today google sees twice as much of the internet as open AI does and that gives them an enormous advantage which is out there I think there will be many many many books written on how even with all those advantages google is kind of screwed up

12:32so far but I would I would certainly not count them out but it's important to recognize that every other AI lab that exists exists in in some part because they started as almost a religious opposition to kind of that that that attitude that was in that was inside of of google and that's created you know some some interesting um you know uh both challenges and and opportunities um we have an amazing relationship 80s percent of the AI you know major AI companies uh use use cloud flare um we have great relationships and and their customers with both open AI and on throttback and and you know axe and rock and the whole the whole kind of the whole group in it including a bunch of the you know Chinese labs as well um and so we we we talked to them all the time and you know one of the things is as we are thinking through what that next business model of the internet is one of the important points is like sure listen we get it we've got to pay for the data that we're that we're taking but you've got to make sure that everyone else pays for it as well and that includes

13:32google can't be that that you know the again that the number one competitive threat that they all worry about that they have they have almost a religious opposition to um that that that company gets all of the data the internet for free but everybody else has to pay and so a lot of the work I've been doing a cloud flare published working on is just to say how can we make sure that you know that two things happen one that we make sure that Google plays by the same rules as everyone else they shouldn't be able to leverage their monopoly of yesterday in order to get a monopoly tomorrow and then secondly how can we help folks like open AI and throttback and others get back to the same level that Google does again Google sees twice as much of the internet as open AI four times more of the internet than and throttback many many many times more than someone like x or meta and so and so you know if we if we we want to play for a world where there is many successful AI companies as possible and I don't want there to be one or five I want there to be 500,000

14:34amazing AI companies from all around the world um we have to make sure that everybody it has a level playing field that they can that they can that they can play from and and again I think that's a big piece of you know what we're trying to think about is we think about a healthy ecosystem yeah yeah uh this might be a false dichotomy here but I saw you signed I think I think that you signed the letter saying don't regulate the open weight models um but I also think that hearing you speak you want the AI models to pay for training content um I'm trying to think if that's a false dichotomy how do those two positions coexist I mean I think I think you can have open weight models um like and and and there's there's businesses that are built you know behind those just like they're open source um uh companies that build build great businesses that they're there but but you still need to compensate um creators it was take it take take take it out from this so let's just imagine in the future that agents are creating a thousand times as much traffic on the

15:35internet as as exists today um who's gonna pay for that um you know so so like that that's there's like there's a lot of things we can do just to make the internet more efficient and so we're working on taking like old pieces of software which aren't as efficient like WordPress and other things and rewriting them to make them significantly more efficient um we do a lot just to you know with the free version of our service and everything just to make sure that people can have it but at the other day there's there's real bandwidth there's real servers there's real cost to serving to serving that and you know if if you don't put some cost in place then you have that you have this massive tragedy the common problem where you know if if I want to say hey where should I go to lunch if the cost of scouring the internet is effectively free then bots are gonna literally go and scour every page on the internet and then come back and say you should go to Wendy's um that's totally inefficient like there there should be something that's there and so we have to figure out some way that the people who are getting benefit from scanning the internet are the ones that are

16:38actually compensating for the infrastructure as well as the work that goes into creating that original content that powers these bots and and I think that that's you know again that's like there's no way that we're gonna be able to keep up with a thousand times the traffic and last week create some business model that helps helps create and pay for that infrastructure interesting um let's talk about the business model before that um I'm very familiar familiar with Cloudflare because I think it was one of the first vendors we all of our entire business runs on Cloudflare which is great and I thank you for that um so I've seen what yeah what you guys have done for people who maybe have never built software products maybe Cloudflare is a little less familiar to them can you give a almost state of the union of like just the scope and scale of how big Cloudflare is and how many businesses internet businesses run on top of Cloudflare? Yeah um so so Cloudflare at Core is a network so we run one of the world's largest networks spans spans the global earth you know over 350 cities where within you know milliseconds of the vast

17:41majority of the world's population and in all those places we will have racks and racks and racks of servers uh and we perform a number of functions the things that people are probably the most familiar with what we do is that we help protect anything that you're putting online from various types of attack whether that's cyber attacks or DDoS attacks or our other attacks we we protect that we doesn't make sure that things are as fast as possible so we make sure that if you've got someone who's visiting your site from Pakistan you've got someone else's visiting it for Virginia and someone else's from Japan regardless of where that is we're going to deliver it in the fastest um possible way over time we've added additional functionality that helps protect uh internet users as they go out and use the network they basically pass through us and then more recently um you know really starting in 2017 um we we started working on how can we actually make it so that anyone out there can develop software and then run it on our infrastructure in order to be as as fast and inefficient as possible and so today you know that's one of the the fastest growing areas uh and if

18:44you use you know almost any of the vibe coding platforms rose lovable or rep lid or um you know base 44 or or what you know codecs from opening i or some of the tools from anthropic um when when those agents build software for you the most preferred place typically for that that software to run is actually on cloudflare's network and uh and that's been you know just incredibly rewarding and so today you know a lot more than 20 percent the internet sits behind cloud flare um almost half of the fortune 500 uh is built on cloudflare and it's um just been incredibly rewarding to see and in in your world of crypto it's you know it's one of the places where you know almost all of the major crypto companies are building on on cloudflare because they they get to start you know with a new a new paradigm and a new new sort of blank sheet of paper and when people and developers uh come and are able to do that uh what what we find time and time again is that uh they're choosing to build on on the on the cloudflare developer platform and uh and it's been just amazing to see what what

