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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
How are you doing? Gentlemen, good to see you. I'm doing well. Great to see you.
Speaker 2:To see you.
Speaker 1:What's new in your world? You made some acquisitions. You made an acquisition. Take us through it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we we bought a a company called Void Zero, which, makes Veat, which is one of the most popular developer platforms that's there. It's just an incredible team. Evan Yu, who's the founder, is just a just a first class human being, someone who who, our team is super excited to work with. The team that he's assembled, is is just great.
Speaker 3:And I think that this is increasingly becoming the platform that, is being used to power a lot of the, agents that are running around around the Internet. And, and a lot of those agents are running on Cloudflare, and so we think it's just a really natural, combination.
Speaker 1:How simple is the synergy? Is it you'll funnel those 130,000,000 users who download VEET every month? I think it's 130,000,000 weekly downloads. Weekly. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a lot. Into, you know, preferring Cloudflare, defaulting to Cloudflare? Or is there more synergy under the hood around developer integration, company integration? Like, how are you thinking about this playing out?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We continue we we plan to continue to leave it as an open source project Mhmm. And support it and invest in it that way. We wanna integrate it closely with Cloudflare's developer platform and make sure that Cloudflare is the best place to run any sort of Vite project that that you that you have. But it'll work in any any of the different platforms as well.
Speaker 3:And so we just really wanted to make sure that Evan and his team have the support to make sure they could continue to to really invest in in what was in what what's just an incredible platform, and and we think that that is gonna drive more developers to Cloudflare Cloudflare Workers platform as well.
Speaker 1:What are the headaches for developers these days? I I know everyone's concerned about token costs and token budgets. Sometimes that doesn't show up for the developer. It's more like the CEO that's worried about it. But is uptime more difficult to maintain?
Speaker 1:We've been seeing screenshots of different uptime tracker status pages that have more and more red and yellow on them. Like what's at the top of the stack and how are you helping?
Speaker 3:Yes. I think that you need a different architecture than than we've than we've had to build sort of the last generation of applications for what's coming with with agents. If you imagine, you know, there are about a 100,000,000 knowledge workers in The United States. If
Speaker 1:all
Speaker 3:of those knowledge workers had one agent which was which was working on their behalf, that would that would and and each of those was each of those agents was running in a container, a traditional container like something you get at a AWS or a a Google Cloud. The amount of just CPU resources that would be needed to to run just those those agents, assuming they've just had one agent per person, is about 50% of the total CPU capacity that's generated, you know, by all the different CPU manufacturers that are out there today. And that's just The United States knowledge workers. If you take that to the world, then it's several times, you know, 30 or 40 times the capacity of of GPUs, and and CPUs that that are existing today. And so what we really think is that as these agents are creating code, you need a different platform for it.
Speaker 3:And and Cloudflare was built Cloudflare Workers was built not on on containers as much, but on something called isolates, which is a much more efficient technology. And so what we're seeing is that as people are building these agents, as they're using them, it's just a much more natural place to be running them. 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 is targeting us. And and and we wanna make sure that with with things like Veat as as first class citizens on Cloudflare that we can help power that future.
Speaker 3:Because, again, it's not gonna be kind of the same system that we that we built with the hyperscalers. It's going to be something different. Again, And, I think that we have a really good shot of of building that different thing.
Speaker 1:So can you help me understand more about the problems of, CPU bottlenecks and then maybe some of the solutions? I'm just thinking about, like, I I I would think bandwidth would be an issue, obviously, CPU load. But is there a world where we get to some sort of convention around maybe it's the robots. Txt or just the user agent? And when Googlebot shows up or any other AI system AI agent shows up, you're just delivering a it's almost an MCP server, but you're just delivering something that looks more like a JSON package, something that's a little lighter, little less CPU intensive.
Speaker 1:Is there a path there to optimization? It feels like we're in the era of, like, squeeze every ounce of performance out of everything. Yeah. But what's actually going to happen here? Where where oh, like, are we just screwed, or is there an opportunity?
