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Matthew Prince

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2024-04-08

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2024-04-08

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1. “That would be more meaningful or more impactful. I think as long as we do what we say we do, hopefully we'll always have the ability to build a great business, but also do those things which are living up to our mission, which is, again, to help build a better internet.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “But if you really do think about the long term, if you are really mission driven, then you'll also get investors and customers that are focused on the long term and will let you do that as well. And so I'm not saying it won't come at some point, but I think both a combination of doing what we say and saying what we do, being incredibly consistent, really focusing on long-term value creation for every one of the stakeholders that we serve, including the general public, that that has given us that freedom to be able to continue to innovate. And I think that it's also one of the real powers of being a founder-led company, the fact that Michelle and I are still showing up every day to work that lets us do that. Because again, it's a level of consistency. And I can't imagine anything that I could do.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Continue to be able to deliver very consistent and long-term results. And we have always focused on efficiency. We've never been the place that waste money on fancy cafeterias or conference tables. We have very functional basic offices and I don't live a particularly fancy life. And neither does Michelle. Because again, what we're focused on is building what is a really great business. We've done that for a long time now. We've done that for 13, 14 years. And over that time, I think we've built a lot of trust with the investing community. And if you look at even as a public company, who are our top 10 shareholders?”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Michelle and I are fundamentally focused on being just incredibly efficient. Business leaders. We often joke that we're scared squirrels at the end of the day where I think that we believe that every dollar of investor capital that we're trusted with, every dollar that a consumer pays us, that we have to deliver A really substantial return for that. And I'm super proud of the fact that we did that for all of our investors before we went public and we're way up from our IPO price. And we, you know.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “It is irresponsible as a company to overhire and then have to lay a bunch of people off, even if they were performing well. But it's also irresponsible as a company to have low performers who you don't lay off as individuals. Because, again, that's bad for the company and it's bad for the high performers that are there.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Early 2022. Every story was about how it was going to be the great resignation. Every employee was going to quit. Meanwhile, we're looking at the data and we're like, Seems like the economy is going to slow down. So, all my peers are like, we're hiring as fast as we can and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it turned out no one quit. Like the great resignation never showed up. And I remember thinking, gosh, maybe we're doing this wrong because, you know, companies I really respect, I would talk to their CEOs and they would say, yeah, we're hiring as quickly as we can. We're like, gosh, all the data sort of suggests that we're about to slow down. And so we're actually kind of pulling back on hiring right now. And that was a very scary and risky decision. But I think it's part of what then has allowed us to not have to do layoffs and to be able to someone who's been able to continue to invest. And those are, it's always incredibly costly and just disruptive and demoralizing if you have to do this. On the other hand, if you don't let go low performers, that's also incredibly disruptive and demoralizing. And so I think we have to be very clear.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “At this point, almost 30 years of hindsight, they were right to fire me, and I was kind of a, but I'm in a better employee today because of that. So we can't get to a point where we just say everyone is great and everyone gets a medal and everyone gets a trophy. There are people who perform better than others. And we have a certain amount of work to get done. The worst thing that you can do as an organization is hold on to your low performers because that not only is wasteful, but it actually is incredibly discouraging to your high performers. That doesn't mean that, again, anyone who we've let go, it won't be a great person somewhere else. Or even if we'd done certain different, if we'd train them in a different way, maybe they would have been, you know, they would have been better. But for us at that moment in time, they weren't the right person. And I think that as you hire people, no matter what, you've got to be really, really thoughtful around this. And it was, you know, I remember in early 2020.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “So I want to be very careful. It would be incredibly unfair for me to talk about the woman who posted the video. I mean, we have a much bigger megaphone and we could walk through all the reasons for her being like, oh, that would be totally, totally, totally irresponsible. What I will say is that it is incredibly costly to hire someone and then have them not work out. So it's in our interest for everyone to work out. Not everyone does. And when they don't, that doesn't mean they're a bad person. It doesn't mean they won't be an incredible employee somewhere else. They just weren't the right person for us. And sometimes that's their fault. Sometimes it's our fault. You know, it just, it can be a number of different things. I think I really, I was at a job and I got fired because I wasn't very good at the job. I still remember it and was super painful, but it was a, I learned from it.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Fit, or you know, some people just sometimes the job grows more than they do, and it's not the right thing. And when we do that, we, I think, in a responsible way as possible, we try to let people go, but it's a relatively small part of the team. And I think we do a good job of it.”

