Cloudflare launched 15 years ago this week. We like to celebrate our birthday by announcing new products and features that give back to the Internet, which we’ll do a lot of this week. But, on this occasion, we've also been thinking about what's changed on the Internet over the last 15 years and what has not.

With some things there's been clear progress: when we launched in 2010 less than 10 percent of the Internet was encrypted, today well over 95 percent is encrypted. We're proud of the role we played in making that happen.

Some other areas have seen limited progress: IPv6 adoption has grown steadily but painfully slowly over the last 15 years, in spite of our efforts. That's a problem because as IPv4 addresses have become scarce and expensive it’s held back new entrants and driven up the costs of things like networking and cloud computing.

Still other things have remained remarkably consistent: the basic business model of the Internet has for the last 15 years been the same — create compelling content, find a way to be discovered, and then generate value from the resulting traffic. Whether that was through ads or subscriptions or selling things or just the ego of knowing that someone is consuming what you created, traffic generation has been the engine that powered the Internet we know today.

Make no mistake, the Internet has never been free. There's always been a reward system that transferred value from consumers to creators and, in doing so, filled the Internet with content. Had the Internet not had that reward system it wouldn't be nearly as vibrant as it is today.

A bit of a trivia aside: why did Cloudflare never build an ad blocker despite many requests? Because, as imperfect as they are, ads have been the only micropayment system that has worked at scale to encourage an open Internet while also compensating content creators for their work. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and a core value is that we’re principled, so we weren’t going to hamper the Internet’s fundamental business model.

But that same traffic-based reward system has also created many of the problems we lament about the current state of the Internet. Traffic has always been an imperfect proxy for value. Over the last 15 years we've watched more of the Internet driven by annoying clickbait or dangerous ragebait. Entire media organizations have built their businesses with a stated objective of writing headlines to generate the maximum cortisol response because that's what generates the maximum amount of traffic.

Over the years, Cloudflare has at times faced calls for us to intervene and control what content can be published online. As an infrastructure provider, we've never felt we were the right place for those editorial decisions to be made. But it wasn't because we didn't worry about the direction the traffic-incentivized Internet seemed to be headed. It always seemed like what fundamentally needed to change was not more content moderation at the infrastructure level but instead a healthier incentive system for content creation.

Today the conditions to bring about that change may be happening. In the last year, something core to the Internet we’ve all known has changed. It's being driven by AI and it has an opportunity with some care and nurturing to help bring about what we think may be a much better Internet.

What’s the change? The primary discovery system of the Internet for the last 15 years has been Search Engines. They scraped the Internet's content, built an index, and then presented users with a treasure map which they followed generating traffic. Content creators were happy to let Search Engines scrape their content because there were a limited number of them, so the infrastructure costs were relatively low and, more importantly, because the Search Engines gave something to sites in the form of traffic — the Internet’s historic currency — sent back to sites.

It’s already clear that the Internet’s discovery system for the next 15 years will be something different: Answer Engines. Unlike Search Engines which gave you a map where you hunted for what you were looking for, driving traffic in the process, Answer Engines just give you the answer without you having to click on anything. For 95 percent of users 95 percent of the time, that is a better user experience.

You don’t have to look far to see this is changing rapidly before our eyes. ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and other AI startups aren’t Search Engines — they’re Answer Engines. Even Google, the search stalwart, is increasingly serving “AI Overviews” in place of 10 blue links. We can often look to sci-fi movies to have a glimpse into our most likely future. In them, the helpful intelligent robot character didn’t answer questions with: “Here are some links you can click on to maybe find what you’re looking for.” Whether you like it or not, the future will increasingly be answers not searches.

In the short term, this is going to be extremely painful for some industries that are built based on monetizing traffic. It already is. While ecommerce and social applications haven't yet seen a significant drop in traffic as the world switches to Answer Engines, media companies have. Why the difference? Well, for the former, you still need to buy the thing the Answer Engine recommends and, for now, we still value talking with other humans.

But for media companies, if the Answer Engine gives you the summary of what you’re looking for in most cases you don’t need to read the story. And the loss of traffic for media companies has already been dramatic. It’s not just traditional media. Research groups at investment banks, industry analysts, major consulting firms — they’re all seeing major drops in people finding their content because we are increasingly getting answers not search treasure maps.

Some say these answer engines or agents are just acting on behalf of humans. Sure but so what? Without a change they will still kill content creators’ businesses. If you ask your agent to summarize twenty different news sources but never actually visit any of them you’re still undermining the business model of those news sources. Agents don’t click on ads. And if those agents are allowed to aggregate information on behalf of multiple users it’s an even bigger problem because then subscription revenue is eliminated as well. Why subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Financial Times or Washington Post if my agent can free ride off some other user who does?

Unless you believe that content creators should work for free, or that they are somehow not needed anymore — both of which are naive assumptions — something needs to change. A visit from an agent isn’t the same as a visit from a human and therefore should have different rules of the road. If nothing changes, the drop in human traffic to the media ecosystem writ large will kill the business model that has built the content-rich Internet we enjoy today.

We think that’s an existential threat to one of humanity’s most important creations: the Internet.