Speaker 3:No. I you know, I think so. I think two two different different problems. So the first is, if you if you're as as as you ask these the these different AI systems to perform tasks on your behalf, what what has to happen behind the scenes, especially those tasks get complicated, is that they need to be coordinated in in some ways. So if you say plan a vacation for me or something like that, what what goes on behind the scenes is that there there's coordination there.
Speaker 3:And the best way to be make that as efficient as possible, what what agents are really good and and and and these various LLMs are really good at is actually writing code. And so that code needs somewhere to live. And the problem is that if that lives in a container, then you've gotta bring in an operating system. You've gotta bring in all all the tooling and everything else, and that's actually extremely heavyweight. And so that's the first place that you've got both a CPU and a GPU bottleneck that's there.
Speaker 3:And so with with something like Cloudflare Workers and isolates, you it's just a much lighter weight system. And so that means that you can have more agents running on the same CPU infrastructure and and be able to provide that. And, again, I think that's why a lot of these next generation, tools are actually built using our our platform. You mentioned something else, is, you know, as as these agents go out and interact with the rest of the web, they they you wanna make sure that that is done in the most most efficient way. And so if they're pulling down, you know, all of the HTML from a from a web page if and and it's and those web pages are designed kind of to be consumed by by humans, there's just a lot of cruft on that that isn't isn't necessarily as important.
Speaker 3:And so some of the things that we're doing are, you know, for those those customers of ours that wanna make sure their content is consumed by by agents, wanna make sure it's as as accessible as possible, we are automatically converting things into markdown, which is a much simpler Sure. System that that saves you a ton of tokens. It saves you a ton of processing. It means that your context window, can be can you can fit more useful information into a into a context window. So I think there's a ton of optimizations, and we're helping both on the developer side as well as on the content side, making sure that we can, have have these agents be as powerful as possible and and get as much done as possible.
Speaker 1:John Gruber, total victory. You know he invented markdown?
Speaker 2:No. Didn't. Grubernator.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Anyway And, I mean, it's it's one of these things that just, you know, it it it turned out it was it was ahead of its time. But it's it's such a key for making sure that we can take information and make it, you know, as compact as possible.
Speaker 1:John Gruber created the the the format for God. It's a funny funny world we live in.
Speaker 2:Talk about, it was last week you guys announced that the threshold had been passed around agent versus human traffic. Talk about that moment. Did it happen sooner or later than you expected? Much sooner. Much sooner.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it was I I at the end of last year, so end of of twenty twenty five, I said that I I thought that we would pass he it bought traffic, and and that's that's, you know, across the board. So that's, like, Google's crawler, but also, you know, the new agents which are which are coming out. I thought we'd would pass human traffic by the end of twenty twenty seven. About three months ago, I revised that based on the traffic that we were seeing to say that it would actually be in the first half of twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 3:And so the fact that it actually happened in the first half of twenty twenty six is just is just it's just been extraordinary, and it just shows how quickly this this is is growing. And and the and the real key here is that I think that if, you know, you or I as humans, we're researching to go buy an additional camera or something. We might visit five websites and do, you know, a little bit of research and some price comparison. You know, you just watch as you use these agents. They have boundless attention to be able to just go to maybe 5,000 websites to find exactly what what you're you're looking for, the best price, the best delivery, the best service, and everything that's that's there.
Speaker 3:And so that's just driving an enormous amount of consumption of of of the Internet. At the same time, the other thing that's happening is that for a long time, since about 2015, the the web has kind of plateaued. There were not there were there were more websites that were, being shut down than were being created, during that time. In the last eighteen months, though, we're we're back to the the web growing, at a rate which is is exponential. And and what and and it looks sort of similar to what what was happening back in the early two thousands in terms of in terms of growth of the web.
