No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:22:40 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:22:40] S1: And what is a way in which it is helping your people and your organization that you think is like clear success? [00:22:48] S0: It's actually used more by our go to market teams and our G and A teams than it is used by our engineering teams. It's giving them a very fast... Early on, I thought we saw training was the biggest gap for people using AI. And when you just point them at a chat interface or another by putting tool, it's too much of a blank slate for them. And so this is a platform that's designed... You design everything for it for how your business works, and they immediately can go there and get access to all the data that they need. They can get guided and taken through where they quickly realize, Oh, this is not trying to replace me. This is trying to make me better at my job. That's been really exciting to see just all the different ways people at the company have done that. A lot of how the conference got put together, the marketing team built hundreds of internal tools where previously they would have to go out and work with different agencies, but the speed that they can move with a smaller team now is just amazing. [00:24:00] S1: Assuming this is a continuation starting in May, you guys did this restructuring to be an AI first organization. What else reflecting on the last number of months has worked or not worked that you would recommend to others?
00:24:18 · Dane Knecht
[00:24:18] S0: Yeah. I mean, so restructuring was hard saying goodbye to some our colleagues. It was the first time Cloudflare ever did it. Had always been very careful not to overhire. This was for different reasons. This is because we saw the way AI was transforming some teams and how they work. Kind of thought of it as like a factory floor where you needed to actually rebuild, rethink how things happen. There were some processes or some... The way a product inventor would send an email before to customers, it involved three teams. It involved a team where you went to BI to go get a cohort of the people that you wanted to send an email to. You went to the marketing team to help you design the email and get the voice right. You went to the marketing operations team to get the email out. Where you're never going to be able to actually redesign that process unless you kind make some hard changes and force people to kind of rethink, well, what actually is the right way to do that? And it might not involve those three teams at all. It might just involve a new way of doing things. So what came out of that was a tool where a product manager now goes in and describes the cohort. They write an email. It rewrites it in Cloudflare's voice. It sends it to their manager, and the manager can click approve if they like it, and it goes out. We didn't go from three teams getting faster at doing that. We went to one tool that can kind of let a product manager now become a superpower they didn't have before.
00:25:56 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:25:56] S1: When you think of all of the different workflows and tasks within an organization that's got about 5,000 people like Cloudflare. Do you decide who the owner is of rethinking that process? Was it bottoms up from one of those teams in this case? Is it an organizational leader When you have so many of these things that could change to be faster and make more sense as you described. [00:26:19] S0: Yeah. I mean, CloudForm has always had a thousand more things that we could could ever do, whether it was products and features or things like this. And so we always look for people that are going to take initiative in ownership. And so, you know, it doesn't really matter if you're ordering it, you know, one to a 100 and try and prioritize it. Any one of those 100 things are are probably safe if someone's passionate about it. So, you know, we we kind of gave people at the beginning of last year the the tools and started seeing how they were experimenting. And people quickly kind of broke out in different cohorts of people that were really leaning in and just naturally doing those things and taking ownership of them. So I think it was very bottoms up from the... How we're going to do those things. [00:27:05] S1: It's been a major topic of conversation for organizations as to how they should think about token budgeting. Right? Like, you know, what's a reasonable amount to spend? How do I think about this versus human capital? We should get tokens even within our organization. Like, what is your philosophy on this now?
00:27:05 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:27:05] S1: It's been a major topic of conversation for organizations as to how they should think about token budgeting. Right? Like, you know, what's a reasonable amount to spend? How do I think about this versus human capital? We should get tokens even within our organization. Like, what is your philosophy on this now? [00:27:24] S0: It's definitely changed. You know, each model kind of makes you rethink it as the the cost dynamics change. But, know, in in general, you know, I think it's kinda silly that we're actually asking humans to decide which model to do each task. [00:27:41] S1: Like, it should be intelligently routed. Yeah.
00:27:43 · Dane Knecht
[00:27:43] S0: Exactly. Like, humans just aren't aren't gonna ever be good at that. Right? Like, you know... But, you know, early on, you do it kind of brute force, and you you know, people you get people to experiment, and you say, hey. Well, let's try for the planning part. Let's use the top frontier models for that. And then once the plan's written out and agreed upon and iterated on, then potentially some more the open source models can go do that. Then you go back and you have one of the frontier models do the reviews and the red teaming and things like that. Now all of that today is fairly manual. But I think as we start to learn and experiment, I think people will become intelligent. Over time, there'll be more governance on that. Kafware has been a place where largely we've let people use the models and tools that they see fit for the job. We don't have a token leaderboard. We don't encourage it. We encourage people to focus on the output. They're not graded on if they use it. They're graded on what they've shipped and what they've built. But then, you know, we do have some kind of... We found, like, just kind of like giving people notices. Like, you know, if you happen to use $300 a day, they'll just get an email. Right? Like, says, hey. Did you know... And because most of the time people didn't realize they were doing it. And they're like, oh, And then I think if it gets to like 500, it goes to your manager. If it goes to a thousand, goes to a VP in a day. But it's... You know, those things rarely happen, and and usually it's it's it's... People are actually happy to get those notices.
00:29:26 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:29:26] S1: Where do you think you are in your overall evolution of, like, take things just for the current level of capabilities of of models? Assume no new development of, you know, rethinking the way different things at Cloudflare are done from go to market to engineering to be [00:29:41] S0: I think we're still so early. Know, comfort is something... You know, two years ago, had about 200 interns. And what we saw was those interns were, you know, really the first, you know, fully kind of AI native, you know, where you took AI away from them. I don't think they would be able to work. Oh, no. And [00:30:02] S1: Is that good? [00:30:04] S0: Actually, I think it is. I I think they know how to use the tools better than us. It's just like you took Google away from me over the last ten years. How would I learn anything? That's where they reached to first. We actually saw the managers that had interns from that summer actually adopt AI faster. So then this past summer, this past year, we decided we're gonna hire a thousand interns. So that's, you know... [00:30:30] S1: For a 5,000 person company? [00:30:31] S0: Yes. Wow. Yeah. Over the course of the year. [00:30:34] S1: Yeah. Still.