But there’s reason for optimism. Content is the fuel that powers every AI system and the companies that run those AI systems know ultimately they need to financially support the ecosystem. Because of that it seems potentially we're on the cusp of a new, better, and maybe healthier Internet business model. As content creators use tools like the ones provided by Cloudflare to restrict AI robots from taking their content without compensation, we're already seeing a market emerge and better deals being struck between AI and content companies.

What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old. For those of you old enough, think back to the Internet not of the last 15 years but of the last 35. We’ve lost some of what made that early Internet great, but there are indications that we might finally have the incentives to bring more of it back.

It seems increasingly likely that in our future, AI-driven Internet — assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them — it’s the creative, local, unique, original content that’ll be worth the most. And, if you’re like us, the thing you as an Internet consumer are craving more of is creative, local, unique, original content. And, it turns out, having talked with many of them, that’s the content that content creators are most excited to create.

So how will the business model work? Well, for the first time in history, we have a pretty good mathematical representation of human knowledge. Sum up all the LLMs and that's what you get. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Inherently, the same mathematical model serves as a map for the gaps in human knowledge. Like a block of Swiss Cheese — there's a lot of cheese, but there's also a lot of holes.

Imagine a future business model of the Internet that doesn't reward traffic-generating ragebait but instead rewards those content creators that help fill in the holes in our collective metaphorical cheese. That will involve some portion of the subscription fees AI companies collect, and some portion of the revenue from the ads they'll inevitably serve, going back to content creators who most enrich the collective knowledge.

As a rough and simplistic sketch, think of it as some number of dollars per AI company’s monthly active users going into a collective pool to be distributed out to content creators based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese.

You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms the AI companies use today form a roadmap for what content is worth enough to not be pruned but paid for.

While today the budget items that differentiate AI companies are how much they can afford to spend on GPUs and top talent, as those things inevitably become more and more commodities it seems likely what will differentiate the different AIs is their access to creative, local, unique, original content. And the math of their algorithms provides them a map of what’s worth the most. While there are a lot of details to work out, those are the ingredients you need for a healthy market.

As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation. That means creating a level playing field. Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small.

It can’t be that a new entrant AI company is at a disadvantage to a legacy search engine because one has to pay for content but the other gets it for free. 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.

It may seem impossibly idealistic today, but the good news is that based on the conversations we’ve had we’re confident if a few market participants tip — whether because they step up and do the right thing or are compelled — we will see the entire market tipping and becoming robust very quickly.

We can't do this alone and we have no plans to try to. Our mission is not to “build a better Internet” but to “help build a better Internet.” The solutions developed to facilitate this market need to be open, collaborative, standardized, and shared across many organizations. We’ll take some encouraging steps in that direction with announcements on partnerships and collaborations this week. And we’re proud to be a leader in this space.

The Internet is an ecosystem and we, other infrastructure providers, along with most importantly both AI companies and content creators, will be critical in ensuring that ecosystem is healthy. We’re excited to partner with those who are ready to step up and do their part to also help build a better Internet. It is possible.

And we're optimistic that if others can collaborate in supporting the ecosystem we may be at the cusp of a new golden age of the Internet. Our conversations with the leading AI companies nearly all acknowledge that they have a responsibility to give back to the ecosystem and compensate content creators. Confirming this, the largest publishers are reporting they're having much more constructive conversations about licensing their content to those AI companies. And, this week, we'll be announcing new tools to help even the smallest publishers take back control of who can use what they've created.

It may seem impossible. We think it’s a no-brainer. We're proud of what Cloudflare has accomplished over the last 15 years, but there’s a lot left to do to live up to our mission. So, more than ever, it's clear: giddy up, because we're just getting started!

That said, one thing that is different is you may have noticed we've actually had fewer public innovation weeks over the last year than usual. That's been because a couple of incidents nearly a year ago caused us to focus on improving our internal systems over releasing new features. We're incredibly proud of our team's focus to make security, resilience, and reliability the top priorities for the last year. Today, Cloudflare's underlying platform, and the products that run on top of it, are significantly more robust than ever before.

With that work largely complete, and our platform in its strongest shape ever, we plan to pick back up the usual cadence of new product launches that we're known for. This Birthday Week, you'll see many as we roll out performance improvements only our Connectivity Cloud can deliver to accelerate all our customers' websites by a mind-blowing 45 percent (automatically and for free), launch new features to make our developer platform faster and easier to use, plug the web's last encryption hole, accelerate AI inference globally, provide new levels of support for startups and the open source community, and much much more.

This is easily our favorite week of the year because of how it allows our team to give back to the Internet and live up to our mission.

The robustness of Cloudflare's platform today contrasts with what feels like an Internet that has become far more fragile over the previous year. When we first articulated our mission as helping build a better Internet, we assumed that “better” meant one that was faster, more reliable, more secure, more private, and more efficient. But today it seems like something more fundamental.

The last year has been characterized by a normalization of Internet shutdowns and limits on Internet access around the world. What were once tactics reserved for authoritarian regimes have spread to even Western democratic nations, where courts and legislatures have been emboldened to restrict fundamental protocols to control perceived harms.