Speaker 3:And so I think you're seeing both more sort of consumption of what's online, but you're also seeing more things online as it as it goes forward. And so in both of those directions, you know, that's that's that's gonna continue to just drive, you know, more and more use of of the of the Internet. And 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. And we've and we've gotta make sure that we make the Internet work for for that new future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, every year, we're just gonna add another nine to the nine nine 99.999% of Internet traffic is bots. Yep. Do you do you know what the baseline was? Like, pre AI, were we at, like, 1% bot traffic?
Speaker 1:I mean, I've said
Speaker 3:No. Was it was
Speaker 1:more it
Speaker 3:was more than that. Was about 20% Okay. For for for
Speaker 2:a long time.
Speaker 3:So it yes. And and it's you know, Google was the was the largest. And then and then, obviously, there's a lot of of malicious things that that run around online. But that was that was around what what it was for and it was pretty stable over, you know, the history of Cloudflare at least, so where where we could measure it. So so since 2010, you know, it was always kind of around that 20% range.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then and then it's and then it's grown. You know, it's it's in the last few years, it started growing steadily, and then it really accelerated in the first half of of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1:I wanna talk about the inference stack, I guess. Like, we're seeing two things play out of sort of a bifurcation, like a WWDC, Apple's launching on device inference that's it's not gonna be frontier, but it's gonna be usable for sure on your phone, on a computer. They can obviously go to their private cloud as well. And then you have, like, the new NVL 72 models. There's stuff in between on a Cerebras chip, fast but expensive.
Speaker 1:Then there's everything from, oh, it runs on commodity hardware, but it's still pretty big. You need a real desktop for it. And I'm wondering about how you see Cloudflare fitting into that. It would be a logical extension to Cloudflare workers to have inference on the edge, inference in different places. Like, where do you see yourself offering inference if at all?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, we we we it's it's actually kind of funny. Back in, 2022, we we issued a a press release that there was a graphics chips company that we were gonna partner with in order to put GPUs at the edge edge of our network.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that graphics chip company turned out
Speaker 1:to be NVIDIA. NVIDIA. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and and and what was what was amazing was at the time, it was just crickets. Like, nobody cared. Sure. And but but we we had we had and and so we we sort of did a little of it, but we hadn't really rolled it out broadly. And and what was funny was and then you fast forward two years later, and all of a sudden everyone cared.
Speaker 3:And so we we basically just reissued the exact same press release. Mhmm. And and and now, you know, that's become that's become a pretty pretty important part of our our our business. And so today, you can run inference at the edge of Cloudflare. Yep.
Speaker 3:And because of the fact that we're, you know, in over 350 cities worldwide, you know, we're within within milliseconds of the vast majority of the world's population, we become a very natural place for inference to happen. I I my my working assumption has always been that about 50% of the inference that happens will be on device, whether that's your your phone or your or your laptop or or whatever. But that there needs to be some standard protocol where your phone or your laptop or whatever that local thing is can hand those either long running tasks or larger tasks off next to the network, and so that would be to us. And then if if for some reason you need something that's more than that, that it could handle it back to, you know, some centralized data center with, you know, with with more more capacity than than we may have. And I think that that that's what that's what we're increasingly seeing.
Speaker 3:I think my my assumption was a little bit probably off. I think actually, I think less is gonna happen on device today because I think more and more of the tasks are going to be these long running
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Tasks where it's not gonna be just, you know, what what's, you know, what's the, you know, what's the temperature in in New York today. Yeah. Instead, it's gonna be something like, help help me plan a a vacation, go you know, take into account all of these different things, shop for, you know, different hotels in different places, plan all the plan all the, the the travel between between the different locations. Here are the criteria that I have. And that might be something that takes, you know, maybe, you know, certainly not not gonna be seconds.
Speaker 3:It it might be, you know, minutes or hours or days in some cases to I feel like you're have
Speaker 2:I feel like you're gonna have long running agents just for Park City, snow forecasting and reporting, tracking like individual I already do. Individual runs, you know. Maybe a network of maybe a network of drones that are identifying what's cracked out
Speaker 1:Satellite photos, playing it last
Speaker 2:Optimizing your routes on the mountain.
