M Prince, in his original TechCrunch pitch in 2010, said “our vision is that we are going to power the Internet”. It’s worth watching his original talk mentioning Innovator’s Dilemma and having Clay Christensen as his professor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAc_5gMwzuM
The vision of Cloudflare is NOT to ‘build a better internet’ but to ‘help build a better Internet’
In this Welcome to Birthday Week interview with M Prince and M Zatlyn discuss why the phrase ‘help build’ is crucial (after having an interaction with Brad Burnham about it in 2013)
“Our goal is to be a good actor that’s part of the overall Internet”. Dig into this, about 7th minute of this talk.
https://cloudflare.tv/event/1sgAMmqjso11lA0y0movIT
I think that’s the rallying cry, a vision for Developers, Cloudflare is arming the rebels, the rebels are the developers who want a better Internet.
And yes, I agree that Price knows the game he’s playing. Just look at “Matthew’s Hierarchy of Developers’ Needs”.
“I’d propose instead that what developers on any platform need, from least to most important, is actually: Speed < Consistency < Cost < Ease of Use < Compliance.”
The foundation is Compliance, but why? why? that was odd to me a while back but I do get this as a foundation. You must have Regulatory Compliance, a rule of law as a foundation of the better Internet.
Read about it here https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-serverless-we…
There is a short paragraph on Compliance followed by The Coming Era of Data Sovereignty
While the regulations are just beginning to emerge, Cloudflare Workers already can run locally in more than 100 countries worldwide. That positions us to help developers meet data sovereignty requirements as they see fit. And we’ll continue to build tools that give developers options for satisfying their compliance obligations, without having to sacrifice the efficiencies the cloud has enabled
The war with Amazon is on, now with the announcement of R2 Storage. Cloudflare R2 Storage includes full S3 API compatibility
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/
And Prince frequently takes a shot at Amazon on twitter
Why is it called R2 ? “Because it’s S3 minus the one most annoying thing: egregious egress”
https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1442879872154566658
Lastly, I think Prince has articulated it for me that he wants Cloudflare to ‘Power The Internet’ to be the network of networks.
Read about the Project Myriagon
https://blog.cloudflare.com/10000-networks-and-beyond/
What’s a Myriagon? In Geometry it’s a polygon with 10000 sides.
“Cloudflare now connects with more than 10,000 other networks. Put another way, over 10,000 networks have direct on-ramps to the Cloudflare network.”
“Cloudflare is an anycast network, meaning that the better connected we are, the faster and better-protected we are”
“we believe, to be one of the top 5 most connected networks in the world, we estimate Google is connected to 12,000-15,000 networks. And so, today, we are kicking off Project CatchG. We won’t rest until we’re #1.”
Of course the crucial question is: Will all this innovation and free products translate to revenue acceleration of the coming year? I will closely watch the growth of enterprise customers (1088 as of last Q with 71% yoy growth) and we’ll find out hopefully how many 10M ARR customers they have at the next Q.
Thanks.