Matthew Prince

I was talking to a guy who ran small business at Intuit and then ran PayPal for a while, and he said, in the future, I worry there are five companies, literally.

One that makes things, one that holds the land, one that transports things, one that holds the money, and then one AI company.

And again, that's an extreme version, but...

Like you could see a version of that.

And so I think the first most important thing for all of us to do is articulate what future we want.

We want one that doesn't have five AI companies, but 500,000.

We want one that has anyone being able to be a content creator and get compensated for creating original knowledge

And we want one where businesses large and small can compete and thrive in this interesting world.

And then as we go forward and we think about this, we can ask ourselves, is what we're doing, is the business model we're creating facilitating that or kind of tearing that down?

And again, I don't have all of the answers, but I'll say these are the things that I'm thinking about.

And these are the things that everyone at Cloudflare is thinking about.

And if you or your listeners are interested in this, these, I think, are the most interesting and important questions over the next five years.

And the entire business model of the internet is going to change.

And if you're not thinking about what that change is going to be, you're not thinking about what the most interesting question in the world is.

I mean, I think you've got to think about

who do you want to have access to your content?

And the answer is going to be different depending on what the content creator is.

And it's going to be different based on what your business is.

If you're running an ad-supported business, it's going to get really tough for that alone to work if the ad companies can just slurp your content down.

Because they can literally just say, you know, you can type in, you know, what happened on the Bankless podcast today?