Speaker 1:A lot of stuff.
Speaker 3:That's exactly. That's that's that's exactly right. Hopefully hopefully it snows this year unlike last year's. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, what are the decisions when you're doing inference on the edge? Because it's sort of a hard pitch to say, I'm going to shave off 300, six hundred milliseconds, when you're talking about a twenty minute workflow or even a ten second workflow, you're getting me a 3% boost. Is that gonna make the difference? But are you optimistic that there will be sort of like a in between state where there will be inference that happens and it needs to happen within the request loop under a second and then the the latency matters?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I think I think there are there are sort of three different Yeah. Buckets why why people are choosing to run inference tasks on Cloudflare. I think I think the first bucket is exactly what you said. It's just it's latency.
Speaker 3:And so especially for those things that have human and computer interaction where where, you know, any delay feels like it's it's it it hurts you that people are are trying to make sure that they can get the best best performance
Speaker 1:possible. For voice models, I mean, it like that has yeah. Voice models have gotta be local. Yeah. I love that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so and so that's and so that you know, again, there there there's a case for that.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 3:the second case is that a lot of times for either privacy or regulatory reasons, people wanna keep things as close to where they physically are
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:As possible. And so, you know, I think that a lot of especially in Europe and otherwise, of places think that, you know, they made a mistake with the Internet kind of one point o and two point o of having everything go back to Ashburn, Virginia, everything go back to The United States. And so I think that there's there's a real kind of sovereign desire to keep things local, and that's important. And I think the third thing is we we actually can be oftentimes much more cost effective because of the fact that, you know, we we are this we are a network. And and because of how we're interconnected with networks around the world, bandwidth for us is effectively free.
Speaker 3:And so it's very easy for us to get things onto our network. 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 can be in some other other places. That's somewhat counterintuitive, but but but it's sort of the nature of what we've what we've built and kind of the secret to what's allowed Cloudflare to to to to to deliver as much as we have over time.
Speaker 1:There there's a ton of ton of debate over data centers, how they get built, how big they should be, what we need, the pushback, regulation, etcetera. How are you is any of this affecting your business? Are you thinking about how you position your footprint in the real world? How are you processing the the evolving discussion around data center construction?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I so so first of all, I mean, we're we're gonna need more data centers. I think a lot of a lot of the discussion is is somewhat silliness. I mean, the the water, consumption I mean, these are closed loop systems. I mean, a a a golf course uses more water than than probably all the data centers in The United States over over the course of over a year.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I think that I think, you know, there there's there's there's a lot of kinda silly concerns that are there. And but but there are but there are real concerns as well. We've gotta make sure that there are efficient ways to get power to these things, that it's not taking power from from other other systems that the grid can support support that. And so I think those are all all all good considerations.
Speaker 3:For Cloudflare ourselves, you know, it it we're we're we're a little bit different where in in the case of, you know, if you're a a AWS or a Google or, you know, a SpaceX, you're building one big facility or a handful of very big facilities and putting a ton of machines in that that one facility. Cloudflare is different. We have a ton of machines, but we spread them massively all around the world. And oftentimes, we we wanna go into the places where networks come together. And so those those can be, you know, some of the oldest data centers in the world.
Speaker 3:And in any of those facilities, we may not have we may we may have only hundreds of machines. But over collectively around the world, we've got, you know, what is a, you know, effectively much larger than any individual data center, which is which is out there. So I think we're less less impacted from, you know, the new builds of data centers. I think we're much more impacted by how do we find our way into the existing data centers, and then how do we make sure that the equipment that we're deploying is as power efficient as possible because we're often given sort of here's the envelope that you have to fit your fit your your equipment in, and we're often guests of, you know, whoever the local ISP is or or or or whoever, you know, partner is that we're working within in the, you know, the the thousands of buildings that we're in all around the world.
Speaker 2:What's new with Italy? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Italy and Spain. Like, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1:But you're So you're fighting for Italy. You're fighting for France.
