01:54:39 路 Sridhar Ramaswamy, John Coogan, Matthew Prince, Jordi Hays
[01:54:39] S8: to me. [01:54:40] S1: Say, I missed out on a 100,000 basis point basis point move. How could you? Yeah. [01:54:45] S13: I I I am always comforted that we actually so we we priced it. Yeah. $15.15 dollars a share and it went up to and and it that's actually the other thing that's interesting. Everyone like Bill Bill Gurley and I have fights about this from from time to time about IPOs. Like, you have a lot of control over how much the pop is gonna be. And we we sat with bankers and we were like, listen. We want it to go up about 20%. [01:55:07] S1: Yeah. [01:55:08] S13: And and and they were like, okay. If you want it go up 20%, you price it right here. So we priced it right at that point, and it closed the first day at 18, which is exactly up 20%. [01:55:17] S1: Okay. Okay. But just to steel man a little bit, is that is that a function of of your business? Not to like be rude or anything, but there are some businesses that are just like meme stocks out of the gate and like they're in some weird thing and there's some froth and like they have less control or is it always controllable? [01:55:32] S0: Well, and and part of that was like, did you think the fair value of your business was 18% or 20% higher than where you priced it and so you wanted like you basically wanted the market to to sort of reprice and you didn't care about not.
01:55:47 路 Matthew Prince
[01:55:47] S13: Yeah. I mean and they if we had priced it at like 13, it would have gone up more. Yeah. But but the problem again, you like, you you wanna you wanna play for the long term here. And so my my again, my fight with Bill Yeah. Is, you know, he he says, you know, that you should you should do, you know, some sort of system where you're where you actually, you know, price it at whatever the top price is. The problem with that is if you look at all the companies that that have done that, so the Airbnb's and and, and others that they basically you know, that that's that's great for your private market investors. That's great for the VCs. That's great for any of the the the founders that are taking money off the table. But you gotta keep running the company. Like, the IPO isn't the end. It might be the end for the the VCs, but it's not the end for the operators of the company. And you wanna be able to kinda build that relationship and build that over time. And so I think, you know, we worked incredibly hard to be very sort of choosy on who are kind of the who we gave allocations to, and we we we went through every single name on the allocation list. And and and I think as a result of doing that, you know, if you look at, like, who our top 10 shareholders are, it's been incredibly stable, over over time. And they're and they're they're folks who give us again great advice and and and and have been really just really, really great to work with. So I I I I'm sure that there are times you don't have it, but I was I was I was surprised at how the banks have a really good sense of if you price it here, here's what's gonna happen.
01:57:15 路 John Coogan, Matthew Prince, Jordi Hays
[01:57:15] S1: Mhmm. [01:57:15] S13: And and in our case, was it was, you know, to the to the penny. [01:57:21] S0: Last question. How are you thinking about long term planning as a CEO when we're on these exponentials, you know, the the example of like agent versus human web traffic, like Yeah. You have you had like more data than almost anyone on the planet and your prediction was still off your original prediction was still off by twenty eighteen months, twenty four months, something in that range. So how are you thinking about overall business planning when model capability is increasing and and you're just seeing sort of exponentials everywhere?
01:57:53 路 Matthew Prince
[01:57:53] S13: Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of different things. So one, I think we're we're trying to make bets on on people who who can who can really function in in really dynamic environments. And and that for us has been somewhat different than I I think a lot of other people. A lot of other people have cut back, for example, on kind of early career hiring. We we you know, Cluffer's about, like, 5,000 employees, but a little bit less than that now. But we hired 1,111 interns this this summer. They're straight out straight out of college. And they're like, they're just they're just killing it because they they are so native to to these tools. And and, again, I think we've always thought of our job is training the interns, but this year, like, the interns are helping train a lot of us in how to how to how to do these things, you know, really well. So I think staying super dynamic. And then, you know, from our perspective, just making sure that we've got optionality, going forward. So, you know, it's it's it has gotten tougher, to get equipment, today. Memory prices are are through the roof. You know, things are harder, but we've we we just have a team that's always constantly trying to figure out how how to to refine that. And then, generally, I think we're we're trying to be a, you know, big adopters of AI, not just in developer land, but also across the entire the entire business. So we built something called Cloudflare OS, which allows, you know, anyone on our finance team, legal team, you know, accounting team, finance yeah. Any anyone that's out there at the company to be able to have access to to tools and and and and really figure out how how their job gets done. The clever thing that we did to seed it was we actually set up this email address. And initially, we told the team that it was this magic AI model. And if they just wrote to the email address then and ask it, you know, I I have this part of my job that I need to get done. How do I get that that done? It would you know, sometimes it would ask more questions, but it would it would actually give you kind of a response back. What what we didn't tell people was actually it was a team team of humans behind the scenes that was initially receiving these these emails, and then they were using AI systems to kind of flush things out.
01:59:58 路 Matthew Prince, Jordi Hays
But what they were really doing was recording all of the kind of key jobs to be done within the organization because, you mean, you have to if you're gonna have AI systems that can help facilitate this, you actually have to record what are the steps that people are are doing as as as a part of that. And so as a result of that, we've been able to see this this Cloudflare OS now with the ability to do things like if you're on the sales team and you have to do, like, an account plan, you know, you can literally just type slash account plan and then describe what it is that you wanna do, and it will output that. And that's made that's made our team so much more productive. And and again, I think it's giving us the flexibility to be able to respond to, you know, whatever comes next. [02:00:41] S0: Very cool. Final final question. Are we gonna are we gonna see an exponential increase in the number of interns this summer? We're gonna see ten ten thousand interns? I don't know.
02:00:41 路 Jordi Hays, Matthew Prince, John Coogan, Farza Majeed
[02:00:41] S0: Very cool. Final final question. Are we gonna are we gonna see an exponential increase in the number of interns this summer? We're gonna see ten ten thousand interns? I don't know. [02:00:53] S13: I mean, I I I we've got to find a place to put them all. And so it's mean, our office in Austin, like we've it's a big space in Austin. We've run out of space there because we have so many interns there. It's I just I just think that there it's I think a lot of companies are doing this wrong where they're saying, like, we're we're not gonna bet on on on the new people coming out of school because, you know, AI is gonna replace them. I mean, these these kids know how to use AI better than anyone else. So we're gonna bet incredibly heavily on that, and it's, and it's so far, it's paying off. I mean, these the like, I think the person who eventually replaces me might might literally be one of the interns to today because they're just so so so smart. [02:01:33] S1: It's happened it's happened before. I mean, I don't know if Satya Nadella was an intern, but he has that famous video of him as a product manager demoing Excel. And yeah. Oh, he company man. [02:01:42] S13: I remember I mean, I I was on a bunch of of calls with Satya Yeah. Before he was before he was CEO. And he was he was just a product manager, you know, at at So I think just if you you can find really great people and and be able to [02:01:58] S1: move on. [02:01:58] S0: That's a That's a There's a GOAT [02:02:00] S6: out there.