Why Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the internet’s unlikely defender

Today, I’m talking with Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. Cloudflare might be the most important internet company you’ve never heard of, and that’s almost by design. It’s a network infrastructure provider to more than 20 percent of the entire web — it’s effectively what prevents bad actors around the world from torpedoing some of the biggest websites on the planet with cyberattacks. But if Cloudflare is doing its job, you don’t have to know it even exists. 

Cloudflare is an absolutely fascinating company at the intersection of so many of the biggest ideas we talk about here on Decoder. That’s in no small part because of Matthew, who’s been at the helm for nearly 15 years and has had to make some of the most uncomfortable moderation decisions in the tech industry. 

As an infrastructure company, Cloudflare is one of the only defenses — in some cases, the only defense — standing between websites and the people who want to take them down. That includes websites for social good, like news organizations around the world, but also means unsavory or downright despicable ones, like neo-Nazi haven The Daily Stormer and hate and harassment breeding ground 8chan. 

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