We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in courts of limited jurisdiction ordering sites they found objectionable blocked globally at the DNS level, nations turning off the Internet for most their citizens in the name of preventing cheating on standardized tests (while it remains on in wealthy and politically connected neighborhoods), ISPs proposing legislation to impose new taxes on content creators, and whole services being banned in countries that had previously declared that more Internet was always better than less. 

This is, unfortunately, a dark time in the history of the Internet.

At the same time, the business model of the web is eroding. The quid pro quo of the web’s last era — the search era — was that you let a company like Google scrape data from your website in exchange for them sending you traffic. In that model, content creators could then generate value from that traffic through ads, selling products, or just getting the ego boost of knowing that someone cares enough about the thing you created to take the time to view it.

That same quid pro quo does not hold up in the era we’re moving into — the AI era — where answers are delivered to questions without ever having to visit the authoritative source. And, if content creators can no longer generate value from their creations, it’s inevitable they’ll generate less content and we’ll all, including the AI companies that need original content to train their models, lose out as a result.

The Internet remains a miracle, but it no longer feels inevitable. It is under attack from active adversaries and beginning to rot from benign neglect. And, with the largest tech companies distracted by their own regulatory challenges, it finds itself without a clear champion. We’re proud of our team for picking up that mantle. At Cloudflare, we believe in the Internet and we will fight for it.

That's why we invest in our public policy team to educate lawmakers and jurists on how best to control the harms created by some limited corners of the Internet without destabilizing its underlying protocols. Why we believe it’s important to provide so many of our services for free. And it's why this Birthday Week we'll announce new ways for the AI systems that hunger for original content to compensate content creators in a way that is equitable. Without a new paradigm, we worry that the incentives that allowed the Internet to flourish will shrivel and its miracle will fade.

Missions matter. Ours is to help build a better Internet. We, or one of our senior executives, still talk to every candidate we hire before extending an offer because we want to ensure we communicate the importance of our mission. One of the most common questions we’re asked is how we plan to preserve Cloudflare's culture? Our answer is always the same: the goal isn't how to preserve our culture, it's always how to improve it. The same has to be true for the Internet. We can't just try to preserve the past, we need to imagine new ways to improve it.

That requires champions to stand up and imagine a better Internet. It’s been too long since you’ve read a positive story about the Internet even though it continues to be a miracle. We are proud that we have the team, platform, and mantle to not just preserve, but improve on, that miracle. It is our mission and what motivates everything we do at Cloudflare. And nowhere is that more on display than during the week ahead. If you too are inspired by our mission, we encourage you to apply to join our team.

Stay tuned for an incredible Birthday Week of new products that make progress on our mission. Thank you to our team around the world for everything you do. Cloudflare is stronger because of the work we've accomplished, and the Internet will be stronger because of Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is officially a teenager. We launched on September 27, 2010. Today we celebrate our thirteenth birthday. As is our tradition, we use the week of our birthday to launch products that we think of as our gift back to the Internet. More on some of the incredible announcements in a second, but we wanted to start by talking about something more fundamental: our identity.

Like many kids, it took us a while to fully understand who we are. We chafed at being put in boxes. People would describe Cloudflare as a security company, and we'd say, "That's not all we do." They'd say we were a network, and we'd object that we were so much more. Worst of all, they'd sometimes call us a "CDN," and we'd remind them that caching is a part of any sensibly designed system, but it shouldn't be a feature unto itself. Thank you very much.

And so, yesterday, the day before our thirteenth birthday, we announced to the world finally what we realized we are: a connectivity cloud.

What does that mean? "Connectivity" means we measure ourselves by connecting people and things together. Our job isn't to be the final destination for your data, but to help it move and flow. Any application, any data, anyone, anywhere, anytime — that's the essence of connectivity, and that’s always been the promise of the Internet.

"Cloud" means the batteries are included. It scales with you. It’s programmable. Has consistent security built in. It’s intelligent and learns from your usage and others' and optimizes for outcomes better than you ever could on your own.

Our connectivity cloud is worth contrasting against some other clouds. The so-called hyperscale public clouds are, in many ways, the opposite. They optimize for hoarding your data. Locking it in. Making it difficult to move. They are captivity clouds. And, while they may be great for some things, their full potential will only truly be unlocked for customers when combined with a connectivity cloud that lets you mix and match the best of each of their features.

That's what we're seeing from the hottest startups these days. Many of the leading AI companies are using Cloudflare's connectivity cloud to move their training data to wherever there's excess GPU capacity. We estimate that across the AI startup ecosystem, Cloudflare is the most commonly used cloud provider. Because, if you're building the future, you know connectivity and the agility of the cloud are key.

We've spent the last year listening to our AI customers and trying to understand what the future of AI will look like and how we can better help them build it. Today, we're releasing a series of products and features borne of those conversations and opening incredible new opportunities.

The biggest opportunity in AI is inference. Inference is what happens when you type a prompt to write a poem about your love of connectivity clouds into ChatGPT and, seconds later, get a coherent response. Or when you run a search for a picture of your passport on your phone, and it immediately pulls it up.

