Matthew Prince

We've seen explosive growth in internet traffic before.

I hearken back to like April of 2020 when COVID hit and all of a sudden overnight, internet traffic doubled over the course of two weeks.

And it was extraordinary how much the system still held together.

And while it created challenges, it was able to scale and we were able to keep the internet functioning and help us get through that time.

I think this is the same sort of moment where you're going to see a lot more traffic.

So I think technically we'll be okay.

I think the big question, though, is what's the business model going to be and who's going to pay for it?

Because there's a lot of servers, there's a lot of infrastructure, there's a lot of stuff

which is behind all of that.

And if the business model of the internet for the last 30 years has been ads and subscriptions, problem is agents don't click on ads.

And buying one subscription and then having agents be able to basically pick all of the content back up from that

That's not going to help make sure that the people who are creating that content get compensated for it.

The people who are providing the infrastructure to power that content get actually compensated for the work that they're doing.

And so we have to figure out some new business model.

And that's a lot of what I'm spending my time thinking about these days.

So, you know, I think it's kind of like, you know, any superhero needs an origin story.

And so our origin story started pretty simply, which was we saw that all of the world of software was going to the cloud.

We saw that all the world of like servers were going to cloud.

And so it seemed obvious to us that sort of networking and the security appliances that were out there before the firewalls of the world, we can go to the cloud as well.

And so