korrents
Matthew Prince

Matthew Prince

@matthew-prince · 9 positions

Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare; launched it in 2010 with Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway, after meeting Zatlyn at Harvard Business School. Writes on the Cloudflare Blog and posts on X as @eastdakota.

Matthew Prince did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

5 of Matthew Prince's claims fit 3 mental models. Most often: Incentives, Second-order thinking, Collective action problems.

Models we see in what they say

Our reading: their claim applies the idea without naming it. The claim is theirs; filing it here is ours.

Incentives

Look at what people are rewarded for; it explains more behaviour than what they say, your own included.

Used by 85 others

AI crawlers are strip-mining the web: instead of a fair trade, content creators get almost no traffic and so almost no value.

  1. Matthew Prince Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare Instead of being a fair trade, the web is being stripmined by AI crawlers with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value. Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!blog.cloudflare.com · 1 Jul 2025All korrents from this piece
    Instead of being a fair trade, the web is being stripmined by AI crawlers with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value.

Content creators should be compensated directly by the AI engines their content fuels.

  1. Matthew Prince Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it. Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!blog.cloudflare.com · 1 Jul 2025All korrents from this piece
    That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.

Second-order thinking

Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.

Used by 87 others

An emergency decision made in a hard case should not be read as setting precedent.

  1. Matthew Prince Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare Hard cases make bad law. This is a hard case and we would caution anyone from seeing it as setting precedent. Blocking Kiwifarmsblog.cloudflare.com · 3 Sept 2022All korrents from this piece
    Hard cases make bad law. This is a hard case and we would caution anyone from seeing it as setting precedent.

Pulling Internet services out of Russia would do more harm than good.

  1. Matthew Prince Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare But given the significant impact of our services on the availability and security of the Internet, we believe removing our services from Russia altogether would do more harm than good. What Cloudflare is doing to keep the Open Internet flowing into Russia and keep attacks from getting outblog.cloudflare.com · 3 Apr 2022All korrents from this piece
    But given the significant impact of our services on the availability and security of the Internet, we believe removing our services from Russia altogether would do more harm than good.

Collective action problems

What everyone would gain from, nobody provides alone, so shared goods need someone or something to hold people together.

Used by 21 others

The answer to content being free for some AI companies and paid for by others is not that no one pays, but that everyone who benefits from the ecosystem contributes back in proportion to their size.

  1. Matthew Prince Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare But it’s also critical to realize that the right solution to that current conundrum isn’t that no one pays, it’s that, new or old, everyone who benefits from the ecosystem should contribute back to it based on their relative size. Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letterblog.cloudflare.com · 21 Sept 2025All korrents from this piece
    But it’s also critical to realize that the right solution to that current conundrum isn’t that no one pays, it’s that, new or old, everyone who benefits from the ecosystem should contribute back to it based on their relative size.