19:48people and in in both kind of the crypto space and now even more so in the AI space uh are are building on on top of us welcome to token 2049 token 2049 is back October 7th and 8th bringing together 25,000 attendees 300 speakers and 500 exhibitors for the world's largest crypto event token 2049 is happening alongside an in partnership with our own digital asset summit Asia so you can experience both conferences in Singapore during the same week across token 2049 week there'll be more than 1,000 side events culminating with after 2049 and formula one weekend and the speaker lineup is stacked Shane Coplin of polymarket Jeff Yon of hyper liquid Arthur Hayes Nasdaq CEO Adina Friedman and many more join us in Singapore October 7th and 8th for token 2049 and digital asset summit Asia avalanche summit is coming to New York City September 16th to 17th join the business and technology

20:52leaders building the next generation of financial products enterprise systems and consumer applications on chain learn how blockchain is enabling faster settlement more efficient markets and new business models at avalanche summit NYC register for avalanche summit and use promo code blockworks15 and ahead of the summit you can track avalanche tokenized equities alongside tokenized treasuries and their growing footprint on avalanche see the data for yourself with blockworks researches avalanche dashboard and don't forget to join us in New York City for avalanche summit yeah 100% when everything got really crazy so chat came out and i'm trying to remember a Q4 of 2022 i think it was and then there's these moments in my head i think it's like may of 25 cloud code came out there's a tobi's letter to all of Shopify is a moment in time in my head

21:52when you saw some of these moments where you like this is the evolution of cloud this is what we've been building for or we need to completely pivot the business and like go all in on this and like reinvent ourselves you know i think um i think it i i wish i could say we were so clever i mean we started working on the developer platform back in 2017 so way before yeah it was was sort of getting started but not really um you know that the the the real kind of rise of AI I was still kind of a backwater and and laughing stock it wasn't it wasn't really the place machine learning was the hot yeah yeah i mean i there was there was some i remember again in some pc pitch once a long time ago we we described you know clubfair's and AI company and we got so laughed out of that room that we were like i mean it's almost have an allergic reaction to saying and yet it's some of all that kind of was what we were really like if you can get enough the internet flowing through you and then you can run sort of AI or machine learning algorithms against that you can actually do a lot of things to predict security threats and enhance performance and do do lots of things um but

22:55but we were we were kind of nervous and so i i think as as we saw um you know AI rising i think we were we were happy selling picks and shovels to the the people who were who were adopting it but we were a little bit nervous about leaning in too much both because you know it wasn't totally clear at first at least with the or the ROI was going to be for business and secondly we're just really paranoid around we didn't want to take a bunch of our internal data and ship it off to some company that we didn't that we didn't know very well and so um and so i think we were we were kind of we were we were we were sort of actually slow adopters uh of it but but really sometime kind of in the middle of 2025 um it just became it became blindingly obvious uh that that there was something here that was was impactful you know beyond it we'd we'd already seen some of that with our engineering teams but across the entire company and um and i think the real turning point for us was probably November of 2025 where we um really leaned in and said now this is the point where

24:00you also have to restructure even how a business is is um is organized and run uh around making sure that it really is um you know that we that we that we can take advantage of AI and use it for the things that it's really good at yeah well we'll get to that in a bit i read your uh Wall Street Journal op-ed which i definitely want to talk about um but before doing was there was there a moment in time where you were like this is how we have to re you know this just happened therefore we have to rearchitect the company and the products yeah i felt like i mean i felt like um sort of October late October early november of of of last year of 2025 um was was the point which it was like opus opus force x had just come out yeah less around um rearchitecting the products more around rearching the organization um i think we had it through i mean it's the way all these things work you know through somewhat dumb luck we'd sort of built the right architecture so to give you it's like the the you know the the the hyperscalers a.w.s google cloud um you know micro stuff to sure if they were really they really were built for what was the mobile era and you know they they

25:04if you look at the evolution of how um where software has run you know back when i was in college if you want we want to we want to stand up a web server so we literally had to call gateway the the server manufacturer to ship us a physical box and that was going to be you know our web server that we got there and so it took like months for this to arrive and then to get all wired up and and software installed and then um vmware comes along and they have these vm's these virtual machines that take one box and make it into many and so you could actually get more efficient um and then folks like docker come along with containers and really the whole hyperscale world and all of the mobile world is built on this idea of containers the problem containers is if you imagine every single knowledge worker on earth has one agent that's running for them which seems I mean pretty conservative I think most knowledge workers are more than one agent and you imagine those agents are all running in containers the problem with containers is you have to import a whole you know operating system and toolchain all this stuff um just to power that not even looking at

26:05GPUs just looking at CPUs you need 40 times the number of CPUs that are produced in the world in order to just run the agents for those knowledge workers which is like that's not going to work so we've got to do something else in order um in order to do that and so what we did at club letters we said you know what's beyond containers what's actually more efficient than containers and um and the answer is this this technology called isolates which most of your your viewers will be familiar with that it's what powers the tabs in your browser basically and the way that you can have kind of lightweight uh systems where you can very quickly open a new you know web page which is a really an application we took that same idea and applied it and what that allows is just much much faster much more efficient uh deployment of code uh and that's exactly what what agents need so we again I think we happen to be having to sort of build the right technology uh for this moment in time and it's just amazing to see now uh how many of the agents that are that that users are using are

