Matthew Prince
Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare. On 6 shows, 9 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveacademic@eastdakota ↗LinkedIn ↗cloudflare.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
He co-founded Cloudflare in 2009, leading the company through its 2019 IPO and serving as its CEO. Prior to Cloudflare, he co-created Project Honey Pot and taught law at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.
6shows
9appearances
215statements
54resolved
31supported
10contradicted
57%fully supported
50said about them ↓ Everything Matthew Prince said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Prince: Prominent AI companies use state-hacker tactics to bypass scraping blocks
“In fact, some really prominent companies That do some very, very, very shady things where they basically say, absolutely, we follow the rules of the road, but when push comes to serve, if it turns out they're blocked, then all of a sudden they're doing a bunch…”
Prince: Cloudflare will block Google scrapers for publishers starting in September
“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…”
Cloudflare laid off over 20% of staff to cut middle management
“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.”
Prince thinks almost every company will cut workforce in 6-12 months
“I do think in the next six to 12 months, almost every company is going to go through some exercise like this where they're going to cut a bunch of their team.”
Prince: Bot traffic will be 1,000x human internet traffic in five years
“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.”
Prince: Earning traffic from OpenAI is 750x harder than Google historically
“In OpenAI's case, it's 750 times harder to get traffic than it was from Google just 10, 10, 10 years ago. In the case of something like Anthropic, it's 30,000 times more, more difficult to get that traffic.”
Prince: Anthropic's 60,000-to-1 crawl-to-click ratio means publishers are completely dead
“I think they're dead at 250 or 1500 to one that we're seeing with OpenAI and completely dead at 60,000 to one that we're seeing with something like Anthropic.”
Prince: Automated web traffic surpassed human traffic for first time in 2026
“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.”
Prince: App stores and Facebook damaged the open web
“And the app store in some ways was an enormous threat to the web. Like it took people away from the web. It was probably one of the biggest, between it and Facebook were like the two biggest forces that really made the web less interesting.”
Prince: Google Paying Publishers for AI Scraping Is Inevitable
“I don't know if they'll pay up before the deadline, but I think it's inevitable that they'll pay up. Because again, I think that they need the content and they understand fundamentally that journalists and content creators and academics deserve to eat.”
Prince: A Golf Course Uses More Water Than All US Data Centers
“A golf course uses more water than probably all the data centers in the United States over, over the course of a year.”
Prince: Spanish and Italian Soccer Leagues Sued Cloudflare Rather Than Partnering
“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.”
Cloudflare announces hard-blocking AI crawlers unless they pay creators
“And then just today on July first, we announced that we are hard blocking the AI crawlers unless they will actually compensate Content creators for the content that they're creating.”
Prince: OpenAI and Anthropic Refer Traffic 750x and 30,000x Less Than Google
“In the case of someone like OpenAI, it's 750 times harder than it was with the Google of old. With the case of Anthropic, it's 30,000 times harder than the content of old”
Prince: Cloudflare will soon publicly expose misbehaving AI scraping companies
“So, you know, watch our blog, and I have a feeling that some prominent AI companies that are misbehaving are Can get called out pretty soon.”
Prince: Regulate pathogen printers, not open-source AI models
“I'm actually quite skeptical of the, if we allow open source models, the world is going to end arguments. That seems histrionic to me. There are things we should worry about. Like it is, you know, I think some of the you know synthetic pathogens and other thin…”
Prince: Nvidia's power stance mirrors Intel's hubris in 2010
“When we talk with the folks at Nvidia, it feels a little bit like talking to Intel back You know, in our case in 2010, or Apple's case in 2005, where they were like, you're doing it wrong if you care about power efficiency.”
Prince: The Bay Area is terrible for scaling companies
“It's, it is, I mean, when we were starting, and by the way, it's why it's the best place to start companies, but it's a terrible place to scale companies.”
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: Starting in a narrow niche creates local minimums that hinder growth
“Where it runs a risk is if you start, start to say, you know, we've got to do X. First of all, you'll attract people that think X is, even though you say the journey is much longer that they'll think that that's the end state. And then secondly, it might be th…”
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 …”
Prince: Bootstrapped Tough Mudder might be more successful than Cloudflare
“I think it's an open question whether, you know, they've been more successful or we've been more successful. Like, they have no costs. They've got this thing that's just a machine that just kicks off a ton of cash, and he can go and focus on, you know, other t…”
Prince: Jeff Bezos is optimizing his life for Instagram
“And for a long time, I looked at like, you know, Jeff Bezos. I was like, wow, he seems like he has a pretty good life. He's not a pretty happy person. And out today, it seems like he's optimizing his life for Instagram, which is weird.”
The other half of the tape: Matthew Prince's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 48 times in 20 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Kantrowitz 16Harry Stebbings 5Guillermo Rauch 5Jordi Hays 2Santi Subotovsky 1Patrick Bosworth 1
Statements about Matthew Prince, by other people (2)
Cloudflare data shows AI crawlers send exponentially fewer visits than Google
“Now for Google, it's 18 pages crawled, one visit. OpenAI, it's 1500 pages crawled, One visit. Anthropic, it's, was, it's now gone up from 6000 to 60,000 pages crawled. One visit.”
Subotovsky: Emergence Capital missed out on investing early in Cloudflare
“So the biggest miss that I've had is when I first joined Emergence one of my good friends and classmates, Matthew Prince and Michelle, were getting started with Cloudflare, and I invited them to present here at Emergence, and I didn't know how venture worked, …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 17
Big Technology 16
TBPN 14
Top Founders 1
2026 19 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- SpaceX Launches Largest Ever IPO | OpenAI Files to Go Public | Uber Cuts 23% of HR · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI Kills Sora & Hits $100M ARR on Ads | Oura Going Public & Whoop Raises at $10BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- WWDC Kicks Off, Jobs Up, Tech Down, VC Horror Stories Go Viral | Diet TBPN
- Gavin Baker: SpaceX Might Be the Greatest Company of All Time
- Microsoft Takes on Frontier AI with Project Solara, OpenClaw, and More at Build 2026 | Diet TBPN
- OpenAI & SpaceX S1 Drops | Layoffs at Cloudflare & ClickUp | OpenRouter & Polsia Raise Mega Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Big Companies Hiring Again, Anthropic's Open-Weight Position, Zuck Backs AI for All | Diet TBPN
- Tyler Cowen Doesn't Think America Should Ban Chinese AI Models
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 27 mentions in 10 episodes 3 per episode
- The Web’s ‘Existential’ AI Threat, OpenAI’s Microsoft Office Competitor, Tesla Robotaxi Launch
- Guillermo Rauch on the Next.js Drama, AI-Driven Dev, Vercel’s v0, and the Future of Frontend.
- 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025
- Is ChatGPT The Last Website?, Grok’s System Prompt, Meta’s llama Fiasco
- Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Base44’s Founder, Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine: Here's How Writing Evolves In The AI Era
- Erotic ChatGPT, Zuck’s Apple Assault, AI’s Sameness Problem
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Matthew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare | 2 | 66 | 50% 6/12 | full record on 20VC → |
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare | 2 | 53 | 56% 9/16 | full record on Big Technology → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare | 2 | 28 | 50% 3/6 | full record on TBPN → |
 MADLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare | 1 | 27 | 50% 3/6 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare | 1 | 21 | 67% 4/6 | full record on No Priors → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare | 1 | 20 | 75% 6/8 | full record on Top Founders → |