The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Prince: The story of eBay starting with Beanie Babies is PR BS
“So, so the eBay example, you're like eBay started with Beanie Babies. So I've talked to the founders of eBay about that. That's complete and utter PR retrospective BS.”
Prince: Almost all successful startup founders begin with broad, ambitious visions
“It is very hard to find an actual startup founder that, that started out saying, we're going to do this small niche thing, and then it grew into this, is this big task. Almost everyone early on, you know, it's why founders, you know, can come across as so, so …”
China employs more people to hack Cloudflare than Cloudflare has employees
“There are more people employed by the Chinese government to hack Cloudflare than there are employees at Cloudflare.”
Prince: The eBay Beanie Babies origin story is a PR myth
“So I've talked to the founders of eBay about that. That's complete and utter PR retrospective BS. And the reason that a lot of stories look like that is because almost nobody Once, if you're in the, you're the journalist that, that, that you said before we sta…”
Prince: Baillie Gifford's average holding period is 16 years
“Like Bailey Gifford, who's, you know, one of Kleffler's, you know, top investors in a Scottish firm, their average holding period is 16 years.”
Cloudflare will inevitably reach $5 billion in annual revenue
“We're on a path From a billion dollars of revenue to five billion dollars of revenue, that's inevitable that we'll get there. It's just a matter of how long.”
Matthew Prince: Cloudflare's founding vision was to run the internet
“If you go and you watch the TechCrunch pitch, there's a judge at the end of it, and he asked, what's your vision? And I was like, our vision is to run the internet.”
Russia sanctioned three tech CEOs together: Benioff, Prince, and Zuckerberg
“There's, there are three tech executives that that got sanctioned at the same time. Yeah, you already interviewed Benioff, who was one of them, it was me, And then, ah, and then Zuckerberg.”
Prince: Cyber threat levels correlate with budget size, except for human rights groups
“There's almost a perfect line that is, the smaller your budget is, the less cyber threats you face, the bigger your budget, the bigger the cyber threats you face, with one notable exception, which is civil society and human rights organizations.”
Prince: Every pre-IPO Cloudflare investor generated at least 10x returns
“Everyone who bet on us pre IPO made at least 10 times the money that they invested with us.”
Cloudflare co-founder Lee Fahlberg was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in his 30s
“Instead, it turned out he had a pretty rare neurological condition called frontotemporal dementia. It's the same thing that Bruce Willis has, but, you know, Lee was in his thirties, which is extremely rare for something like this.”
Matthew Prince: Online spammers specialize in specific categories rather than general spam
“If somebody is, You know, a spammer for Viagra. Are they also spamming for, you know, fake university diplomas? The answer is no, by the way, people, people tend to specialize.”
Matthew Prince: First spam email arrives an average of one week post-harvesting
“What's the length of time between when a spam crawler harvest your email address and then when you get the first spam message, it averages about a week.”
Prince: Michelle Zatlyn originated the idea for Cloudflare
“And it was actually Michelle who was like, that's the idea. We're building that. And so it wasn't really even my aha moment. It was actually Michelle's.”
Cloudflare designated Michelle Zatlyn as temporary CEO in public succession plan
“When we went public we had to go through, like, a succession planning exercise, you know, if Matthew gets hit by a bus who steps in as a CEO and the board decided, and I think this is publicly filed that, you know, Michelle would step in on a temporary basis a…”
Cloudflare splits decisions: Prince controls product, Zatlyn controls go-to-market and HR
“Today at Cloudflare, as we think about things, when we have a question of what product to build, ultimately, I'm the one who makes the decision on, on that. But Michelle has a ton of input and is, is helpful. But at the end of the day, it's my decision. On the…”
Matthew Prince Was Debt Broke When Starting Cloudflare in 2009
“When we started Cloudflare, I was debt broke. Like I, if we hadn't raised money in November of 2009, like I wasn't sure how I was going to pay my rent. I'd already borrowed a bunch of money from my mom”
Michelle Zatlyn's husband runs bootstrapped ventures aiming for $3M cash flow
“It's actually Michelle my business partner, her husband, he's got two other guys and the three of them just churn out bootstrap businesses and they try to get each of them to cash flow basically three million dollars a piece. Cause then they can basically each…”
Prince wrote his 1996 college thesis arguing the internet was a fad
“I wrote my college thesis on why the internet was a fad in 96 1996.”