Insight
Bragging about company valuation is like bragging about mortgage size
“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”
Insight
Prince: Raising capital just means you failed to generate enough revenue
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Cloudflare does not run on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
“So we're not running on top of AWS or on top of Azure or Google. We actually had to build the network out ourselves.”
Opinion
Prince: Tech's allergy to going public harms public markets
“I think this sort of allergy to being a public company is a disservice to public markets generally.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cloudflare inside sales reps generate $1.3M new ARR annually
“No, over 12 months, 1.3 million in new AR per year, which is about twice what you would get from a high performing other SAS company where that's usually around 700,000 dollars per fully ramped rep.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Cloudflare powers over 10M web properties and APIs
“We have over ten million web properties, APIs, mobile applications that sit behind our network, and we run a network that literally spans the world everywhere from not very exotic places like San Jose to Djibouti and All across mainland China.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cloudflare signs up 15,000 new sites daily mostly at zero CAC
“Every day, you know, 15,000 new sites sign up for our service, most of whom heard about us with, there were zero customer acquisition costs.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: 25% of Cloudflare enterprise business converts from self-service
“About 25% of our mid-market enterprise business actually graduates from the self-service business.”
Insight
Prince: Tight infrastructure coupling makes external tech integration difficult for cloud companies
“I think the challenge with most cloud companies is we're so tightly coupled That it's really difficult to take an outside product and have it naturally fit into our ecosystem.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Prince: Decentralization is likely to disrupt major tech leaders including Cloudflare
“I don't know whether it's going to be crypto in any of the forms that it is today, but I do think that something decentralized is, is is important. And I think that that, that is likely to be disruptive to a number of companies that are very successful today, …”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Prince: Some customers pay Cloudflare over $1M per year
“We have companies that pay us over a million, you know, over a million dollars a year.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Cloudflare self-service customers average $100 per month
“We have what we think of as our self-service business, which are people who come in, give us a credit card, and pay for the service, and that's going to be around a hundred dollars a month on, on average.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Cloudflare enterprise tier starts at $5K per month
“We have what our mid-market and enterprise Customers, which we have a traditional enterprise sales team for, and those will be, you know, it really varies, but sort of starting at 5000 dollars a month and up from there.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Cloudflare owns equipment in nearly 100 countries and 150+ cities
“So we own equipment in nearly a hundred countries around the world, a hundred and over a 150 cities around the world.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Cloudflare retains more than half of $183M raised in bank
“And, you know, I'm proud that we have still to this day you know, more than half of that still in the bank.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Cloudflare reached $50M in revenue within four and a half years
“The metric I remember is that we went from zero to fifty million dollars in, I think, four and a half years, which puts us in some pretty, pretty amazing company with companies like Salesforce and Workday and others.”
Disclosure
Cloudflare kept every funding round secret for nine months
“Every round that we've done, we've kept secret for at least nine months after we did it.”
Assertion Partly supported
Cloudflare is growing at high double digits past $100M ARR
“We're growing still high double digits at the rate that we're at, which is which is really, really, really you know, amazing.”
Assertion Contradicted
Prince: Cloudflare is operating at basically break-even
“We run the business that basically break even today.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: Cloudflare's acquisitions are small acqui-hires under ten people, not revenue plays
“Most of the acquisitions that we've done have been aqua hire types of acquisitions. I think we've done two that have had A little bit of a technology component to them, but again, still very, very small teams, 10 or fewer people as part of that nothing so far …”
Matthew Prince