Matthew Prince (Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare)
Episode publishedPodcast: The Slow HunchThe Slow Hunch
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Curiosity is the opposite of focus. The biggest criticism of Cloudflare is we're a mile wide and an inch deep, and it's so much fun. Like, I love that. Can we make it super inexpensive to run thousands of experiments? We have a traditional product engineering team, but we also have a sort of less traditional thing we call ETI. And their stated goal is to fail 90% of the time with 90% of the products that they launch. They don't meet that goal. They fail only 50% of the time. And I get mad at them because I'm like, you're not risks. And there are plenty of people that inside of Cloudflare who a
Welcome back to the slow hunch. In this episode, I am thrilled to welcome my old friend, Matthew Prince, the CEO and cofounder of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is among the most important companies on the Internet processing large portions of Internet traffic. We got to know Matthew, from when we invested at USB back in 2013 at their series c and have followed the journey for a long time. In this episode, we go all the way back to the kernels of Matthew's ideas that would later lead to Cloudflare. We spent a lot of time at the end talking about what's going on today on the Internet, the relationship
Like, we we it was only because we really when Fidelity did our fourth round of funding, we pushed them on like, We want you to treat us like a public company. What would you do? And they're like, Okay, you want me be a public company? You should do actual earnings calls. Scripted, give guidance, do the whole thing. The first few, we were so bad. By the time we did our real earnings call, I think it was our thirteenth at that point. So it had been over basically three years.
And I think there was the idea of having some analysts throw in some softball and also hardball questions.
Was the hardest thing we couldn't find because the VCs VCs VCs one of VCs, like, you know, is is that we live in a jurisdiction that doesn't have no fault divorce. So so as a result, nobody tells each other the truth. But nobody wants to offend each other because it's like the pain of getting divorced is too high. We had a very hard time finding people to ask hard questions.
I remember that. First time I met you was I think twenty twelve or twenty thirteen when you guys were raised in the Series A or Series C rather. And I remember walking out of your office with our team thinking to myself, Holy shit, what these guys are building is incredible, so powerful, and also so scary. Like, I hope we trust these guys to handle it the right way.
Scary, scary. We're very, very scary. I think we've handled it pretty well,
mostly. I think you have too. And so I know you've been, you know, you're on the podcast circuit talking about, you know, Cloudflare and your story, and I'll give you the setup for what the slow hunch is, and and maybe we can, cover some new ground or maybe look at it in a slightly different way.
I was I was trying to think about because I've I've been I've been thinking about it to some extent, like, my slow hunch has been. And I'm not sure it's you know, to build a better Internet, it's I and I haven't got this pithy, but but let me let me try it with you, which is, because the thing the thing that extends back before Cloudflare, that extends back before unspam, was something around the idea that the internet is a bigger deal than people realize, and it's deeply flawed and needs to be fixed.
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