   2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “Literally, we had people, you know, for six months didn't do a single thing as far as we could tell. And yeah, at some point, you got to get back to actually doing work. And so, you know, if you don't do work, then we're going to let you go. But again, that's not because we were too big. That's just because you need to have people who actually doing their jobs. And so I think we should focus on that. I think we've actually been unbelievably disciplined in the rate at which we've hired and our margins have stayed kind of exactly the same for quite some time as a result of that. When you hire someone, it's a big deal. It's a responsibility that you have. I mean, incredibly proud that like last year we had 1.2 million people apply to work at Cloudflare, which is just extraordinary. We hired about a thousand, a little over a thousand of those. And we do a pretty good job of that. But every once in a while, we make decisions or somebody just isn't the right.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Again, I don't think we even fired a bunch of people. We fired about the same number of people that we normally fired. COVID had some really interesting effects. I think one is that, you know, in 2020, we really stopped firing people because we're human, right? People were suffering. We wanted to take care of them. Some people just expected that that would be the state of how things went on forever, that you could join a company.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Think of those as layoffs, no, because I mean, if somebody doesn't do their job well, then we'll fire a person. But a layoff is a very specific thing where you're saying we need to increase our margin. We've never made a determination on letting go.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Growth rate this far into The internet. I think that if you started to see the utility of the internet slowing down, you would see the usage slowed down. And that's not just because we're bringing, I mean, it's amazing we've brought 4 billion people online. It's disgraceful that there are 4 billion people who are not online. But it's not just that. Even if you look at developed markets, you're still seeing double digit growth rates in internet usage. And I think that's the best predictor of is there still real value, which is coming from it. And so, you know, I think we can wring our hands about is AI going to destroy the web or not. I'm still optimistic that having networks that connect people together, people are going to use that to communicate and find answers to questions. And if the current tools that we have, if Google isn't sufficient to sort the wheat from the chaff, then there will be a new Google.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “Still keeps emerging. There was a period of time in the early web history where the search technology that we had wasn't good enough. That's where Google came from was building something that was just a better way to filter through all of the garbage that was out there. So I guess I'm a little bit more optimistic that fundamentally people are trying to figure out how to communicate people are trying to figure out how to find the answer to the problems that they have and find innovative new solutions. And there will be things that make that harder and there will be then things that make that easier. But over time, if you look at it, the growth in overall internet traffic, despite enormously during COVID and then that is slowed down. But last two years, it's still grown almost 25% year over year, which is an extraordinary.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “For us, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how you're consuming the content, whether or not that's on your desktop or a mobile device, whether that's through a browser or an app, I think behind the scenes, a huge amount of what we see is processed through API. So APIs make up 57% of the traffic that we processed last year. And so that's maybe not a traditional website. I think the web is probably the easiest thing for most people to relate to. But at the end of the day, it's just anytime you're accessing content online, if there's a network involved, then I think we play some role in that. I think these things evolve and change over time. The death of the web has been predicted many, many, many times. And again, it's...”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “You mentioned Belly Cat, all these sites. You basically mention websites, right? Or servers on the internet in some way. I look at the web and I see this slow deterioration of web content because of AI, right? Like all the web is being flooded with like C++ AI generated content and all the action is sort of on platforms. And so it's actually interesting to say they can't block YouTube because they can't go into YouTube and filter YouTube directly like Google just runs that as a service. China might be able to filter the web more directly and block some sites versus others. How do you feel about the state of the web today? I've been asking a lot of CEOs that because all of you, all of us, built companies because of the richness of the web and our ability to meet customers right away because of the web. And as things head towards platforms and the web gets overrun with AI, that might be changing in a huge way.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “I think we've made it very difficult to block any one site on Cloudflare inside Russia without blocking all of Cloudflare. We're at a scale where blocking all of Cloudflare is tough. And it's interesting that it's interesting to look at what Russia hasn't been able to block. So the fact that YouTube is still available, I think it's actually really interesting point. And I think I've spent actually quite a bit of time talking to policymakers and people who are much deeper experts about this. And they've said that at the end of the day, a Russian family still relies on something like YouTube to entertain kids. And if Putin shuts that down, that he has a problem with the average Russian family. In our case, there's just enough things that the Russian economy depends on that run on Cloudflare that you can also have folks like Bellingcat. It's very difficult to block one without blocking the other. These are the sorts of things that we don't make any money off of, but we think are important policy decisions to be thinking about as a fundamental internet infrastructure provider.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “That's earned us some challenges. I'm personally sanctioned by the Russian government, which is a sort of surreal thing to have happen. But again, I sort of wear that as a badge of honor and think that that's us doing the right thing fighting for the internet overall. And so I think that we should worry about the sort of TikToks bans and porn filters and things. But I think that those are the sort of small stakes compared with what are some of the really, really big stakes efforts where Russia and Iran are basically saying, can we recreate the same filtering engines that someone like China has? And if they do, it won't stop there. It'll happen then next in Turkey. It'll happen next in Egypt and it won't stop there either. India, Brazil.