Speaker 2:You're summer We need world
Speaker 1:peace here.
Speaker 2:Come on. Are limited duty. Unlimited. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No no no Ibiza for me or or Really? The Malfi Coast. No. It's it's you know, I think it's it's interesting. It's been actually kind of puzzling for us.
Speaker 3:So all of this stems back so so for those who don't know, in in both Italy and in Spain, there there've been pretty aggressive tactics to come after either me personally or or Cloudflare. And it's all been driven largely by the football leagues, the the soccer league in those And in those what they're concerned about is is piracy. The the thing that's been ironic about it is, like, we don't like piracy on our network either. We don't make any money off of it. It's it takes bandwidth.
Speaker 3:It steals resources. And so we have a whole team that's working all the time to shut shut the pirates down. And and yet, you know, the Pirates are clever. They find ways to to use our our system because, you know, huge percentage of the Internet sits behind Cloudflare. You know, there's gonna be stuff from time to time that we don't we don't capture.
Speaker 3:It takes us some time to catch. With leagues everywhere else in the world, the NBA and NFL and and MLB and and the Premier League in in The UK and and others, we work really closely with them to if they identify a pirate stream for us to, you know, pull that down. Because, again, it costs us money. We don't like it. But for whatever reason, La Liga in in in in Spain and and the and the and the league in Italy have have decided that instead of instead of partnering with us to take this down, they they would sue us instead.
Speaker 3:And so so again, yes, it it it does cramp some of my summer plans.
Speaker 1:I wanna talk about IPOs, life as a public company. There's a few entrepreneurs that are trying to go public this year. You had a very successful IPO. The stock is up more than a 100,000 basis points since you went public. Fantastic run.
Speaker 2:We're advice for putting everything in points now. Sounds even better.
Speaker 1:I mean, this talk's about thousand percent. It's fantastic. But a 100,000 basis points sounds even better.
Speaker 3:Basis points a lot.
Speaker 1:100 more yeah. 110,000 basis points. Who's counting? But, anyway, what was the what was your process like? We were talking about the level of float lockups.
Speaker 1:Like, what were the hard decisions? Were there things that we're talking about now with these big IPOs that weren't even on the top 10 of your to do list? What is important to a successful IPO and then running a public company?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think, you know, there are a handful of things that that that that are, you know, interesting lessons for us. So first of all, like, I love being a public company. It's you know, I I think that it's interesting. You know, the the the in in jurisdictions where, yeah, you don't have no fault divorce, spousal homicides are much higher, which is I think kind of an analogy to the difference between private market investors and public market investors.
Speaker 3:It's really hard to fire your VC. 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 stupid. I sold your stock.
Speaker 3:And then we and we have a conversation and sometimes they say, oh, actually, that makes sense now, and I bought it back. Right? Yeah. But I think you can have actually a much more honest, much more real conversation. And and and that's and that that's felt actually just a lot healthier than what you see in the third Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's so true. Mean, there's everybody that's angel invested in any number of meaningful companies is going to have portfolio companies where you've fully given up on the company and you you just try to be try to be nice and, yeah, help if you can. But at at some point, you're just totally disassociated with the investment and you're just like and and that's that's that's the reality. But yeah. So it's it's very healthy to be like, yep.
Speaker 2:I'm disassociated, like, moving on. Moving on. Put my energy elsewhere.
Speaker 3:And in both and in both directions. Right? I mean, it's just a better it's a it's a better relationship. And and I and so I I, like, I loved the process of going public. I think the thing that we did, like, it was it was an opportunity for us to really kind of retell our story.
Speaker 3:Like, you don't get to reinvent yourself very often, but the process of writing the s one was incredibly just an opportunity to sit down and and really do it. And and we you know, really dug in and and told the story in a in a way that to this day, we still refer to parts of that that that document to sort of explain what is Cloudflare and and how did we work. I think that the most clever thing that we that we did, and this was advice that I got from from Ryan Smith from Qualtrics, was he said, you know, he's like, what are you doing about friends and family? And I'm like, we're not gonna do it. Like, he because you can take 5% of a of a IPO and allocate it to friends and family.