The models that power those modern miracles take significant time to generate — a process called training. Once trained though, they can have new data fed through them over and over to generate valuable new output.

Before today, those models could run in two places. The first was the end user's device — like in the case of the search for “passport” in the photos on your phone. When that's possible it's great. It's fast. Your private data stays local. And it works even when there's no network access. But it's also challenging. Models are big and the storage on your phone or other local device is limited. Moreover, putting the fastest GPU resources to process these models in your phone makes the phone expensive and burns precious battery resources.

The alternative has been the centralized public cloud. This is what’s used for a big model like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which runs services like ChatGPT. But that has its own challenges. Today, nearly all the GPU resources for AI are deployed in the US — a fact that rightfully troubles the rest of the world. As AI queries get more personal, sending them all to some centralized cloud is a potential security and data locality disaster waiting to happen. Moreover, it's inherently slow and less efficient and therefore more costly than running the inference locally.

Running on the device is too small. Running on the centralized public cloud is too far. It’s like the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”: the right answer is somewhere in between. That's why today we're excited to be rolling out modern GPU resources across Cloudflare's global connectivity cloud. The third place for AI inference. Not too small. Not too far. The perfect step in between. By the end of the year, you'll be able to run AI models in more than 100 cities in 40+ countries where Cloudflare operates. By the end of 2024, we plan to have inference-tuned GPUs deployed in nearly every city that makes up Cloudflare's global network and within milliseconds of nearly every device connected to the Internet worldwide.

(A brief shout out for the Cloudflare team members who are, as of this moment, literally dragging suitcases full of NVIDIA GPU cards around the world and installing them in the servers that make up our network worldwide. It takes a lot of atoms to move all the bits that we do, and it takes intrepid people spanning the globe to update our network to facilitate these new capabilities.)

Running AI in a connectivity cloud like Cloudflare gives you the best of both worlds: nearly boundless resources running locally near any device connected to the Internet. And we've made it flexible to run whatever models a developer creates, easy to use without needing a dev ops team, and inexpensive to run where you only pay for when we're doing inference work for you.

To make this tangible, think about a Cloudflare customer that makes consumer wearable devices. They make devices that need to be smart but also affordable and have the longest possible battery life. As explorers rely on them literally to navigate out of harrowing conditions, tradeoffs aren't an option. That's why, when they heard about Cloudflare Workers AI, they immediately knew it was something they needed to try. The promise is powerful devices that are still affordable and have great battery life while still respecting users’ privacy and security.

They are one of the limited set of customers we gave an early sneak peek to, all of whom immediately started running off ideas of what they could do next and clamoring to get more access. We feel like we’ve seen it and are here to report: the not-so-distant future is super cool.

Over the years we've announced several things on our birthday that have gone on to change the future of the Internet. On our first birthday, we announced an IPv6 gateway that has helped the Internet scale past its early protocol decisions. On our fourth birthday, we announced that we were making encryption free and doubled the size of the encrypted web in a day. On our seventh birthday, we launched the Workers platform that has revolutionized how modern applications are developed. On our eleventh birthday we announced R2 and further freed data from the captivity clouds.

This year, as we celebrate Cloudflare's thirteenth birthday, we set out to have as dramatic an impact on AI development as we have in other areas we've focused on in the past: providing tools that bring affordable, powerful AI inference to anyone, anywhere on Earth.

And so, to commemorate that, let's close with a poem about the connectivity cloud. This one was generated using a tiny bit of code and Meta's Llama 2 LLM model running on Cloudflare's Workers AI platform in a data center not far from where we're writing this…

Prompt: “Write a poem that talks about the connectivity cloud and contrast it with the captivity cloud”

The connectivity cloud, a wondrous sight to see,

Where data flows and knowledge is set free,

A place where minds meet and ideas take flight,

A world of endless possibility in sight.

But then there's the captivity cloud, a darker place,

Where thoughts are trapped and minds are in disgrace,

A prison of the mind, where freedom's lost,

A world of endless sorrow and cost.

So let us choose the connectivity cloud,

And let our minds be free and allowed,

To soar and glide and reach for the sky,

And never be held back, but always fly.

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010. This week we'll celebrate our 12th birthday. As has become our tradition, we'll be announcing a series of products that we think of as our gifts back to the Internet. In previous years, these have included products and initiatives like Universal SSL, Cloudflare Workers, our Zero Markup Registrar, the Bandwidth Alliance, and R2 — our zero egress fee object store — which went GA last week.

We're really excited for what we'll be announcing this year and hope to surprise and delight all of you over the course of the week with the products and features we believe live up to our mission of helping build a better Internet.

While this will be our 12th Birthday Week of product announcements, for the last two years, as the cofounders of the company, we've also taken this time as an opportunity to write a letter publicly reflecting on the previous year and what's on our minds as we go into the year ahead.

Since our last birthday, it's been a tale of two halves of a very different year. At the end of 2021 and into the first two months of 2022, COVID infection rates were falling globally, effective vaccines were getting rolled out, and the world seemed to be returning to a sense of pre-pandemic normalcy.