27:07either running in uh isolates on cloud flow network or as their generally code they're generating that code running it in an isolate and it's it's much much more efficient it's much less expensive and and just a lot faster yeah 100% um let's talk about uh how you run the business so there was a um a moment that I think a lot of other founders and CEOs looked at with I feel like there are these moments in time for AI I mentioned the Toby Shopify one I think you're you're op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was one that I saw a pastor on a lot of the kind of founder uh group chats so if I remember correctly you guys had this monster quarter in q1 correct me if I get any of this wrong monster quarter in q1 businesses ripping I think it was early May late April early May you guys you know kind of announced this huge record uh you know record q1 and then you uh proceeded to riff I think it was like a thousand people 1100 people something like that which was roughly 20% of the company and if I if I remember the Wall Street Journal op-ed correctly um there was a line in there that I think got passed around a lot which was you there are builders there are sellers and there are

28:11measures and you said um you know the builders make the things maybe these are product people engineers designers they're the sellers maybe these are the marketers or the the salespeople or the you know uh you know account managers or whoever maybe and then there are the measures and um I think if I if I remember the point of your op-ed it was that the measures can now the AI can now do all the measuring the AI does the the audits the finance the legal the compliance the middle management I'd love to hear just kind of what so first of correct me if I got that wrong but second um how did this you were not very AI-pilled six months later you're laying off 20% of the company how did we get there you know I think um so first of all it's we we we we we just started adopting it and we and we and we I think we're very realistic about what what is AI good at and what is it not yet good at um I'm not in the kind of camp of everyone's going to lose their job there's no there's no hope in fact you know like you know we just see how much more productive our developer

29:11team is um using you know assisted by by AI tools and if that's the case like there's so much for us to do that I'm going to hire as many developers if I can have a developer is now 10 times as productive I'm not as many developers as I as I possibly as I possibly can on the other side you know in in sales you know that a great salesperson the favorite thing is to spend time with customers and we found that you know pre AI you know mostly salespeople were spending you know maybe 40% of time with customers but about 60% of the time was like building presentations and filling in you know the sales force records and doing all of all all of that kind of back office work which nobody really loves and um and so and so we use tools to where now most of our sellers are spending 90% of their time with customers and they spend much less time actually building those tools and that's driven just significant increases in in productivity uh which has been amazing. I think the thing that that we realized was that you know there's a bunch of things about a business that you

30:14need to measure and you need to measure them accurately and the problem with humans is that they have biases and especially the problem with humans on a team is that they tend to have really shared biases across that and it it actually influences how accurately and how well humans can actually measure things. AI has biases too but what's interesting and I think actually under talked about is how those biases are uncorrelated with the rest of the organization and so it's like our true outside fresh set of eyes to look at at various various problems and what that means is you know if in the past you know they sort of recommended like the Harvard Business School recommended number of direct reports that any that any manager has was supposed to be around six. We've found that actually you can have a better manager relationship with the people who are your direct reports. You can you can be fairer to them you can you can give them better feedback. You

31:18surface when they when they need help more accurately if you use these tools and we found that you can actually take somebody in the past would have had six direct reports and actually make that 12. What's powerful about that is that as you do that the organization flattens. In fact if you want to measure how hierarchical an organization is the probably easiest thing to measure is what's the average number of direct reports in that organization. The larger that number is the flatter the organization is the smaller that number is the more hierarchical it is and we were around six and we're sort of making our way towards 12 today but but as we've done that it's actually flattened the org enormously which meant we just didn't need as many middle managers because people the managers were more efficient at doing that and someone who is a middle manager at a club player would be a great senior manager at some startup and and what was amazing was it's I mean it's sucked it was incredibly emotional I mean they were friends really dear friends of mine that that that we let go. They're very talented people and what I'm proud of is we actually worked to make sure that as many of

32:22those people actually got placed in really great jobs and they're going to go on and some of them are starting companies and some of them have gone to work at other great companies we really you know prioritize that in addition just giving what was was incredibly great severance and and you know continuing to vest stock and and do a bunch of things that were we're pretty pretty unusual but I think what has been surprising to me is that you know when I talk to my peers at other other companies especially other than large public companies they're all like yeah we got to do that too but you know I want to stick my neck out because we saw your stock went down when you did it and I mean it went right back up but you know and I got all that I mean I got a bunch of death threats but there's a whole bunch of things which don't make these things fun to do as a leader but honestly like that's what leadership is when you realize you're gonna have to make that change and and what I know is that you know when we did that back in the beginning of this year it was much easier for somebody to get a

33:22job than today and as more of these companies start to make these changes or it's getting more difficult and so I think as a leader once you realize you need to make these changes every day you wait is actually a disservice to the employees that you're eventually going to lay off and that's I think that's just chicken shit leadership at the end of the day and that the right thing that you should be doing is once you make the decision take the take the hit I mean and again it sucked and and I got lots of arrows but but I'm proud of the fact that we've been able to place as many of those people they're great people in great other positions I know they're gonna create amazing new things going forward and today cloudflowers running more efficiently and flatter and and and just and just better than we ever have before and that's because we've got great people who are building products we've got great people who are selling products and then we have fewer people that are actually doing the measuring because the tools that we have are just significantly better to do to do those things today. I have a very good insight into what crypto founders are doing not as good of an insight into what public company CEOs are doing what do you think happens