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “You can't overstate how disruptive the internet was to what are the five traditional sources of power in society that have been the case since, you know, we climbed out of whatever swamp we climbed out of thousands and thousands of years ago, family, religion, government, media, education are where power traditionally has come from. And the internet disrupted them all in various forms. And they are trying to push back. It's not that the internet isn't without faults. And we should be honest about those and talk about those faults. But we should also be very careful not to give up on what is there. And so as I look at it, you know, the leaders in trying to, China's really interesting and really smart in that they never really let the internet”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “Mentioned Russia and Ukraine several times now. You're obviously supporting a bunch of customers in Ukraine. You have also said that just disconnecting Russia from the global internet would be a mistake. And the quote here is the consequences of such a shutdown would be profound and that Russia needs more internet access, not less. This concept is broadly called the splinternet, right? The idea that every country is going to sort of invent its own internet, we can see it here in this country, right? There's different state laws now that sort of determine what services are available depending on age or pornography or what people think about protecting children. Do you see that coming here? Do you see the splinternet taking root here? Kicking TikTok off our internet in some way appears to be in vogue. Do you see that coming here?”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “I think it's worth talking about these things Even if they're not our most pressing issues, because I do think that we need to be long-term oriented as we think about this. And 40 years up to 2016 was a new hope, the next 40 years is the Empire strikes back. The adats have just landed on Hoff. And again, if you look at what does Russia do when they take new territory in Ukraine, one of the very first things they do is they find the sort of the ISP and telecom headquarters and they reprogram the routers to route the traffic back through Russia. Why do they do that? Because controlling communications is so critically important. That's the other side of this. And it is not inevitable that the internet exists the way it does 40 years from now. And I'm proud of the role that Cloudflare is playing in helping defend what, again, I think is one of the great inventions of human history.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “I just think that it's important to, like, I don't actually know what the Modi government would do versus the opposition government in India or anywhere around the world. I know that we have to operate in lots of places around the world and we comply with the laws in all of those places. I don't know that changing the laws in the US would actually change what we have to do in other parts of the world. Or if it did, all of a sudden then we just can't be a global company because if you have it, if you set up a set of rules where you can't operate that way, then it makes sense. So we are pretty good at, again, I think following the law wherever it is. And I think clarity of law makes a ton of sense. What I'll say is I don't, again, spend a ton of time thinking about this because it's an issue that's come up three times in 13 years.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “That's the policy. It probably won't be Europe either. My hunch is that if that's the direction we go, that the country that ends up setting the policy is India. And that's a place where we're spending a ton of time looking at and watching. And it is very telling the amount of investment that the major technology companies are making in that country because they have the sort of natural gravity and they have the political will to set that policy. And I think the good news is. Relatively free press. The bad news is pretty scary world in terms of internet regulation, cryptography regulation. And so again, I think we've got to is there a role for regulation? Absolutely. But you've got to think about who that is and what it looks like. And on a global network, there's a real tension that is different than you had with telecoms.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “And I remember fondly watching Tom Brocar, whoever, you know, growing up as a kid. But there's a lot of voices, whether they were brown voices or female voices or gay voices that just didn't appear on TV in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. And so there's a trade-off that's there. And that's when the regulation is set by Lawrence, Kansas. In a global network, if we start to think about what that regulation looks like, I think that the sort of grade of horribles that we could go down is that we could actually get it set by the lowest common denominator of what every country on earth wants. And in that case, we get to sort of a teletubbies like internet where only the least possibly offensive thing is what can be anywhere online. And that sounds absurd. And yet, if you look at a lot of the regulation that's coming out today, I think that that's what we have to be extremely careful of. And it won't be the US that's”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “Yeah, they competed a little bit with one another, but they effectively had an oligopoly on this new technology that existed. And so where risk would come from them was actually regulation. And so they as an industry got together and said, how can we fend that off in different ways? And it's led to all kinds of things. So the fact that every single, all three of those networks still to this day cover both political conventions, the Democratic, the Republican Convention, with the same pool feed, basically, from opening speech to balloon drop at the end, that the vast majority of anchors came from like Kansas, like it way overrepresented because it was the center of the country. Equal time laws weren't proposed by the government. They were actually proposed by the networks to say this is a way to show that we're radically neutral, that preserved the technology in some cases, you know, there's a lot of people who say, well, that was great.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “And the tension is that it is global from day one. In Cloudflare, we launched Cloudflare, eight people. We had customers in 10 countries the day we launched, which we were like, wow, that's amazing. By the end of the first month, we think we had customers in every country on earth. And we had eight people. And again, that's miraculous at some level, but it's also, I think it starts to show some of the tensions that are here. And so I think the question with regulation is who's regulation? And once upon a time, if you think about other technologies that have come along, so think about television. So television comes out. It is this wildly successful product. In that case,”

