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 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
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 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…”
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”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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?”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Prince: Cloudflare powers infrastructure for two internet DNS root servers
“We provide the infrastructure for two of the 13 root servers.”
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.”
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.”
Cloudflare built an AI agent trained on 10 years of incident data to review code releases
“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…”
Prince: AI's biases are useful because they are uncorrelated with human team biases
“The really interesting thing is it's also uncorrelated to all the other biases that are within an organization. A team of people working together will tend to develop A set of biases. And that doesn't mean that AI doesn't have biases, but they're uncorrelated …”