34:26over the next several months do you think that this is like you know very early days and a lot of you know your peers are gonna follow suit I think everyone I think everyone is I mean to date we're one of the few companies that sort of did it from a position of strength most people are doing it because it felt like their business was threatened in somewhere or another but everybody is looking out and they're seeing the same thing and I think as as people and there's some reasons why like I think we because we started with security background actually get figured out some ways to integrate these technologies safely into into our into into the work that we did in a way that that I think some other companies are struggling with but people can figure it out and you know the harnesses they're getting built are really a really robust you know we open source the one that we call it club for OS but we open sourced it because it's just been so valuable to us but I think as that happens you know there there is going to be a significant shift across across companies and again I I think that the they doesn't doesn't feel good but the kindness thing that you can do

35:30if you're the leader of of any organization if you know you're going to have to restructure how your business works the kind of thing to do is to do it as soon as possible yeah walk me through what you think happens maybe in three to five years from now one thing I've noticed it blockwork so we just had the you know usually with head count everyone wants head count on the company everyone wants to you know add more people and everyone wants the budget we just had the first person tell me I said you really need to hire you for your team they said I have I've got I've got eight agents right now don't don't give me another human I don't want another human to manage that I hate I hate he said I hate human management but I've never had more fun managing these agents never be your sense somewhere all this goes I mean it's wild how many people I mean what we see internally is a lot of people who were managers are actually saying no no I want to go back to being an individual contributor I think that what what it means to be a manager and what it means to be an individual contributor is going to get really kind of funny and blurred over over time and and I mean it's wild see like all these really senior people who are going to places like

36:33anthropic and saying no I want to go back to being an individual contributor I think that's going to spread across this I'm not sort of a doomer that we're all out of jobs I think again if if you're a talented engineer there's always going to be work to get done you're going to use tools in order to do that more more efficiently but it's it's it's it's it's it like I think that the the world is bright for that like we we this last year over the course of 2026 we're hiring 111 11 interns and I mean it's just incredible well you are about to hire 1000 we're in the truth yeah we're we're we we started the beginning of the year if you go over the course of the entire year it'll be over a thousand interns why are you hiring a thousand interns because it's because they're amazing they're like they're all a native everybody else to stop hiring interns so like we like to zag when everyone else is zicking and and like they came in and we're just you know amazing and what we did is usually we think you know our job is to train the interns on what it's like to have a real job and do all do all that stuff um we told

37:37them this year that yes that's still half but the other half is you have to go train us and so we've taken actually interns and embedded them in senior teams to show like hey you know have we tried this new tool have we done this this thing and it's and it's worked incredibly well with knowledge transfer both both directions and I mean I spent a ton of time just having dinners with you know in all the different cities that we had interns and and it's just why I have how talented um you know the group the group was so I'm actually pretty bullish that we're gonna have you know great people who are building things I'm pretty bullish that like selling isn't gonna be something I mean agents are gonna there's gonna be sort of agent agent commerce and things like that but if you're doing a hundred million dollar software deal like that's still gonna be humans. Okay and our enterprise sales is ever more important. Yeah yeah yeah yeah and so I think that that's like that I think those two areas are really are really big if you're getting it you know a degree right now in like accounting I'd be a little bit more nervous so you know I think I think that that um I think there's there's there's a ton of work to do um places like us are hiring like crazy especially builders and

38:41sellers and uh and I think that's gonna that's that's that that that is actually the most fun parts of of of a business that are out there today so yeah so I'm I'm optimistic I am not kind of in the yeah I just gonna take everyone's jobs camp like like some of the like Dario and some of the you know people in the labs are um I'm but I'm much more in you know in the it's gonna refocus how we run businesses it's gonna put more and more importance on on building things and selling things and it's actually gonna make us better at measuring our businesses as well. Yeah I agree I agree um how has it been to manage the um I guess we could bucket this into investor relations and the public markets um so I always thought that crypto would grow up one day and you know become more like the you know traditional capital markets and you know volatility would get suppressed and actually what has happened to me is that the equity's market has become more like crypto um yeah and you know crypto has always traded on like a lot of narratives and like the public markets are no different right now I loved uh I was cracking up at uh Benioff's uh Benioff's

39:46launch of cloud cloud force I think he called it or excuse me cloud cloud force really just a they launched a connector like an integration like it was just beautiful marketing but when I saw that I was like oh the the marketing there is for the public markets as as much as it is for the for the customers and so I'm very curious how you've managed and how you think about managing public market investors. Yeah you know I am I I love being public um you know it's uh again to use a bad analogy um you know the the race rates of spousal homicide are significantly lower in jurisdictions that have no fault divorce whereas if you have to have like if you make divorce hard then one of the things that happens is spousal kill each other which is which is obviously not good um the problem with private markets is you know and like private equity

40:47in venture capital and all those things is that there's no no fault divorce it's really tough to get rid of your venture capital investors it's really tough to get rid of your private private equity investors and by the way it's really tough for them to get rid of the founders and CEOs of the companies uh that they run it's it's it's painful and as a result you kind of find yourself in a weird situation where nobody tells like the truth um everyone's sort of hedging and couching and and again I I loved our VCs and I loved you know the the the folks in and but but it's the public markets are so much better if I say something stupid on this podcast a bunch of our public market investors will call me and be like that was stupid I sold your stock and here's why it was stupid and you know half the time I'm like yeah you're right that was stupid I'm sorry you know and and hope you hope you keep following us uh and and the other half of the time I'll be like no it wasn't stupid here's what here's the strategy behind it and let me explain it and we have really honest conversations and so I've really liked that it's just a it's it's a it's a it's a much more