Internally, we were starting to meet again in person with colleagues and customers. We'd weathered an unprecedented increase in traffic across our network caused by the pandemic and, with a few bumps along the way, used the challenges we'd faced through that time to rebuild our architecture to be more stable and reliable for the long term. We both felt optimistic for the future.

Then, on February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. While we were fortunate to not have team members working from Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus, we have many employees with families in the region and six offices within a train ride of the front lines. We watched in real time as Internet traffic patterns across Ukraine shifted, a disturbing reflection of what was happening on the ground as cities were bombed and families fled.

At the same time, Russia ratcheted up their efforts to censor their country's Internet of all non-Russia media. While we had seen some Internet restrictions in Russia over the years, historically Russian citizens were generally able to freely access nearly any resources online. The dramatically increased censorship marked an extreme change in policy and the first time a country of any scale had tried to go from a generally open Internet to one that was fully censored.

But, even as the war continues to rage, there is reason for optimism. In spite of a significant increase in censorship inside Russia, physical links to the rest of the world being cut in Ukraine, cyber attacks targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, and Russian forces actively rerouting BGP in invaded regions, by and large the Internet has continued to flow. As John Gilmore once famously said: "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it."

The private sector and governments around the world came together to help support Ukraine and render Russian cyberattacks largely moot. Our team provided our services for free to government, financial services, media, and civil society organizations that came under cyber attack, ensuring they stayed online. As the physical Internet links were severed in the country, our network teams worked to route traffic through every possible path to ensure not only could news from outside Ukraine get in but, equally importantly, pictures and news of the war could get out.

Those pictures and news of what is happening inside Ukraine continue to galvanize support. The Ukrainian government continues to function in spite of withering cyber attacks. Voices inside Russia pushing back against the regime are increasingly being heard. And ordinary Russian citizens have increasingly turned to services like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 App to see uncensored news, in record numbers.

Our efforts to keep the Internet on in Russia led the Putin regime to officially sanction one of us (Matthew) — a sign we took that we were making a positive impact. Today we estimate approximately 5% of all households in the country are continuing to access the uncensored Internet using our 1.1.1.1 App, and that number continues to grow.

2022 was not the first year in which the Internet became a battleground, but to us, it does feel like a turning point. In the last twelve months, we've seen more countries shut down Internet access than in any previous year. Sometimes this is just a misguided and ineffectual effort to keep students from cheating on national exams. Unfortunately, increasingly, it's about repressive regimes attempting to assert control.

As we write this, the Iranian government is attempting to silence protests in the country through broad Internet censorship. While some may suggest this is business as usual, in fact it is not. The Internet and the broad set of news and opinions it brings have generally been available in places like Iran and Russia, and we shouldn't accept that full censorship in them is the de facto status quo.

And these efforts to reign in the Internet are unfortunately not limited to Iran and Russia. Even in the liberal, democratic corners of Western Europe, incidents in which court ordered blocking at the infrastructure layer resulting in massive overblocking spiked dramatically over the last year. Those cases will set a dangerous precedent that a single court in a single country can block access to wide swaths of the Internet.

While it may seem ok to Austrians for an Austrian court to enforce Austrian values for an issue within Austria, if any country's courts can block content at the core Internet infrastructure level even when it results in the blocking of unrelated sites then it will have a global impact. And, inherently, it will open the door for Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, and Azerbaijan to do the same. And that's just the countries that start with the letter A. If these precedents are upheld then the Internet risks falling to the lowest common denominator of what's globally acceptable.

The magic of the early Internet was that it was permissionless. Cloudflare was founded to counter an old and very different threat to that magic than we face today. Early in Cloudflare's history, we used to get asked who we were competing against. We have never thought the answer was Akamai or EdgeCast. While, from a business perspective, we always thought of our business as replacing the vast catalog of Cisco's hardware boxes with scalable services, that transition seemed inevitable. Instead, the existential competitor we faced was a threat to the permissionless Internet itself: Facebook.

If you find your eyebrow raised as you read that, know you're not alone. It was the universal reaction we’d get whenever we said that back in 2010, and it remains the universal reaction we get when we say it today. But it has always rung true. In 2010, when Cloudflare launched, it was getting so difficult to be online — between spam, hackers, DDoS, reliability, and performance issues — that many people, organizations, and businesses gave up on the web and sought a safe space in Facebook's walled garden.

If the challenges of being online weren't solved in some other way, there was real risk that Facebook would, effectively, become the Internet. The magic of the Internet was that anyone with an idea could put it online and, if it resonated, thrive without having to pass through a gatekeeper. It seemed wrong to us that if those trends continued you'd have to effectively get Facebook's permission just be online. Preserving the permissionless Internet was a big part of what motivated us to start Cloudflare.

So we set out to help solve the problems of cyberattacks, outages, and other performance challenges making sure that the Internet we believed in could continue to thrive. We built a global network able to mitigate the largest DDoS attacks easily, and to make anything connected to the Internet faster, more secure, and more reliable. We created tools to make it easy for developers to build and maintain new platforms, with the ability to deploy serverless code in an instant across the globe. We developed new ways for our customers to protect their internal systems from attack with Zero Trust services. And we made it all as widely available as possible, constantly striving to provide accessible tools not only to the Fortune 1000 but also to the small businesses, nonprofits, and developers with ideas about how to build something new, creative, and good for the world.

