Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2031
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.”
Assertion Contradicted
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Cloudflare's network peering makes bandwidth effectively free
“Bandwidth for us is effectively free.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Cloudflare often avoids paying for space or power
“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 …”
Insight
Prince: Public market investor relationships are healthier and more honest than VC
“It's really hard to fire your VCs. It's hard for your VCs to fire you. And so as a result, like actually it's kind of dysfunctional. Whereas public market, like I love our investors because if I do something stupid, they call me up and they say, that was stupi…”
Opinion
Prince: Companies have substantial control over their first-day IPO pop
“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…”
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare seeded internal AI OS with secret human operators
“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…”
Opinion
Prince: Companies Cutting Junior Hiring Due to AI Are Making a Mistake
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Anthropic is 30,000x and OpenAI 750x harder than Google for traffic
“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.”
Disclosure
Cloudflare enables free default blocking of uncompensated AI web crawlers
“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.”
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare is exploring creating its own stablecoin for micropayments
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Iran is targeting US financial and infrastructure firms with cyber attacks
“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…”
Insight
Prince: Prioritizing raw performance over power efficiency is a losing chip strategy
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Major AI labs are making Cloudflare their preferred code execution target
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Web creation has returned to exponential growth over past 18 months
“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 …”
Insight
Prince: Pricing IPOs at maximum valuation benefits VCs over operating executives
“The problem with that is if you look at all the companies that, that have done that, so the Airbnbs and others that they basically, you know, that's great for your private market investors. That's great for the VCs. That's great for any of the founders that ar…”
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare hired 1,111 college interns in one summer
“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.”
Opinion
Prince: The internet's original sin is lack of privacy, not payments
“The original sin of the internet is not that it didn't include payments. It's that it was, that there was no privacy built into it, and your IP address reveals far too much about you as, and who you are.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Big tech companies agree they must eventually pay for web content
“Cause we've talked with all the big tech companies, all the companies about this and they all like with maybe one or two very small exceptions. They all say, yes, we understand over the longterm, we have to pay for content.”
Assertion Partly supported
Prince: Iran's largest crypto exchange and major bank suffered massive cyberattacks
“One of Iran's largest banks was hacked by what looked like a group of Israeli hacktivists. The largest cryptocurrency exchange in Iran was hacked and all its funds were drained.”
Insight
Prince: Every chip shortage in silicon history turns into a glut
“There's never been a chip shortage in any time in the history of silicon that doesn't turn into a glut.”
Disclosure
Cloudflare acquires VoidZero, the company behind developer platform Vite
“So we bought a company called Void Zero, which makes Veet, which is one of the most popular developer platforms that's there.”
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare converts customer content into Markdown for AI agents
“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…”
Matthew Prince