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27. “Sort of, but not, but Amy, I think you'd be surprised. I mean, how many orange, like huge deal in France, right? Not a big deal. We can pick whatever example you want. What has been different about the internet?”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “In terms of freedom of expression, I grew up in the US. I tend to think if you believe in innovation, if you believe in things like a free press, that does make sense. But the vast, vast, vast majority of the world doesn't believe in those things. And so there is regulation all around the world. What's different is, you know, telecoms are inherently regional businesses. Like AT&T, big deal in the US, but you go to England, no one's ever even heard of it. Comcast, huge deal in half the United States. I think they've heard of this.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “Sure, there's. But the tricky part is that there's a different role to follow in almost everywhere in the world. So your frame of reference, you type the First Amendment, you talk about network neutrality. I mean, you're very US-based. And the U.S., I mean, none of these, these are all actually relatively easy issues in the US because the US is radically libertarian”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “The trade off here is usually as you go down the stack towards infrastructure, traditionally we regulate those providers and say you cannot make these decisions the telephone network AT&T does not get to decide who gets to make phone calls everyone can just make phone calls because that's a public good. You go all the way up the stack to Facebook and the First Amendments at play and we sort of say you can do whatever you want all the way here at consumer facing and if people don't like your moderation decisions Mark Zuckerberg theoretically they can leave right the consumer market is vibrant enough and transparent enough that that's fine but all the way down at the metal right it's we're arguing about telecom providers we're arguing at net neutrality right in a way we don't want to you always slow these bits down do you think there should be some level of regulation for a service like Cloudflare that says you can or cannot take”