41:51kind of just truthful um relationship I think the other thing that you know everyone was really warned us about was um that you know public markets are incredibly short-term oriented they only care about your next quarter all all those things that's just not been the experience we've had like we have these amazing investors they're an investor a Scottish investor called Bailey Gifford yeah average holding period is 16 years the average right that's I mean the average holding period for a VC fund is less than is I mean VC funds are only 10 years 12 at the absolute max right and so so that you've got these public market investors that have incredibly long time horizons and are really focused on what the strategy is and if you look it was new a cloud flare your earnings call like like our see if it doesn't compare many questions everyone is focused what's the strategy what's the future so I think you can you can run businesses that are very long-term oriented in the public markets and have and have a lot of success as long as you continue to deliver you know innovation and growth and and again I think that's the something that we've done a you know a good job at and and hopefully we'll be able to continue to do that

42:55what do you think is the most understood uh excuse me misunderstood aspect of cloud flare um you know I think that um I think that probably and probably less if you got our investors actually probably understand it sometimes better than our customers do um I think a lot you know a lot of our customers still think of us as you know cloudlers like the you know security CDN that's that's out there um it's such a small part of the overall business of what we're doing uh and we've really really evolved it's it's a bit it's a very natural but the other thing that you know what's interesting is because we started out servicing you know the long tail it for a long time um with investors took took them a while to realize that you know most most of our revenue comes from really big big um you know enterprise customers and so I think those those are probably the two two areas I think there's the either you know customers still sort of CS for just doing one thing and they don't understand how how all the pieces fit together and then I think sometimes investors um are like oh you're you know two SMV focused and we're like

43:56yeah it's less than you know 10% of revenue today yeah uh maybe let's get into cloud flare and how the business has evolved and and and really where it's going so like I was uh you know doing a little prep reading for this episode of reading your blog posts and the product announcements basically it became very clear to me you were building the full stack for like the machines internet economy or however you want to call it you've got paper the the toll booth right paper crawl and paper use and monetization gateway you've got the wallet um on the crypto side you've got the browser the identity layer uh the you know stablecoin with net dollar what is the end vision for what you're doing here um it's funny I was watching um I was watching the dark night uh the other night last night actually and I was I um there's a scene where like the joker is with two phase in the hospital and and it's like you know everyone thinks they have a plan right and and and then I was like I empathize with that like I'm not sure people assume that there's some grand unifying plan here yeah I think really we're we're responding to both first and foremost what we need ourselves to

45:00build sort of tooling so we're building the things that our own team needs in order to in order to continue to to build and so that that drives a lot and then what are customers um ask us for and then you know I think right now we're trying to figure out what is that future business model of the internet and I think it's all it has to be I mean again if you if you worry about the tragedy of common's problem where your agent has an incentive just crawl the entire internet no matter how much that costs um you know because it because the costs are being borne by someone else like we got to flip that around the agent has to pay and but it has to be like tiny like fractions of fractions of fractions and so like the the the most interesting thing I think we're working on internally and oh and by the way trying to find anyone to partner with we have we have no pride of ownership here we we don't need to own how this works we'd we'd love to partner with someone if anyone solve this problem but if you yet to find anyone who has which is we've got to do something that can do that can process um you know micro payments at just incredible skip so to give you some sense today cloudflare

46:06handle the public number that we've released is that we handle um about half a billion uh web transactions per second we think between one and 10% of those will be um you know sort of monetizable through some sort of micro transactions so that means that you've got you know roughly 10 million financial transactions per second that you've got to do very very small so have to be super efficient because you can't you can't have a lot of of of transaction costs uh they're associated with that but you have to be able to do that at at scale these uh which is the world's largest payments network uh handles at peak during the holidays about 80,000 uh transactions per second so we need something that's literally three orders of magnitude larger than visa and probably has to scale to a hundred million transactions per second in very very very short short order um you know that when that busiest day in history of all the financial markets uh there were about two million equities uh uh transacted per second at the peak um so we're still an order of magnitude larger than

47:10than all of that um and so like that's a really tricky problem um and but but we but we have but we have to solve it because if we don't again i i don't know how we're going to pay for the thousand times traffic that's coming from from agents uh and and and how we're going to do it in a way which is fair to the people who are putting content online and so it gives them an incentive uh to put that to put that content online and so that's that that's some of the infrastructure that we're working on um and either building ourselves or or or or you know hopefully finding something we can we can partner with and it's turned out to be i kind of thought there would be a lot of people who've been with self in that problem it feels like a lot of people insert the crypto space everything else are shooting to be the next visa i think the real opportunity is to be the white space that visa can't even handle like it you can't do my payments uh on on on a network like visa it's it's just too expensive yeah i'm gonna try to find this uh blog post i wrote in when was this 20

48:10i wrote this in 2018 i will show you this um i wrote the future of mic this was uh so we launched the business we launched blockworks in that 20 seven end of 2017 so i said uh this is June of 2018 i said the future of micro payments is on a blockchain i said before you know it the browser will have a crypto wallet extension that you will use for micro payments across every form of the web blah blah rest of the blog post um and i think this is a good reminder that things that tend to take much longer than you think they will but they do and again i'm i i think that there's going to be a role for blockchains and and and crypto um to get especially to get things into and out of the network yeah yeah like is consensus fast enough well that's what that was actually my my next question i want to ask you is there are there are no blockchain set up to support what you need i so you guys you guys launched the two main crypto things that i've seen you do you have the wallet and you have a stablecoin right well we we have we have an idea of a stablecoin even i net net dollar yeah another idea we have a name we have a name yeah yeah yeah what we were i mean what we were really