It's not dissimilar to the story of another disruptive tech company that began a few years before we did. Shopify has been a long time Cloudflare customer using a number of our services, including our Workers developer platform. Their unofficial rallying cry of "arming the rebels" has always resonated with us.

In many ways, Shopify is to Amazon.com as Cloudflare is to Facebook. Both of the former providing the key infrastructure you need to innovate and then getting out of your way, both of the latter building a walled garden from which they can ultimately extract maximum rents.

Shopify framing their customers as the rebels taking on the Empire of Amazon is, of course, a reference to Star Wars and so it may not be surprising that we often talk internally about the Star Wars movies as a metaphor for the history of the Internet: past, present, and maybe future.

The first movie, Episode IV, was titled "A New Hope." The plot of that movie feels a lot like how the world experienced the Internet for the 40 years prior to 2016. There was this magical thing called the Force, and it was controlled by these incredible people called Jedi. Except instead of the Force it was the Internet and instead of Jedi it was programmers and network engineers.

It's easy to forget that it's the stuff of not-too-long-ago science fiction that you could have a device in your pocket that could access the sum of all human knowledge. And yet, there are now more smartphones in active use than humans on Earth. Neither of us feel all that old, yet we both grew up in a time when if you had an opinion and wanted to get it out to a broad audience you had to write it up, send it in as a letter to the editor, and hope that it would get published.

Today in the world of Twitter and TikTok that is almost unimaginably quaint. The Internet blew that all up, just as Luke blew up the Death Star, and it's hard to overstate how much that disrupted every traditional source of power and control.

But after Episode IV came Episode V: “The Empire Strikes Back.” And make no mistake, the traditional centers of control are working hard to find ways to control the Internet. While we think the shift came somewhere around 2016, it feels like in 2022 the Empire has discovered the rebel base on Hoth and the AT-ATs are closing in.

Episode V is a pretty dark movie. Spoiler alert for the small percentage of you who may not have seen it, but the hero realizes his mortal enemy is his father, loses his hand, his rogue friend is encased in carbonite, and the girl he likes sold into slug slavery shortly after she declares her love for not him but the about-to-be-carbonite-encased friend. But it's also the best movie because the stakes are so high.

The stakes are high for the Internet too, and we believe it's important for us to engage on the hard technology and policy issues. The next several years will be challenging as we rebuild the legacy protocols of the Internet to be more private and secure by design, so they can accommodate what the Internet has become, and wrestle with hard policy issues around respecting local laws and norms on a network that is inherently global. The team at Cloudflare comes to work every day appreciating the challenges and importance of what we need to help do to live up to our mission.

Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and we are proud that more than 20% of the web and 30% of the Fortune 1,000 relies on Cloudflare to be fast, reliable, secure, efficient, and private for whatever they are doing online. Throughout the year we have Innovation Weeks usually dedicated to new products to sell to our customers. But, during our Birthday Week, we give back with products and initiatives that aren’t designed to generate revenue, but instead we provide them because they improve the fundamentals of how the Internet works.

And so this year we'll be launching new services and partnerships to make the best security practices more affordable and bring them more easily to an increasingly mobile world. We're helping developers access more resources they need to deliver the next generation of applications. And we're launching privacy-preserving alternatives to widely used services because we believe a better Internet is a more private Internet.

We're not ready to declare that it's time for the Ewoks to start dancing, but we are proud of our continued innovation and the thoughtfulness of our team as we navigate these challenging times. Although the global economy continues to provide uncertain headwinds as we head into the new year, we are confident we have the plan and the team that will make us successful.

Thank you to our team, our customers, and our investors. Happy 12th birthday to Cloudflare. And, as always: we're just getting started.

This week we celebrate Cloudflare's birthday. We launched the company 11 years ago tomorrow: September 27, 2010. It has been our tradition, since our first birthday, to use this week to launch innovative new products that we think of as our gift back to the Internet.

Since going public, it's also been an opportunity for us to update our Annual Founders' Letter and share what's on our mind. Recently we've been thinking about three things: team, the Internet, and innovation.

When anyone asks us the key to Cloudflare's success, we always say the same thing: the team we've been able to attract to help us achieve our mission of helping build a better Internet. In the last year we've had more than 250,000 people apply to work for us and extended offers to less than one half of one percent of them. We continue to attract great people.

It's incredible to realize that more than half of Cloudflare's team today started since March 13, 2020, when we closed all our physical offices due to the pandemic. In the last several months, as we've started to see a light at the end of the COVID tunnel, we've been hosting what we called Summer Socials with our team. Getting together outside, often over a picnic lunch, it's been fun to meet face-to-face people we'd only video conferenced with before. And even more fun to watch people from across the team get to know each other outside the confines of a Brady Bunch-like on-screen box.

As a company that was very much a work-from-office culture before the pandemic, we were terrified of what would happen to our culture when we switched to fully remote work. Eighteen months into this forced experiment on a new way of working we're happy to report: it's working. Really well.

