Cloudflare CEO: The Man Deciding The Internet’s Next Business Model

Yeah, the thing that I find so interesting about this is not, I mean, there's obviously great questions to be had about what businesses will do well, what businesses will not do well, how do you position your company? But from a societal perspective, we have this open internet.

You were talking in the 90s.

Then kind of AOL comes around, starts to centralize the internet.

And then social networks have basically entirely centralized the internet.

And Google was at the center of it.

I'd say social networks combined with Google have centralized a lot of the internet.

And that has all these societal implications.

Like maybe it's driven a lot of polarization, like you mentioned.

Maybe it's driven a lot of...

I mean, think of how many small businesses and bigger businesses are just set up on...

Instagram ads Facebook ads like the whole the whole ad network of the internet how do you think this impacts um I mean we'll get into the business component in a second but society as a whole

yeah you know I think um you know there are parts of the internet that have gotten really centralized and there are parts of the internet that are still I mean remarkably um decentralized and I'm actually really proud of the role that Cloudflare's played um you know at some point there was an investor early on that said who's your biggest competitor And I said, Facebook, and they looked at me like I was crazy.

But I think that's actually kind of true.

Because, you know, when Cloudflare was first getting started, you know, Facebook was gobbling up a huge amount of the internet where it was, you know, it was easier for you to be behind, you know, Facebook, and then having your own your own website.

And part of the reason for that was, Having a website was hard.

You had to deal with security problems.

You had to deal with performance.

You had to deal with all this other stuff.

And so people actually were kind of giving up on creating those things.

And so I think-

Wait, to make sure I understand.

So in the sense that instead of going and creating like your own website, your own app, your own blog, it's like just launch it on Facebook.

Facebook page.

I mean, that's in certain parts of the world in Nigeria, you know, the internet is Facebook largely.

And so there, there just isn't as much of that, that, that ecosystem is out there.