Matthew Prince

So at the very beginning, I remember we were in a venture capital meeting at one point and they were like, who's your competition?

And I said, Facebook.

And the VCs all rolled their eyes.

But I actually think there's something that was really true to that.

This was like, what, 2009 or so?

This was like 2011, 2012, you know, early days.

Because I think that, you know, what Facebook, like a lot of the value that Facebook provided is it provided all of this safety within kind of their Disneyland environment.

But in exchange, you had to give up a lot of what was unique about whatever it was that you were doing online.

And I think if Cleffler hadn't come along, actually, Facebook would be a lot larger in terms of how much was there.

Because in the early days of Cleffler, 2009, 10, 11, 12, there's a period of time where people are like, everything's going to end up on Facebook behind that walled garden.

And there's not going to be as much of kind of the independent internet anymore.

I think that we are to Facebook as like Shopify is to Amazon.

We provide kind of what the base functionality of keeping you safe, making sure that you can do whatever you want.

But then it's up to you in order to really innovate and create and have your own experience.

And so you said we sit above.

I always think we kind of sit below.

We're kind of that deep infrastructure layer that's down, you know, buried somewhere, which, again, if we're doing our job right, you shouldn't even have to think about it.

And you can be as creative as possible.

If you then look kind of over the last period of time that Cloudflare has been around, the internet for a long time is growing like crazy.

And then it kind of stalled out for the last little bit.