It turns out what we all suspected is in fact true. Culture has little to do with fun offices, plentiful snacks, or adjustable desks. Instead, for us, it starts with hiring people who are relentlessly curious and, at the same time, empathetic. Curious people want to learn. Empathetic people love to teach. And if you put a group of them together, whether in a swanky office or on Zoom, great things will happen.

As we come out the other side of COVID, we have an opportunity to help build a better way to work. It would be naive to insist that we go back to the way we did things before. We've been more productive, and on average our team has been happier in their jobs, than any time in the company's history. At the same time, we know there can be considerable value in coming together in person to solve hard problems, brainstorm about the future, and build relationships that make the company stronger.

We don't have all the answers on what the future of work looks like, but we've begun to formulate a place to start our experiments as people come back. We hope we can use the times we get together as ways to better collaborate and learn. But, at the same time, give our team the flexibility to work how and wherever they are the most productive.

Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. We always capitalize the I in Internet, in spite of what the AP style guide has said since 2016, because it's a proper noun, we believe there is and only should be one, and we have an enduring respect for what a miracle it is that it exists.

Right around the same time that the AP started to say that you needn't capitalize the I in Internet anymore, something seemed to change. The world shifted from seeing the Internet and what it enabled as an irreproachable good to a source of great danger.

We've watched the same thing. Since 2016 it's often felt like a connection to the Internet only brings cyberattacks, toxic social media, threats to democracy, increasing polarization, and a declining disdainful discourse.

We have real challenges ahead as some of the technologies that ride on top of the Internet have broken down traditional gatekeepers without sufficient concern for addressing the harms they previously protected against. But, at the same time, the Internet itself remains a miracle.

A mere 11 years before Cloudflare's founding, long distance phone calls still cost a fortune, sharing a photograph with someone in another country took weeks, and the idea that you could access the sum total of human knowledge from a device in your pocket was beyond even the fantasies of science fiction.

The last 18 months of the pandemic have reaffirmed our faith in the miracle that is the Internet. Imagine just how much worse it would have been had the pandemic happened just 11 years ago, let alone 22. The Internet allowed many of us to continue to work, connect with our loved ones, exercise our creativity, and stay connected to the world.

We're proud of what we've done to live up to our mission and help build a better Internet during this time. And, as we come out the other side, we will continue to engage with policy makers to address the new harms an interconnected world has brought while preserving the miracle that is the Internet itself.

The Internet may seem static, but it is not. 11 years ago, watching a video online was an exercise in frustration. Today, it seems almost automatic that you can push play on your TV and access nearly any movie ever made instantly. That's possible because the Internet isn't static; it gets better through innovation.

At Cloudflare, we're optimized to catalyze exactly that innovation. It starts with our mission: to help build a better Internet. The word "help" is important, because we know we can't do it alone. So, wherever we can, we work with others across the Internet ecosystem to push it forward and make it better.

Sometimes people outside the company are surprised by the products we build. In fact, predicting our roadmap is pretty easy. We look at all the steps that are required to load a web page, send an email, stream a video, login to a workstation, or anything else you do online and ask: can we make that more secure, more reliable, or faster?

What's exciting is that the pace at which the Internet is getting better is accelerating. And, in turn, the pace at which we are able to launch innovative new products is accelerating along with it. As the Internet grows and acquires more capabilities, we believe we will continue to grow with it. An investment in Cloudflare is, fundamentally, we feel an investment in the Internet itself.

And so, this week, we have an incredible series of announcements that are designed to help build a better Internet. We're entering a new area to close one of the last network security risks that we haven't historically protected our customers from, driving down costs of core cloud services, pushing the boundary of our network to our customers' doorsteps, and investing in new technologies that may someday disrupt the web as we know it today.

Thank you to our team, our customers, and our investors. Happy 11th birthday to Cloudflare. And, even as we pick up steam, we continue to believe: we're just getting started.

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010 — 10 years ago today. Stopping to look back over the last 10 years is challenging in some ways because so much of who we are has changed radically. A decade ago when we launched we had a few thousand websites using us, our tiny office was above a nail salon in Palo Alto, our team could be counted on less than two hands, and our data center locations on one hand.

Outside our first office in Palo Alto in 2010. Photo by Ray Rothrock.

As the company grew, it would have been easy to stick with accelerating and protecting developers and small business websites and not see the broader picture. But, as this year has shown with crystal clarity, we all depend on the Internet for many aspects of our lives: for access to public information and services, to getting work done, for staying in touch with friends and loved ones, and, increasingly, for educating our children, ordering groceries, learning the latest dance moves, and so many other things. The Internet underpins much of what we do every day, and Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet seems more and more important every day.

Over time Cloudflare has gone from an idea on a piece of paper to one of the largest networks in the world that powers millions of customers. Because we made our network to be flexible and programmable, what we’ve been able to do with it has expanded over time as well. Today we secure the Internet end-to-end — from companies’ infrastructure to individuals seeking a faster, more secure, more private connection. Our programmable, global network is at the core of everything we have been able to achieve so far.