Speaker 3:And I didn't wanna, get my aunt, like, over if it if it if the stock went down or something, I didn't wanna have to explain that over Thanksgiving Yeah. Thanksgiving dinner. And he said, no. No. No.
Speaker 3:You're thinking about it wrong. Think about the people who if they, you know, if you they owed you a favor, that they could make a meaningful difference in the future of of Cloudflare and then offer them to the ability to invest in in the IPO. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was
Speaker 3:like, is that, like, is that legal? He's like, check with your lawyers, check with the bankers, but the answer is yes. And I was like, some people are gonna have, like, conflicts. He said, doesn't matter. Like, even if just the fact you offered it, even if they can't do it will will mean that, you know, that that that that they'll they'll always remember that super fondly.
Speaker 3:And it was incredibly good advice. And we made this crazy list of all of these, you know, people who, you know, who were like, you know, at some point, that might be an important relationship, for us. And, like, 75% of them said yes, and and they all made, you know, a ton of money as a as a result of it. And it was it was it was one of those kind of Now
Speaker 2:your aunt doesn't talk to you anymore.
Speaker 3:No. My well, yeah, my aunt doesn't talk.
Speaker 1:Say, I missed out a 100,000 base point basis point move. How could you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I I am always comforted that we actually so we we priced it Yeah. $15.15 dollars a share and it went up to and and it that's actually the other thing that's interesting. Everyone like Bill Bill Gurley and I have fights about this from from time to time about IPOs. Like, you have a lot of control over how much the pop is gonna be, and we we sat with bankers, and we were like, listen.
Speaker 3:We wanted to go up about 20%.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and and they were like, okay. If you wanted to go up 20%, you price it right here. So we priced it right at that point, and it closed the first day at 18, which is exactly up 20%.
Speaker 1:Okay. But just to steel man a little bit, is that is that a function of of your business? Not to, like, be rude or anything, but there are some businesses that are just, like, mean stocks out of the gate, and, like, they're in some weird thing and there's some froth and, like, they have less control, or is it always controllable?
Speaker 2:Well and and part of that was, like, you did you think the fair value of your business was 18% or 20% higher than where you priced it? And so you wanted, like, you you wanted the market to to sort of reprice and you didn't care about not
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean and they if we had priced it at, 13, it would have gone up more. Yeah. But but the problem again, you like, you you wanna you wanna play for the long term here. So And my my again, my fight with Bill
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is, you know, he he says, you know, that you should you should do, you know, some sort of system where you're where you actually, you know, price it at whatever the top price is. The problem with that is if you look at all the companies that that have done that, so the Airbnb's and and and others, that they basically you know, that's that's great for your private market investors. That's great for the VCs. That's great for any of the the the founders that are taking money off the table. But you gotta keep running the company.
Speaker 3:Like, the IPO isn't the end. It might be the end for the the VCs, but it's not the end for the operators of the company. And you wanna be able to kinda build that relationship and build that over time. And so I think, you know, we worked incredibly hard to be very sort of choosy on who are kind of the who we gave allocations to, and we we we went through every single name on the allocation list. And and and I think as a result of doing that, you know, if you look at, like, who our top 10 shareholders are, it's been incredibly stable, over over time.
Speaker 3:And they're and they're they're folks who give us again great advice and and and and have been really just really, really great to work with. So I I I I'm sure that there are times you don't have it, but I was I was I was surprised at how the banks have a really good sense of if you price it here, here's what's gonna happen. Mhmm. And and in our case, it was it was, you know, to the to the penny.
