No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:30:34 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:30:34] S1: Yeah. Still. [00:30:35] S0: Yeah. And it's it's just been amazing because, you know, one, just the number of ideas that come from the interns. You know, that's something that, you know, with AI, less people experiment faster, and so having more ideas, getting more people in there. But also just seeing the the way that they use AI. They need to fill out a form. They reach for AI. I still find myself, there's so many things where I'm like, Oh, wait, just been doing this manually still. Then I'm like, Yeah. Oh, wait. Actually, I should be using AI. I don't think that that's a natural natural for most of us yet. And I think that will take time. And so, yeah, I think we're still barely in our AI journey. [00:31:19] S1: I love it though. The mass intern strategy. I run a very small partnership and we always have a, you know, an intern or two floating around a team of about a dozen for, you know, ideas and intern energy and all that. But we just converted one of our, you know, in college interns to full time in in Jed and had him drop out and everything. And I I I think that you're right where maybe, like, the dial should be turned up on the amount of DNA that is really, really native to these tools. [00:31:51] S0: Yeah. And I think it's great for them as well too. I mean, you see these schools like Waterloo and Northeastern, like, with these these co op programs. From what we've seen is people that get that type of real work experience are some of our best employees many years then and go on to do great things.
00:31:51 · Dane Knecht, Sarah Guo
[00:31:51] S0: Yeah. And I think it's great for them as well too. I mean, you see these schools like Waterloo and Northeastern, like, with these these co op programs. From what we've seen is people that get that type of real work experience are some of our best employees many years then and go on to do great things. [00:32:13] S1: It is interesting or encouraging though that instead of it being like, Hey, here's a master plan. We're going to map out every department and sub department at Cloudflare and be like, Here are the key workflows. We're going try to reengineer the workflows. It is instead a strategy of assume people are rational about their tokens if given information about their usage, hire a bunch of interns, and assume high agency people we have here are going to go shift those workflows to something more intelligent over time.
00:32:13 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:32:13] S1: It is interesting or encouraging though that instead of it being like, Hey, here's a master plan. We're going to map out every department and sub department at Cloudflare and be like, Here are the key workflows. We're going try to reengineer the workflows. It is instead a strategy of assume people are rational about their tokens if given information about their usage, hire a bunch of interns, and assume high agency people we have here are going to go shift those workflows to something more intelligent over time. [00:32:42] S0: Yeah. And then and then brute force and just try things. Early on, we had an email alias called agents at Cloudflare, where we... This is back in January of last... Of this year, where we just told people to, you you curious, can I use AI for this? Email in your jobs to be done. And that email list would reply back to the skill file. And for a while, thought it was actually thought it was all AI and automated. It was actually a bunch of interns that were helping people write skill files. But that let us kind of get to see in a way that's not going out in like hiring a consulting firm to come out and catalog every single thing to be done. It's people that are recognizing, hey, this seems harder than it needs to be. I wonder if an agent can help me here. [00:33:33] S1: Is there anything else about the last year that's changed beyond the intern level, like your hiring philosophy? What you look for in people to bring on?
00:33:33 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:33:33] S1: Is there anything else about the last year that's changed beyond the intern level, like your hiring philosophy? What you look for in people to bring on? [00:33:44] S0: Well, I mean, one of the biggest things we always look for is curiosity. And so if people aren't using AI at home in their personal life and all that, that's a pretty big red flag. How can you not be embracing AI if you have a level of curiosity out there. So I think just doubling down on some of those key characteristics of drive and curiosity and empathy play even better for this next set of people? [00:34:20] S1: Well, I mean, I'm a alpha user of all products and technology forever. But I think the answer is fear and skepticism. Right? And so I guess implicit in this claim about curiosity including an experimentation with Frontier Tools is like that needs to be a core principle for people who work at Flare. [00:34:46] S0: Yeah. I mean, a lot of things that we're doing, we're not... We're inventing new ways of doing things. Mean, scale that we operate at for the number of sites behind us and the the amount of free services we give away, it's just not possible with off the shelf technology. So you you need people that can come in and literally invent new things, and and that that starts with curiosity.
00:34:46 · Dane Knecht, Sarah Guo
[00:34:46] S0: Yeah. I mean, a lot of things that we're doing, we're not... We're inventing new ways of doing things. Mean, scale that we operate at for the number of sites behind us and the the amount of free services we give away, it's just not possible with off the shelf technology. So you you need people that can come in and literally invent new things, and and that that starts with curiosity. [00:35:11] S1: I have a couple questions for you to to close out. And so mainly about security both and how to do that in a new way both at at Cloudflare and then how you think it's gonna work in the in the broader ecosystem. What do you think is the, like, process by which if half the engineering team is going to go work on security and just fix seventy years of vulnerability? How do you attack that problem? Internally, assuming that not all software is perfect, even amazing production internet scale software, and then, you know, we'll talk about the ecosystem. [00:35:42] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think largely today we have one red team. I think by the end of the year next year, will probably have four or five red teams. So break people out into groups that are actually being more adversarial and actually going out and actively trying to find vulnerabilities. [00:36:04] S1: Why is that the approach when instead of, Oh, we're finally going to get our patching systems right, our processes right.
00:36:04 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:36:04] S1: Why is that the approach when instead of, Oh, we're finally going to get our patching systems right, our processes right. [00:36:12] S0: I mean, processes and those things can always be better. We have a VOLTON process. We have a patching process. Are they perfect? No. But, you know, the best way I found for those sorts of things to get better is to out of crisis kind of comes that's how you get those things fixed. When the volumes get too big for the engineering team to just do them using their normal processes, Engineers are inherently lazy in a good way. And so they automate away those things as they need to, as they kind of realize that there's no other way to do that. So I think the focus needs to be on the discovery side and people will do the right thing and figure out how to patch it in a scalable way over time. [00:37:02] S1: Do you express a philosophy on just prioritization of this versus shipping new features? Because I guess my understanding of... It's not as if we didn't have a backlog of vulnerabilities vulnerabilities in every large piece of software to go fix. Was just whether or not that was a priority for engineering teams previously as one common state. [00:37:24] S0: I I think you need to figure out how to do both. It might come at the expense of cost optimization or other things, but I mean, companies, if you're not shipping, you're dying. This is how we think about it. [00:37:39] S1: So it's not gonna be freeze in order Yeah. To do