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31. “But the point that I was trying to make when I said, you know, I woke up in a bad mood and kicked someone off the internet was there is some aspect of that. There is somebody that makes a decision. If I go back and I've been fighting with my at the time girlfriend now wife over whether or not we should do this and was always like are even you not on my side? I think there are humans that are behind this and you need to acknowledge that that's the case. And I think you need to set up structures.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “I think we have gotten to a point where it is very difficult to operate if, again, it's what I wrote when we kicked the Daily Stormer off. There is a small group of people who make the decisions on whether or not you use these services. And the funny thing about the posts that that's not the actual post that we posted. That was the internal post that I wrote. It was maybe a little bit brutally honest.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “As an individual, whether that's a, you know, just someone running a kitten website or in a small county in Georgia trying to run an election versus like the FSB, which is exactly what is going on today. And so, you know, part of what we and a handful of other companies do is make sure that you can have, again, that collective immune system that can keep you safe and can make sure that as the bad hacker comes, that you've got the forces standing up to make sure that you can stay safe no matter what.”

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34. “I mean, it has just become so efficient if you're a bad guy to just be able to literally scan the entire internet, to have a catalog of every vulnerability which is out there to run through all of those. And then the value that you can derive from taking over a website, you know, publishing cute pictures about kittens because you can create some subfolder that's child pornography or because you can use that server to hack another server and bounce across it. I mean, it's, you know, in every bad movie featuring technology, there's a bunch of FBI agents or whatever staring at a screen saying, oh, he's bouncing the connection through 10 different satellites. So it's really hard for us to figure it out. That sort of happens. And that's that really is how bad guys operate online. And it is very difficult”

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35. “Regularly companies that are much, much, much larger than Cloudflare that run into the same issues, call us up and say, hey, we'd love your advice on this. Again, I'm proud of the fact that's a role that we're playing. And again, I think that that's an important bit as we think about how are we going to ensure that the Internet still exists. Because I don't think that's inevitable.”

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36. “Obsess None of these sites paid us anything that mattered, right? If the only thing we were motivated by was just money. I mean, it's easy. You should, of course, you should kick these things off. But again, I think we really do believe that we're very principled. We were very, very mission-driven. And I think that's sometimes gets us into this, these sorts of challenges. But I'm really proud that the team that we have is thinking about them. And I hope it sets a good example for a lot of both startups and also companies that are a lot larger than we are. And it's cool that today.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

37. “Just enough badness out there looking for vulnerabilities that's hard to stop. And then in addition to that, just the advantages that we're able to provide in terms of performance, in terms of cost, just being able to make sure your content is available everywhere in a cost-effective way. If you have to exist in a world without a Cloudflare, it's just a lot more expensive to operate. And so again, I think it comes back to that question that we ask ourselves when we were eight people above the nail salon, which is, you know, if we ran the entire internet, what would the right policy be? And again, we will never run the entire internet. Like, that's just never going to happen. But I think that that's the right mentality to think about these questions from because I think it puts the right level of seriousness into the discussion. And then that, again, I think for our team and others, I think that's what helped.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

38. “There's real risk that's out there. You need an immune system in order to just stay online, even if you're posting cute pictures of kittens, right? And so it's not just the neo-Nazis that get knocked offline. Everything at some point needs some level of a security guard or, again, like an immune system to stay online. If you don't have that.”

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39. “There's some truth to that, but there's also the thing about hosting providers is there's lots of them. The thing about Cloudflare, and there are very few companies that can provide the services that we do. And if you piss all of us off, It's really hard to still be on the internet.”

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40. “Exactly right. And it's like, why does Russia go through the effort to do it? And it turns out that it's because that's where trust in these organizations go to. And Cloudflare is not a government and no big tech company is. But if you think about it on a daily basis, more people interact with Cloudflare's network than live in any country on earth. And so we're not a government. I think some of the principles of how large organizations build trust do apply to us. And so again, I think we try to follow those principles of rule of law, which is transparency, consistency, and accountability. And it goes to the point of, I remember,”

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41. “My Aristotle textbooks. And Aristotle really believed that there were kind of three things that were inherent for a government to be trustworthy. It had to be transparent. It had to be consistent and had to be accountable. So you need to know what the laws were. They needed to be consistently applied. And then the people who applied the laws had to be subject to the laws themselves. That's basically kind of what government is. It's really amazing. Around the world, even totalitarian governments that don't really follow the rule of law pretend to, right? They pretend to be transparent. They pretend to be. We just had election. Oh my god.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

42. “What's different about us than other companies is that we're willing to talk about it. Whereas most other companies don't. And the reason we're willing to do that is that I think transparency is key to trust. When this first all went down with Daley Stormer, I tried to figure out how when you get into these situations, do you show that you are being thoughtful and responsible? And I actually, you know, I went back and pulled down a bunch of philosophy textbooks and actually started out reading James Madison because I thought, you know, okay, in the US, we have like the First Amendment. Where does that come from? And what's behind it? Because it turns out if you go to Germany and you say, well, what about the First Amendment? Everyone rolls their eyes. And I think it's a wrong place to start where I actually think is, and again, I think the right place to start is actually around rule of law, which is actually, and Madison is really inspired by Aristotle. So I went back and read all.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

