The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“What we're seeing though, is that for the first time in history, searches across the major search engines, Google in particular, are actually on the decline.”

“Today, it's almost 10 times as hard to get a click, to get a visitor from Google to your site.”

“In fact, about 75% of queries to Google now get answered on Google itself.”

“Again, I think that that's just going to mean that over time we'll have more consolidation in the media industry. We'll have less and less content. We'll have actually more salacious headlines as people are chasing The content that is, is left that's out there…”

“The ratio 10 years ago of crawls from Google to clicks was two crawls, one click. Six months ago, it was up to six crawls one click, and that's all because of the answer box. What the AI overviews, which they've rolled out over that time, have done is they've …”

“If we strangle off the business model of those places, if we strangle off the incentives for content to create for content creators to create content, then we're actually going to end up strangling the AI systems as well, because there's, if there's no content…”

“In order for AI to get better, you have to have original content. People have to be going out and creating that. And right now we're strangling off all of the incentives for that content creation, which not only hurts content creators, it will ultimately hurt …”

“Humans should get content for free again, because we've kind of paywalled way too much, frankly. And robots should pay a ton for it. Because again, every time a robot ingests something, it's in service of, Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of different hu…”

“That will go away as well, because what will happen is the AI company will ingest the podcast and then summarize it on, on their page.”

“Starting really 18 months ago is that those companies said, hey, I know we hired you in order to stop the Chinese hackers, but we have this new threat that's there... And it was only when we actually saw the data and we saw how AI companies were taking content…”

“What we've done is we've actually tried to identify with real narrow precision. What are those pages that are on the web that have some indication that they are going to be monetized. And generally that is look at, is it behind a paywall or is it, does it have…”

“And there's some just, there's some, even some big legitimate companies that completely ignore robots.txt.”

“Google's crawler does five different things, at least. One is it checks if you have an ad on a page. It makes sure that if you're putting an ad for Procter & Gamble, Procter & Gamble product up, it's not against a pornographic site or something like that. So i…”

“There's actually an original one of the protocols set out a four or two response and that response says payment required. And so we're actually tapping into that exact original specification to say when a robot tries to access, access a page, Where there's an …”

“And so that's the sort of thing where I think a marketplace over time can develop where original valuable content will get compensated and there will be a clearing price in the market once we have that scarcity that's created by that wall.”

“I am also a hundred percent certain that regulators are paying a ton of attention to this. And that around the world, you will see them force Google to split their crawler out into announcing exactly what it is doing.”

“By all the measures that we can see, it's actually kind of plateaued and is actually flattened out in terms of in terms of content. You see fewer domains getting registered. You see fewer new websites going online.”

“I believe today that 99 out of, cents out of every dollar spent on AI is just being lit on fire. But that one cent that's out there Is gonna generate real returns.”

“On the other hand, you know, I am, I, I'm still quite skeptical that the AI customer support agent that, that is a much harder problem or the AI lawyer that is a much harder problem because it's just harder to tell whether something actually worked or didn't. …”

“The data that we have also substantiates that and shows that compared with 10 years ago, it's become 10 times harder for the same piece of content to get a click from Google than it was before.”

“What I worry about is that if the value creation model of the web has been all about how do I get traffic The new interface of the web isn't going to send you traffic, and if that's the case, if content creators can't get value from selling a thing or a subscr…”

“Their very algorithms, as they come across a piece of content, they prune off that content Which is already kind of part of the meaty part of the cheese, whereas the parts that are in holes are actually super valuable to them, and so I actually think that if w…”

“I think the mistake that a lot of content creators did was they actually did deals that don't scale as the business models of the AI companies scale with them. So if you do a deal that's like, twenty million dollars and you get all my content, I mean, that's a…”

“Why Google is so important is when you talk to all of the other AI companies, Google is the one company that they're the most afraid of. And that the reason that they're most afraid of them is because they think that they have privileged access to content in a…”

“It is not particularly long before you're running something which is the equivalent of kind of the current generation of ChatGPT on your iPhone or your, or at your Android device.”

“We're going to speed run the last 30 years of CPU efficiency gains. In, in the next, you know, five to 10 in, in GPUs.”

“I think that that's, it, it'll probably be the same fundamental infrastructure that regulates how bots access the web, that ends up regulating how browsers access the web, and a browser that Takes data and then immediately feeds it back to an LLM might have mo…”

“As you looked at open AI, it was about 750 times harder than with the kind of Google of old to get traffic with something like anthropic is 30,000 times harder.”

“Starting on July first we flipped the script. We made it as a default that if you're using Cloudflare that you can by default for free block any crawlers from taking your content without compensating you.”

“We're looking at all of the different providers that are in this space, including potentially creating our own stablecoin that would be part of how these transactions you know, take place.”

“We're starting to see that Iran is targeting other other largely U.S. Financial services firms critical infrastructure firms to try and see, to sort of try and strike back from what is you know, how, how do they strike back against the US in a way that that, t…”

“We've seen this game before with Intel saying, oh, that doesn't matter. Like just get the most performance possible. You can water cool things, all kinds of things. That, that tends to not be the winning strategy over the long term, and so we do think that the…”

“The worst outcome by far Is the slog. Where you have these companies that are growing just enough that it feels like success is just over the next hill. And they, and so they can't stop But there, nobody cares about them anymore, and their investors are tuned …”

“I think it's very rare to find someone who said, I started out just trying to build, you know, the platform for, you know, People to sell snowboards, and I, and, you know, and I ended up building, building Shopify, or I started out, you know, building that sma…”

“To be as successful as Gates, to be as successful as Bezos, to be as successful as Benioff, not only do you have to love it, but it becomes you.”

“We detected in December of 2021 the early indicia of Russia probing in a way that was similar to how they probed before they went into Georgia, before they went into Crimea, when they got more involved in Syria, and, you know, briefed government officials in b…”

“Had we not done that, it would have been much harder for President Zelenskyy to get, get the message out on what was happening. It would be much harder to see what was happening on the front. It would be much harder to see the atrocities that the Russians Cont…”

“There are more people employed by the Chinese government to hack Cloudflare than there are employees at Cloudflare.”

“If the wild success is the best outcome, the second best outcome. I would argue is quick failure.”

“The worst outcome by far Is the slog. Where you have these companies that are growing just enough that it feels like success is just over the next hill. And they, and so they can't stop. But there, nobody cares about them anymore, and their investors are tuned…”

“It's why it's the best place to start companies, but it's a terrible place to scale companies.”

“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…”

“The biggest mistake that no, the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make is picking bad co-founders. The second biggest mistake that they make is not setting their sights on an ambitious enough target”

“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…”

“I've always thought that, that entrepreneurs who brag about how much they raised or what their valuation are, it's sort of like if you brag about how big your mortgage is it's, it feels sort of distasteful”

“It's not necessarily something to be proud of. It just means that you didn't actually generate enough revenue yourself to cover the costs that you had.”