Speaker 2:Last question. How are you thinking about long term planning as a CEO when we're on these exponentials, you know, the the example of, agent versus human web traffic? Like Yeah. You have you had, like, more data than almost anyone on the planet, and your prediction was still off or your original prediction was still off by, you know, twenty eighteen months, twenty four months, something in that range. So how are you thinking about overall business planning when, you know, model capability is increasing and and you're just seeing sort of exponentials everywhere?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of different things. So one, I think we're we're trying to make bets on on people who who can who can really function in in really dynamic environments. And and that for us has been somewhat different than I I think a lot of other people. A lot of other people have cut back, for example, on kind of early career hiring.
Speaker 3:We we you know, Cluffer's about about 5,000 employees, but a little bit less than that now. But we hired 1,111 interns this this summer. They're straight out straight out of college. And they're Like, they're just they're just killing it because they they are so native to to these tools. And and, again, I think we've always thought of our job is training the interns, but this year, like, the interns are helping train a lot of us in how to how to how to do these things, you know, really well.
Speaker 3:So I think staying super dynamic. And then, you know, from our perspective, just making sure that we've got optionality going forward. So, you know, it's it's it has gotten tougher to get equipment today. Memory prices are are through the roof. You know, things are harder, but we've we we do have a team that's always constantly trying to figure out how how to to refine that.
Speaker 3:And then, generally, I think we're we're trying to be a, you know, big adopters of AI, not just in developer land, but also across the entire the entire business. So we built something called Cloudflare OS, which allows, you know, anyone on our finance team, legal team, you know, accounting team, finance, you know, anyone that's out there at the company to be able to have access to to tools and and and and really, figure out how how their job, gets done. The clever thing that we did to seed it was we actually set up this email address. And initially, we told the team that it was this magic AI model. And if they just wrote to the email address then and ask it, you know, I I have this part of my job that I need to get done.
Speaker 3:How do I get that that done? It would know, sometimes it would ask some more questions, but it would it would actually give you kind of a response back. What what we didn't tell people was actually it was a team team of humans behind the scenes that was initially receiving these these emails, and then they were using AI systems to kind of flush things out. But what they were really doing was recording all of the kind of key jobs to be done within the organization because, you mean, you have to if you're gonna have AI systems that can help facilitate this, you also have to record what are the steps that people are are doing as as as a part of that. And so as a result of that, we've been able to see this this Cloudflare OS now with the ability to do things like if you're on the sales team and you have to do, like, an account plan, you know, you can literally just type slash account plan and then describe what it is that you wanna do, and it will output that.
Speaker 3:And that's made that's made our team so much more productive. And, again, I think it's giving us the flexibility to be able to respond to, you know, whatever comes next.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Final final question. Are we gonna are we gonna see an exponential increase in the number of interns this summer?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're
Speaker 2:gonna see ten ten thousand interns?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's I I I we've gotta find a place to put
Speaker 1:them all.
Speaker 3:And so it's, I mean, our our office in Austin, like, we've it's a big space in Austin. We've run out of space there because we have so many interns there. It's I just I just think that there it's I think a lot of companies are doing this wrong where they're saying, like, we're 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 these kids know how to use AI better than anyone else. So we're gonna bet incredibly heavily on that, and it's, and it's so far, it's paying off.
Speaker 3:I mean, these the like, think I the person who eventually replaces me might might literally be one of the interns to today because they're just so so so smart.
Speaker 1:It's happened it's happened before. I mean, I don't know if Satya Nadella was an intern, but he has that famous video of him as a product manager demoing Excel. And yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I
Speaker 3:I remember I mean, I I was on a bunch of of calls with Satya Yeah. Before he was before he was CEO. And he was he was just a product manager, you know, at at So I think just if you you can find really great people and and be able to
Speaker 1:move on. That's a goat.
Speaker 2:That's a goat.
Speaker 1:It's a goat. A out there. Yeah. You're the goat as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, whenever you put up a 100,000 basis point move in your stock over just a couple years, you're in you're in contention for GOAT, I I say. Thank so much for coming on the show. Always a fantastic time.
Speaker 2:Thanks for jumping on.
Speaker 1:Good to see you guys.