{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Slow Hunch","title":"Matthew Prince (Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4496,"description":"In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Since 2010, Matthew and his team have built Cloudflare into one of the most important companies on the internet: powering and protecting vast portions of global traffic. \n\nOur conversation explores the through-line from Matthew’s initial hunch about fixing the flaws of the early internet, to Cloudflare’s present role as a foundational infrastructure provider.  \nWe talk about the early experiments and risks that have shaped Cloudflare’s culture, and how those small bets compounded into a truly iconic company today. Matthew shares stories from the company’s pre-IPO days, the decision to make encryption free, and how Cloudflare’s infrastructure ended up running two of the internet’s thirteen root servers. Toward the end, we dive deep into the transition from a search-driven internet to an answer-driven one, and what that means for publishers, creators, and the future business model of the web.\n\nIt was especially fun to record this one with Matthew, who I’ve known since USV’s investment in Cloudflare’s Series C back in 2013. \nHope you enjoy!\nChapters\n00:00:00 Curiosity vs. focus; small bets culture\n00:02:44 Pre-IPO mock earnings calls & learning to take hard questions\n00:04:48 Matthew’s slow hunch\n00:05:54 The Unspam origin story: legal mindset meets early internet problems\n00:11:16 Passing trademark legislation in Utah\n00:13:39 Meeting Lee (via Arthur Keller)\n00:18:00 Lee moves to Utah; building from a basement\n00:20:02 From Unspam to Cloudflare\n00:20:25 Enter Michelle\n00:28:19 Realizing how critical Clouflare’s role was (the 2017 outage)\n00:29:07 Conducting experiments at scale: how small bets can become big lines of business\n00:31:44 Making encryption free\n00:33:26 From brittle deploys to Workers\n00:36:00 Cost curve obsession & why lowest cost to serve always wins\n00:38:00 Running 2 of the 13 internet root servers\n00:41:31 Pakistan Telecom story: local demand...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Miey0AwAFKTKs0A_ufYSnDbrZHkWY3pdiAZS43mf4rw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8wYTMz/NDYyYTc0NDBkZWNi/YWM3OWI5NDExYzQ5/NGNkMC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}