43. “Comments. We've tried to walk through here's why this is hard and here's why we struggle with it. Here's the good and here's the bad and here's why these are tricky issues. And it just happens to be that neo-Nazis are about the grossest thing that you can imagine. And so people who are trying to be gross, you know, either are or pretend to be neo-Nazis. And so you get tough conversations around this.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

44. “Or you might see something else. And I think it's one of those questions where if you're living in an apartment building, generally it's not cool to like. But I think that what a lot of tech companies really believe in is they trust kind of their own internal bubble. They don't trust the rest of the world. And so they have this really almost militant secrecy about them, which I think is actually one of the real mistakes that the tech industry today is making, whereas we really take a very transparent view of this. And so I have to confess that I didn't expect that I would spend a significant portion of the time that I talked to journalists for the rest of my career talking about neo-Nazis, because not really a topic I actually spend all that much time thinking about. But I think that the thing that we've done is that when we have come to these hard issues, we haven't just said paragraph 13G of our terms of service beyond that.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

45. “Facebook or Twitter who really are every single day having to make these decisions. They have a much harder job because they are fundamentally the content. In our case, in order for somebody to have gotten to us, it has to be an individual makes a kind of gross decision to post something, which then doesn't get taken down by a platform, doesn't get taken down by a host, and falls kind of all the way down to the network level, which there's a lot of layers that have to have gone wrong there. But every once in a while, it is bound that that is going to happen. And it tends to be places that are still technically maybe legal, but are really harmful and destructive. In some cases, places where we've actually worked with law enforcement and they've said we are very worried that if this site is still online, you might see a mass shooting.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

46. “I don't want to dismiss that these are tricky issues, but they are not daily issues for us. For the most part, our business is pretty straightforward. There are things which are illegal in various parts of the world and in those places in the world we comply with the laws. They're then the things that are illegal, but maybe gross in various ways. Or someone might say, oh, I don't like that. And for most of the parts we say, well, that's what a legislative process is for that tends to actually work surprisingly well. Cuffler's 12 or 13 years old now, 13 years old now, I guess. So we've had sort of three of these big incidents over that period of time. And so the mean time between incidents is a little over four years at this point. It's not like every single day we're bringing our hands and thinking about it. I think that that's different than if you're”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

47. “And so I think coming back to the mission and coming back to those core values is a lot of how we as a company and how I, as a leader of the company, make decisions.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

48. “Never say it's not my job, you know, always, always going in a bunch of different directions. By the way, often to a fault, I think the biggest criticism of Cloudflare can be that we're a mile wide and an inch deep. We do a ton of different things. But again, I think that comes from curiosity. I think we're a very transparent organization. When we make mistakes, we talk about it. We do that both externally and internally after every board meeting. We present all the slides we present to our board, to our entire company, which people thought after we went public, there's no way we'd keep doing it, but we have. And then I think we're a very principled organization, which fundamentally means we're not going to sacrifice the short term for the long term.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

49. “Media, religion, government. You can't overstate how disruptive the internet was. And so the analogy that I've often used is it's sort of like episode four of Star Wars, a new hope, the sort of 40 years leading up to 2016. And then right around then, it flipped. And today, I don't think we can take for granted that the internet that we have known in our lives exists 40 years from now. And so I think we're very much living in a time where we have to think about how we make decisions on what's right for our business. But at the same time, we also have to think about how we make decisions to fight for the fundamental kind of existence of the internet overall. And that for us comes back to then, you know, what are our core values in a Cloudflare? We are a very curious organization. We want to take on new challenges.”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

50. “A 15 minute meeting and turns into two hours. Michelle comes and finds me and gets driving the meeting. We finally walk them all out and put them in a cab in San Francisco and look at each other and like, what in the world have we gotten ourselves into? That's when the mission really crystallized. And that's when the mission became so important. I think when we started, when we said, what are we doing? We were making the internet a little bit faster and more reliable, more secure. But today, I think that as we think about things, it's much more about how do we fight to make sure the internet still exists. And as you look, again, from the comfortable places that we sit in the West, that may not seem like a threat, but if you look at what Russia is trying to do, look at what Iran is trying to do, Turkey, Egypt, for different reasons, India, Brazil, you can't overstate how disruptive to the traditional sources of power, be those the family, education,”

    2024-04-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT