Cloudflare

“We're seeing a lot of agentic payment now flow over these new protocols, like x-for-o-two, which is one that we incubated at Coinbase that we actually put into the Linux foundation. So Google and Cloudflare and AWS, a bunch of people are working with us on tha…”

“In May of 2026, you won't believe it, but we now see that automated traffic is past human traffic for the first time in the history of the internet.”

“And if we just assume the current trends, what's, what's blows my mind is that if you just fast forward five years from now we estimate now that automated traffic online will be a thousand times what human traffic is.”

“I do think that we're going to move more and more away from kind of an app store model. Because that's not going to be the interface where we reconnect with it.”

“I think at the same time, you've got sort of agents that are operating on their own. That's probably the smallest of the categories right now. I think that that will grow and become a pretty large category, but right now that's sort of Agent to agent kind of c…”

“The internet, European internet came this close to completely collapsing in COVID because in COVID over a period of two weeks, Internet traffic doubled, and it especially doubled for video streaming, which was, ah, which was a very high bandwidth.”

“If every one of those agents ran in a traditional container, like, you know, which is not even a VM, not even its own server, but just a container, right? You would need more than 40 times the current CPU production in an, in a calendar year in order to suppor…”

“The majority of companies that are out there, the majority of content that's created They actually want that content in AI, like Cloudflare, like our knowledge base is a way of us sharing how to use Cloudflare really well. And we want to make sure that every A…”

“Visa, largest payments network in the world, handles at peak during the holidays, somewhere around 20,000 financial transactions per second. Cloudflare handles about half a billion internet transactions per second.”

“We think that somewhere between one and 10% of those will day one be monetizable through agents with a with a micropayments transaction, which means that if you're going to build something like this, you've got to build a payments infrastructure that can day o…”

“And what we have said at cloudflare is that by mid September, we're gonna treat Google the same way on. If you have an, you know, ads, if you're a business that's ad supported, subscription supported, then we're going to restrict Google from being able to acce…”

“I think it will be the nail in the coffin for almost every public software company. And what I mean is when Stripe and data, like, okay, there's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, we can put them in a different category, right? They clearly are on many levels. When Op…”

“I think it was Cloudflare this morning said that in five years from now, we'll have 1000 times the amount of agent traffic to human traffic.”

“We provide the infrastructure for two of the 13 root servers.”

“What our style tended to be was we thought of venture capitalists primarily as, you know, sources of money and, you know, mostly sort of, we wanted when we needed money, we wanted to be able to access capital, no thought leadership, but we, yeah, we really jus…”

“If you're asking that question, it probably means you have the wrong co-founders.”

“And hilariously, like two or three years later in 2024, we, and you can look this up, we actually issued the exact same press release, just changed the date, and our stock doubled.”

“OpenAI is, you know, big customer of ours you know, all their mobile app is built, you know, on, on, on us.”

“Anthropic, again, another big customer all of Cloud.ai sits, sits on top of us.”

“You know, I think for the next you know, a 104 days, a 104 weeks. So two years you're going to see a log for J like vulnerability every single week.”

“We actually built an agent that not only reviews every code release that we send out, but every configuration change. So if you go into the cloudflow dashboard, you push a button that generates a file that then gets pushed out to the rest of our network. And w…”

“So for us, it was auto at cloudflow.com. And we told everyone, it's a magic AI agent. We've set it up. You can ask it anything. Now, in reality, behind the scenes, it was a team of about 20 people that staffed this 24 seven.”

“And so we went from what used to be a two week process down to what is now a three minute process.”

“We laid off more than 20% of our team and not because the business was struggling, but, and not because they weren't great team members. But we just need fewer middle managers.”

“I think 12 to one is right. And the benefit of expanding the number of the average number of direct reports Is it inherently flattens the organization?”

“Probably half of our customers are in that camp where they actually want to make it as easy as possible.”

“What we've seen is if you go across the biggest publishers in the world, Condé Nast, Dot Ash Meredith, you know, they are, they, because we've now given them these tools, they're actually signing much better deals with the AI companies.”

“You have, I mean, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, all these companies trade above 15 times NTM revenue again.”

“And they did one of the first mass layoffs of a company doing really, really well. So they let off 20% of their workforce, even though they're crushing all their numbers.”

“My gut is in terms of tokens consumed on planet Earth, these CDNs are delivering less than one percent of them, and I mean, maybe less than 10 basis points.”

“So we bought a company called Void Zero, which makes Veet, which is one of the most popular developer platforms that's there.”

“And it's, I think, why you're seeing more and more of the big AI labs have Cloudflare as the preferred target for where, where their code gets run. You know, OpenAI released a project for their enterprise users a little while ago that, again, is targeting us.”

“Some of the things that we're doing are, you know, for those customers of ours that want to make sure their content is consumed by agents, want to make sure it's as accessible as possible. We are automatically converting things into Markdown, which is a much s…”

“That for a long time, since about 2015 the web is kind of plateaued. There were not, there were more websites that were being shut down than were being created during that time. In the last 18 months though we're back to the web growing at a rate which is, is …”

“And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, going, going, you know, forward, say five years, that, that bot traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.”

“Bandwidth for us is effectively free.”

“And because of where we deploy systems, we often are in places where We don't have to pay for the space or the power, which allows us to then pass those savings on to customers. So it can be significantly more cost effective to use inference with us than it …”

“So with the NBA and NFL and MLB and the premier league in the UK and others, we work really closely with them to, if they identify a pirate stream for us to, you know, pull that down.”

“La Liga in, in in, in Spain and the league in Italy have decided that instead of partnering with us to take this down, they would sue us instead.”

“And we made this crazy list of all of these, you know, people who, you know, who were like, you know, at some point that might be an important relationship for us. And like, 75% of them said yes. And they all made, you know, a ton of money as a result of it.”

“Like you have a lot of control over how much the pop is going to be. And we sat with bankers and we were like, listen, we want it to go up about. And they were like, okay, if you wanted to go up to 20%, you price it right here. So we priced it right at that po…”

“Cloufter's about, what, 5000 employees a little bit less than that now. But we hired 1111 interns this summer. So straight out of college.”

“So we built something called Cloudflare OS. Which allows, you know, anyone on our finance team, legal team, you know, accounting team, finance anyone that's out there at the company to be able to have access to tools and really figure out how, how their job ge…”

“I think a lot of companies are doing this wrong, where they're saying, like, we're not gonna bet on, on, on the new people coming out of school, because, you know, AI is gonna replace them. I mean, these kids know how to use AI better than anyone else, so we'r…”

“The first one is that online traffic will increase in a way that you'll have more agent traffic on the internet than humans by 20, 27 as per cloud flare.”

“And I think what you saw in the case of AppLoving and Cloudflare is it turns out high-priced stocks At the start of a paradigm shift, no matter how amazing the quarter is, are just vulnerable to disruption.”

“The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a seventy billion dollar company today.”

“To be a two-pronged AI beneficiary, you have to be able to monetize your AI, and you have to attract new customers. There's two prongs, and the ones that have done it so far are close to infra, right? Cloudflare, Twilio, Mongo, Datadog and even DigitalOcean”

“If you think of bot detection and Cloudflare and all of these things that they talk about, like they sometimes go on soapbox and saying, we are guarding the internet. We are keeping the bots away. It's all bullshit because What they're actually doing is preven…”

“Cloudflare and Shopify, both said they were hiring a thousand interns over the course of 20, 25. Because the intern onboarding costs, it used to be takes a month before you enter and can do anything useful. Now they're doing something useful within like a week…”

“Never leave a company you believe in for like, you know, these kinds of reasons, you know, you have to stick it out because things change really fast. And one thing doesn't change is like, you know, the trajectory of the company, like if you are an interest co…”

“Actually, you know, I'm a big believer that you can't be good at everything. And when I, what I mean by that is if when you're building a company, right, you can't be good at serving all kinds of customers. You can't be good at serving a customer through a sel…”

“So initial enterprise plan was nothing but The same product which you have on PLG with the white glove service, you know, because what happens with a lot of customers is they come through PLG because they love that it's very simple to start, very simple to use…”

“So first customer, enterprise customer we have was Bain Capital. So Bain Capital was using ourselves a product and they were happy with it. And we just put a phone number on a website, you know, if somebody wants to call us and that phone number was pretty muc…”

“Like in the first three, four years, we did not go after any of the Akamai customers at all. But if they come to us, we will, but there are times where we did say no to the customers, like, no, we are not ready for you.”

“Back in 2012, 13, there was only two percent of the website who actually was using some kind of a CDN solution or somebody did also, but not.”

“We hire, like, a lot of mid-market A's, not, we did not hire, like, your traditional enterprise A's early on... The reason for that was that we wanted to build a fast velocity motion which was, like, the deal size was about 50,000 dollar, and we wanted to do d…”

“So, so in terms of even hiring the leadership team in the go to market, we were hiring people who were more open about like doing things in a different way versus like come with a playbook. So we never hired somebody who like, Hey, I have a playbook. This is h…”

“Business school idea was very much about like a more like ad revenue. So you basically build the network and a lot of traffic, and then you can make money through the eyeballs. That's kind of the idea versus like actually to be the security, the layer, the net…”

“And I think a lot of these companies who are acquiring, they feel like I want to build the best basket out there. Then I'm not displaceable, basically. But within the basket, few things may become obsolete or become like a commodity, and that's okay. But the b…”