“AI Will Break the Internet” — Cloudflare CEO’s Big Prediction

We've talked about what the core values are at CloudFlare. It's transparency, curiosity, and being principled Mhmm. Which which is really just being long term oriented, you know, kinda lines up with, a lot of how you think about the world, I think. Mhmm. You know, I we just found that we get rewarded for that in lots of different ways and in a ways that are hard. I mean, the last year, we had 1,500,000 people apply for a thousand jobs. Welcome back to the Eric Riese Show. What if the mission powering your company turned out to be bigger than you yourself even imagined? In this episode, I sit down with Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO of CloudFlare, now a $70,000,000,000 public company, to tell the story of how a startup that began as a cloud firewall now finds itself defending the very future of the Internet. From fending off nation state cyberattacks to standing up for democracy in Hong Kong when no one else would, not even some of their larger competitors. CloudFlare has become a frontline guardian of digital freedom. Roughly 20% of all Internet traffic runs through the Cloudflare network. They defend websites large and small, from your humble blogger to multinational enterprises. I wanna call special attention to a story Matthew tells about a time that they gave away their most important product for free, simply because their mission demanded it and they have an ethos of principled decision making. It's a story we've seen a lot on this show. An example of the harder is easier style of thinking that unlocks magnetic powers of attraction, alignment, and loyalty. By making principled decisions and having a determination to figure it out, Cloudflare broke through its initial niche market and is now a $70,000,000,000 behemoth. But today, the stakes are even higher. Matthew explains how AI is not just disrupting industries, it's dismantling the economic foundation of the web itself. As search engines become answer engines, creators are being cut out of the value chain, threatening the survival of journalism, research, and art, all the things that made the Internet special in its early days. I hope you'll find this conversation is a wake up call, a behind the scenes look at how one company is trying to preserve the open Internet and why the next chapter of AI may determine whether we get a better web or lose it entirely. And if you think about it, it's that principle decision making that has taken their mission from a firewall in the cloud to becoming the Internet's passionate defender. I hope you enjoy this incredible conversation about technology power and what it means to build something that matters with Matthew Prince. Matthew, thank you very much for doing this. It's always a pleasure to hang out. It's great to see you. Yep. So I have so many questions I wanna ask you, and this is that Cloudflare is such a great story in so many …