49:14trying to do um when we when we announced that was kind of you know it's like flushing the fesans out of the grass we we were we were trying to like and so over that time we've met with everyone come come come talk to us yeah come talk to us we like hey we're doing help help and so like i you know i've spent i spent a ton of time and there's there's a lot a lot a lot of smart people out there and there and there might be building you know incredible businesses the problem is that they just can't like the the volumes that we're talking about are it's just it's really it's really tough to to figure out so the largest um you know vendors that we've that we've seen in the space and potential partners are getting up to about two million transactions per second uh and it's it's usually some sort of you sort of hybrid with his which is kind of you know blockchain based but also has as as some other things to to get it you know a batching pooling and other things to get um you know get up to the speeds that you need uh to that but that's still an order of magnitude slower than we than we need on day one and we think you know very quickly it

50:14it's two orders magnitude slower than than we need so we have to have some way to to scale that so i i think that the the problem is that we're kind of like a customer of one at least at first because i you know i i think over time you're gonna have other people but it's like that that's what we've sort of struggled with i think there's a lot of people who are saying like we can do you know sort of visa like payments much more efficiently and again that's amazing that you should that that a lot of people are going after um but but i think saying no we're gonna actually make it so that every time an agent accesses a resource online there's a a tiny fraction of a penny that they're paying which is both helping support the infrastructure cost and rewarding the creator of that of that content that's um that's a much more sort of niche specialty area but but i think it's i think it's a really interesting one and again if someone's listening and says hey i know how to solve that uh or or i have solved that you know we're we're still very much um yeah doing that while internally also trying to figure out you know can we build this you know

51:15because you can we build us ourselves because some of them might have to answer that that's what i was about that i'm when i'm thinking about your problem that you're in it's a buildverse buy or maybe not builders but it's a um yeah do you do it internally or do you work with vendor basically like there there is not an l1 blockchain that can support 100 million transactions a second so why not go build it yourself even net net dollar right it's like yeah i mean i i mean that i think we're running both those things in parallel where you know but buildings have takes time and and with risks and but yeah we have a team that's working on that and and are hiring you know like crazy uh for that for that team um while at the same time would be totally happy if someone came out that would work tomorrow and said hey i have i have a solution um and then you know you would either partner with that that firm or or acquire them you know what you could do is there's a lot of uh l1s who actually have phenomenal technology and maybe you could get close semi close to this far an order magnitude off but far but uh their tokens are just in the dump you could do the first ever i mean first big token m and a deal m and a deal that's uh we we

52:18uh and i i i i would not i would not be surprised if there's some team that's that's thinking about that but but again i think that the key is you've got to have the real technology that can that can keep up with this and i and i and i think we're like we're not religious about this like it doesn't have to necessarily be a a blockchain i mean it'd be great if it is because it's you know those are those are those are great things and i do think that again getting funds out of the system and getting funds into the system obviously it makes sense to use a lot of the the rails that that that that already exist um and are out there and and a lot of the most official ones are are are going to be in crypto and and that makes and so that that that's going to make a ton of sense but the but the the the whatever it is that processes like the high velocity like i think that's that's the bit that um that's a very difficult um you know computer science problem um and and then we have you know we also have to kind of play to our strengths so some some of the companies that have done this in really smart ways have and i actually built this on with really beefy heavy

53:24you know servers that are you know connected with you know extremely fast networking and again that's that's great that's a way of doing it but but it doesn't play to the strengths of club for where we have what are actually relatively commodity uh servers scattered all around the world and we can do things like you know make sure that they that there's the time is all synced you know precisely so that you can you can you avoid double spend problems and other things but it is again it's we need to be able to play also to the kind of strengths of what what we're what we're able to do and so um and so again i we have we have a team thinking about this and working on it um but but we're but we have no pride of ownership if there's someone else who has a solution there we'd love to talk to them there you know this is a crypto podcast after all so i think a lot of people here are trying to figure out our agents the next big thing in in crypto and um i think i forget who said this someone said maybe there's Eric Voorhees who started another company called Venice that's doing quite well right now but he i think he was the one who said uh

54:26you know maybe humans weren't actually the end customers for blockchains after all maybe we have just been waiting for these agents and so i'm curious like you are you are the person building this right now you are having a you know build versus buy conversation internally why don't you just why do you need to hit a chain at all like why don't you just use internal ledgers and versus you know sign receipts and yeah i mean we may um i but but i mean the thing that's nice about changes that they can then be across multiple different different organizations um the thing that's bad is that they that consensus is slow and so and so you've got you've got to balance those those two bit i i would guess that um it it ends up being something that's a little bit hybrid and and i think one of the you know one of the things that that i've always appreciate about cleftlers that we're not very religious so we we tend to try and figure out what the right solution the problem is and we don't just think that you know we have a hammer so everything's a nail like we we've got we got a hammer but we got a you know screwdriver and we've got a drill and and a whole bunch of other

55:28things and we're going to try and combine that to create what the right solution is and again i think like if if you're participating in this there will be a way to get funds in and out of this that will be you know across a bunch of the different blockchain protocols but we'll also partner with PayPal and Visa and america's breath and you know traditional banks and if you want to just a ch the money out that we'll let you do that too we we want to be sort of the universal translator that makes that makes everything work and and again our interest is in making sure that our customers who are the people who are putting content online putting applications online that they are you know able to have you know successful businesses and be able to be able to thrive and so i think that you know sometimes um sometimes i think some parts of the the kind of crypto ecosystem can get pretty religious and be like you have to do it exactly this way and yeah we're kind of like listen this amazing tool we're super happy to have it we've got these other tools too and the right answer is probably a malgamation of more than one of them yeah do you worry at all

56:28that um you have a very what i'd call like a neutral business today um like security and DNS and you know you know browsers and it's all very neutral plumbing um money is money tends to be um regulated in custodial and sometimes adversarial in in new ways that maybe your business has never faced before how do you never faced never faced before um i mean content you've never faced that yeah regulation and i never thought i was going to have to be an expert in you know Spanish copyright law i was reading about who was it Italy or something something Italy or something yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm in spain and Italy i i'm in the question uh and i'm going to expert on like Indonesian politics at this point i mean this i think we've always kind of been at at in some of that i agree that there's either you know all kinds of additional problems that that come uh when you you touch money on the other hand i think when we talk to like i like i think that we don't need to be the one that actually holds

57:29the money we just need a maybe one helps transact between the websites and the agents and and make that that'll work and when we talk to regulators um you know they're like we're really concerned that if we don't get the business model right that like this this incredible resource that we've had you know implodes and so i think that um i think i think because we come at it not from the we know we want to be a bank um but but we want to make sure that people who are you know contact readers are and and and business owners are getting getting paid for the work that they do i think that's that that has so far been something where we've gotten you know really pretty um sort of uh i would say constructive interaction with with regulators around the world but but but by no i mean i like i'm not naive um there will be we will we will have to deal with all sorts of new uh yeah problems that that come along with this um and and even even if the transactions are very very small if you do a lot of them you know you can you can you can you can create

58:30their fraud or or all kinds of other problems and we'll we'll have to deal with that yeah i remember your um i don't remember the name of the the site i remember you get you kick someone off the you you kick someone off like a decade daily the daily the daily the daily stormer was one uh eight Chan was another Kiwi Farms was another there were there it's it's funny you know we we that were you know if if if we get a court order to block something in some some region like that like we comply with that like we we have to we're but i thought you just i thought you just didn't comply with that in Italy do we didn't comply we did not sign that they're in Italy Italy has this um this uh like the piracy the piracy shield or something or a ski shield yeah and it's a it's basically you have to sign up and then anyone who runs a media company can put any website on a list and then and then the requirement or privacy shield has to be taken down globally so that's a problem for a lot of different reasons one like yeah literally um they they tried to take offline uh a site

59:37which which was created by the u.s. Department of State so that was that that we we had a little bit of a it's like being able to regulate outside of Italy is probably really much more crazy out of Italy that's fine but yeah yeah really beyond their borders seems seems unreasonable and then the second thing is there's no judicial oversight uh there's no like like do process or rule of law matters and that means that there has to be you know some actual oversight by some you know uh uh some some like in shrine to body it can't just be a group of of media owners that gets to decide what's on the internet and what's not on the internet and so i think we like we're we're we're if if Italy sent us a quarter or saying block this thing in Italy we comply with that um if if Italy sets up a scheme where an unelected cabal with no judicial oversight can block something everywhere in the world obviously we're going to push back on that because that's insane yeah yeah let's um Matthew let's end on a happier note instead of ending with Italy um maybe uh so anything that

1:00:40you actually one one fun fact about Italy is that if if you're um if you're convicted of a white color crime which is which is what they're you know threatening me with um you can serve your your your your your punishment time um you don't have to actually go to jail but you do have to stay in Italy so i was just thinking well i'm just go hang out and test getting for a while that might i'm just saying yeah yeah top top uh uh uh uh uh uh uh how dare you make me go eat all that how dare how dare um Matthew across any topic here a i running companies blockchains you know really anything is there anything that you think that you see right now that you have a vantage point into that you think hasn't become obvious to the general public yet so i mean i think what's wild to me is that during covid in two weeks uh internet traffic doubled and parts of the internet almost collapsed nobody talks about this but um at the time i was on

1:01:40i was on a i was on this crazy phone call with um netflix amazon youtube ackamai um uh you know but all the big streaming services and it was like this mexican standoff where like the the european internet like the you know the late center of ted steven said the internet's just a series of tubes and got mocked mercilessly the internet's just a series of tubes those tubes have a finite capacity uh and if you send too much traffic through them they start failing and we're we're watching um both because there are a lot more people who are like putting their kids in front of the tv to you know you know entertain them in covid but also because the peak times of internet use in aja started line up with the peak times of internet use in in europe because people were basically getting up and and doing streaming earlier in europe and then when people coming home from work in in china they were also doing streaming and a lot of that just concentrated across the um sort of major exchange points across europe and it was

1:02:41causing this just i mean it was like things were about to fall over and so the mexican standoff between the very streaming companies was everyone had to decrease their streaming rates they couldn't stream at 4k uh anymore otherwise it would go down and and no one wanted to do it and eventually everyone agreed to do it and that that's what we kept the internet going that was at 2x we think it's going to be a thousand x now the good news is that you know agents don't tend to stream video as much at least today but who knows what the future looks like but there's a lot of stuff that's that's just going to break unless we find ways to make it significantly more efficient or we find ways to pay for it and and have that and so i think that's i think that's the thing that i know i'm spending the most time thinking about and i think that it doesn't feel like the rest of the world is broken up to that that yet i think the other thing that i'm spending a much time thinking about and i kind of feel like i have sort of an idea of a solution for the first bit the second thing i i don't have um sort of two different things that i think that i don't have a good solution for

1:03:42so the first is i really worry that in the future it's going to be incredibly hard to start a new business because like what what what is it that gets you to buy from you know a new small business that's starting typically the answer is either convenience or emotion either it opened and it's you know right on the way to to work and so you can stop there you know quickly or emotion they they put a Facebook ad Instagram up in front of you and you're like oh yeah i have to you know buy that you know i don't know the skincare product or whatever whatever it is um what what's going to be interesting in the future is i think agents don't care about those things agents are like cooling calculating and they have almost infinite amount of time um and so what that means is that convenience and emotion don't work for being a new entrant and the challenges if we don't have new entrants what over time happens is you get consolidation among the major players and agents are

1:04:45actually going to kind of trust the things that they know and that they can find the most information on which is going to have even more pressure around consolidation and so i i worry that for small businesses there can be this incredible pressure it's going to be very difficult for new entrants to to enter the market and so you know i said earlier that you know i want a world where there's not five a i-committees there's 500,000 i also want a world where there's not just a small number of very powerful conglomerates that are doing everything for us but instead we've got a away from new entrants to come in and i don't know i don't know that we know exactly how that's going to work but it's something that i'm spending a lot of time thinking about the the other side of that problem is that like i'm an extreme outlier um in terms of just you know my the sort of financial resources and and other things i would guess that in the not so distant future i'm spending about a million dollars a year on the various agents that that work on my behalf um i bet the average u.s. consumer will spend about twelve hundred dollars a year and my theory would be that that money

1:05:48comes from replacing things like your netflix subscription a lot of the stuff that you use for entertainment uh and that that shifts over to spending on the various a i agents and i think that that a lot of the things around like advertising based business models i mean i if you saw the anthropic you know ads where they sort of talked about how creepy ads with agents or ads with you know an advisor are i think that that that the fight for those dollars is going to be so fierce this actually can be really difficult to have ad based models because ads inherently are like you're corrupting the system from giving you what the right answer is if all of a sudden i realize that my agent is recommending i buy a Ford rather than a then then a you know a anise on because because Ford paid them advertising agents i'm going to switch my million dollars to someone else and i think most consumers are going to switch really quickly and so that what that means is and and to give you a sense like google makes about seven hundred and fifty dollars per us user per year uh meta makes about two hundred and fifty so twelve hundred is a big number to to fight for

1:06:51i mean people are going to be fighting for that crazy what i worry about is the kinshri longka because right now the kinshri longka has access still the most of the web because it's ad based but if in the future in order to get in and compete you've got to be spending twelve hundred dollars a year or or maybe even a million um like it's going to be really tricky and so i don't know how i really worry that this is going to exacerbate the problems of sort of haves and halves knots and it's going to lock in uh of the advantages that that a lot of the developed world has and i haven't heard any solution to that problem and and i think it's something that we're going to have to think about and worry about as a society won't chat and anthropic just become the internet i guess that's the bat the bear case that's the yeah yeah i was talking to a um uh i was talking to i don't know how old this pro kid must have been like 14 years old his internet is tiktok right now he yeah he doesn't google he he just tiktok's everything and i'm like oh that 10 years from now the next 14 year old will be it's it's chat i mean i'm like my dad who's 85 like like he's just lives in in his

1:07:57his chat systems um all the time what i think people don't totally appreciate is that you know that there have been platform shifts like we like you started out browsing the web on your browser on your desktop or laptop that then shifted to social where that became kind of the interface that's where they they kid on tiktok um and then and then mobile was another shift but for all of those the dominant business model remained the same which was advertising yeah we're now having a shift to the the interface that you're going to look at is that that that that that agentic chat and you what exactly it looks like i think it's still up in the air but i like i go back and watch old episodes of the cartoon the jetsons and just are like how did George like if George wanted to buy something what he did and the answer was he asked Rosie to help full robot and Rosie went out and did it did it form i think that's going to be a lot more of what happens most of the information you've consumed you're going to get through some sort of AI interface most of the commerce that you do you're going to do through some sort of AI interface and and then and that becomes the view that

1:09:01you have for the rest of the rest of of everything and again that's going to put enormous pressure on what have historically been advertising based business models and we're going to have to find some way to continue to reward the creators that are they're creating that i i can see a path by the way to doing that financially one of the things i really worry about i flew up to stock on the meat with Daniel Ack the creator of Spotify and one of the things he said um we were fascinating conversation one of the things he said is that you know there are two reasons why people become a musician to get richer to get famous and and he's like and if you had to pick between which one motivates people more it's actually the getting famous um part that the way is totally irrational being anonymous and rich is the best thing in the world so shame but um but but but fame drives a lot of this what i think is really going to be tricky is like i can find a way to get content creators continue to be rich in a world that's AI but if where you're consuming it is sort of a regurgitation sort of the cliff notes version that you're getting through AI how do i ever make sure that that person gets famous

1:10:03and one of the things i'm doing a bunch of the i-labs is we should create sort of i don't know if it's the Nobel Prize or the Academy Awards but we for the first time in human history have a mathematical knowledge model of all human knowledge that's what the LLM's are and and so we can measure who in the last year contributed the most to you know Texas history research or to you know biology of of of you know mammals or whatever it is and we can actually say okay it was that person and we should actually be giving people those awards because i think fame is still something that really motivates people and and and being recognized by your peers and being recognized for really contributing to human knowledge is is it's something super valuable and i think we're going to have to do that in order to in order to get people to continue to you know do the work that feeds the information into these these systems that we're all going to be using yeah Matthew amazing conversation man i'm not only a customer very happy customer of cloudflare but really like the way that you see the

1:11:07world and enjoy um yeah hearing your thoughts on everything so appreciate the time thank you thank you for having me