Disclosure
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2031
Prince predicts bot traffic will be 1,000x human traffic within five years
“I think that if you extrapolate this out, you know, in five years, I think you'll see a thousand times more bot traffic than human traffic. And if I had to take kind of an over under bet on that, I'd take the over bet that it's just going to, it's growing at s…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2031
Prince: There will never be a 14th DNS root server
“There will never be a 14th root server, and the organizations that run them will probably never change as well”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: The same individual currently directs all Iranian state cyber attacks
“And the same guy to this day is running all of Iranian cyber attacks.”
Insight
Prince: Co-founders asking how to divide responsibilities likely have wrong partners
“If you're asking that question, it probably means you have the wrong co-founders.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Prince: Log4j-level software vulnerabilities will be found weekly for two years
“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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Prince: AI resistance among mid-career workers risks creating a lost generation in tech
“I really do worry that we're going to have this sort of lost generation of sort of either, you know, young millennials or older Gen Z folks that just, they, they're, they were sort of, they're going to have incentives to say we shouldn't use these tools becaus…”
Insight
Prince: AI will boost engineering and sales hiring while replacing corporate measurement roles
“If I have a developer and I can now give them AI tools and they're 10 times as productive, I'm gonna hire as many developers as I can. If I, you know, have a salesperson and I can give them tools that eliminate the parts of their job that they don't like, whic…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Meta is targeting a 50-to-1 manager span of control
“Meta is trying to get to 50 to one.”
Insight
Prince: A 12-to-1 manager ratio is optimal for flat organizations
“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?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Prince: Local newspaper to earn more from AI licensing than display ads
“My wife and I bought the local newspaper in our hometown, Park City, Utah. I think we will make more this year off AI licensing deals than we do off display ads.”
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare viewed early VCs strictly as money sources without wanting advice
“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…”
Assertion Partly supported
Prince: Cloudflare re-issued a years-old Nvidia press release and stock doubled
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: One AI agent per worker requires 40x annual global CPU output
“If you take every knowledge worker on earth, and you imagine that they're each going to have one agent that is working on their behalf. It turns out that the CPU utilization of that is more, it's 40 times the current annual CPU production that's out there.”
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare's initial internal AI agent was secretly staffed by 20 humans
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Cloudflare cut earnings prep time from two weeks to three minutes with AI
“And so we went from what used to be a two week process down to what is now a three minute process.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Matthew Prince: Ad-supported web business models fail because bots don't click on ads
“The business model of the last 28 years, which largely advertising based doesn't work because bots don't click on ads.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Major publishers land better AI deals using Cloudflare content controls
“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.”
Assertion Contradicted
Prince: More money goes to music creation per GDP today than ever in history
“We can quibble about are the right people getting the money or not, but there's more money going into music creation today on, on, on per capita per GDP. Than any time in human history by far.”
Assertion Partly supported
Prince: Spotify paid out ~$12B last year, exceeding music industry market cap 22 years ago
“Spotify last year sent something like 12 billion dollars Out to music creators. That's more than the entire music industry's market cap was. 22 years ago, which is extraordinary.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Cloudflare powers infrastructure for two internet DNS root servers
“We provide the infrastructure for two of the 13 root servers.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: OpenAI is a major Cloudflare customer powering its mobile app
“OpenAI is, you know, big customer of ours you know, all their mobile app is built, you know, on, on, on us.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Anthropic runs all of Claude.ai on Cloudflare infrastructure
“Anthropic, again, another big customer all of Cloud.ai sits, sits on top of us.”
Matthew Prince