Future of Internet in the age of AI
I first met Matthew Prince in 2010, the day he l aunched Cloudflare at TechCrunch Disrupt. His original pitch for Cloudflare was “Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the masses” that would take a few minutes to set up. Others like Akamai offered similar services, but for big-budget customers. Cloudflare was going after a burgeoning ecosystem of apps and relatively young services. That simple elevator pitch hid the real “why” of Cloudflare nicely—in the future, Prince and his co-founders Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn wanted to build a network that would not only offer simplicity and speed but also protect their customers from emerging internet threats such as denial-of-service attacks.
Having seen the emergence of Akamai and a few other similar companies, it was clear Cloudflare was the one to watch. Their simpler, cloud-centric approach was novel. It was the way the modern internet was being built. It resonated with me. I decided to stay close, not only to Prince, who is a charming and eloquent communicator but also to keep close tabs on Cloudflare.
Fast-forward to today — that vision has turned Cloudflare into a $32 billion (in market capitalization) company with almost $1.3 billion in 2023 revenue. Those numbers don’t tell the full story of Cloudflare and its role in the internet’s infrastructure and smooth functioning. Just last month, the San Francisco-based company warded off a world-record 3.8 Tbps DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are very much a routine problem for large infrastructure providers.