This is also the approximate one-year anniversary of Cloudflare going public. At the time, we wrote our first founders' letter to the potential investors. We thought it made sense on this day, which we think of as our birthday, to reflect on the last year, as well as the last 10 years, and start a tradition of updating our original founders' letter on September 27th every year.

Ringing the bell to go public on the NYSE on September 13, 2019.

It's been quite a year for our business. Since our IPO, we've seen record expansion of new customers. That growth has come both from expanding our existing customers as well as winning new business from new customers.

The percentage of the Fortune 1,000 that pay for one or more of Cloudflare's services rose from 10% when we went public to more than 16% today. Across the web as a whole, according to W3Techs' data, over the last year Cloudflare has grown from 10.1% of the top 10 million websites using our services to 14.5% using them today. (Amazon CloudFront, in second place based on the number of websites they serve, grew from 0.8% to 0.9% over the same period.)

Every year to celebrate our birthday we've made it a tradition to launch products that surprise the market with new ways to expand how anyone can use our network. We think of them as gifts back to the Internet. Three years ago, for instance, we launched our edge computing platform called Workers. Today, just three years later, hundreds of thousands of developers are using Workers to build applications, many of which we believe would be impossible to build on any other platform.

This year we're once again launching a series of products to extend Cloudflare's capabilities and hopefully surprise and delight the Internet. One that we're especially excited about brings a new data model to Workers, allowing even more sophisticated applications to be built on the platform.

It is impossible to reflect on the last year and not see the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, our customers, our employees, as well our friends, colleagues, and loved ones in the greater community. It's heartening to think that for more than half of Cloudflare’s life as a public company our team has worked remote.

2020 was meant to be an Olympic year, but COVID-19 stopped that, like much else, from happening. Eight years ago, when Cloudflare was just two, the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, sent a message from the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. That message read “This is for everyone” and the idea that the Internet is for all of us continues to be a key part of Cloudflare's ethos today.

When we started Cloudflare we wanted to democratize what we thought were technologies only available to the richest and most Internet-focused organizations. We saw an opportunity to make available to everyone — from individual developers to small businesses to large corporations — the sorts of speed, protection, and reliability that, at the time, only the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook could afford.

Over 10 years we’ve consistently rolled out the latest technologies, typically ahead of the rest of the industry, to everyone. And in doing so we’ve attracted employees, individuals, developers, customers to our platform. The Internet is for everyone and we’ve shown that a business can be very successful when we aim to serve everyone — large and small.

Something Steve Jobs said back in 1988 still resonates: “If you want to make a revolution, you've got to raise the lowest common denominator in every single machine." Although we aren’t selling machines, we think that’s right: democratizing features matters.

Just look at the scourge of DDoS attacks. Why should DDoS attack mitigation be expensive when it’s a plague on companies large and small? It shouldn’t, and we optimized our business to make it inexpensive for us and passed that on to our customers through Unmetered DDoS Mitigation — another feature we rolled out to celebrate our Birthday Week three years ago.

In 2014, also during Birthday Week, we launched Universal SSL, making encryption — something that had been expensive and difficult — free for all Cloudflare customers. The week we launched it we doubled the size of the encrypted web. Let’s Encrypt followed shortly after and, together, we’ve brought encryption to more than 90% of the web and made the little padlock in your browser something everyone can afford and should expect.

Percent of the web served over HTTPS as reported by Google.

In January of this year, we rolled out Cloudflare for Teams. The product was designed to replace the legacy VPNs and firewalls that were increasingly anachronistic as work moved to the cloud. Little did we know how much COVID-19 would accelerate their obsolescence and make Cloudflare for Teams essential.

Both of us sat on call after call in mid-March with at first small, then increasingly mid-sized, and eventually large and even governmental organizations who reached out to us looking for a way to survive as their teams shifted to working from home and their legacy hardware couldn't keep up. We made the decision to sacrifice short term profits in order to help businesses large and small get through this crisis by making Cloudflare for Teams free through September.

As we said during our Q1 earnings call, the superheros of this crisis are the medical professionals and scientists who are taking care of the sick and looking for a cure to the disease. But the faithful sidekick throughout has been the Internet. And, as one of the guardians of the Internet, we're proud of helping ensure it was fast, secure, and reliable around the world when it was needed most. We are proud of how Cloudflare's products could help the businesses continue to get work done during this unprecedented time by leaning even more on the Internet.

Giving back to the Internet is core to who we are, and we do not shy away from a challenge. And there are many challenges ahead. In a little over a month, the United States will hold elections. After the 2016 elections we, along with the rest of the world, were concerned to see technology intended to bring people together instead be used to subvert the democratic process. We decided we needed to do something to help prevent that from happening again.

Three and a half years ago, we launched the Athenian Project to provide free cybersecurity resources to any local, state, or federal officials helping administer elections in the United States. We couldn't have built Cloudflare into the company it is today without a stable government as a foundational platform. And, when that foundation is challenged, we believe it is our duty to lend our resources to defend it.

Today, we're helping secure election infrastructure in more than half of the states in the United States. And, over these last weeks before the election, our team is working around the clock to help ensure the process is fair and not disrupted by cyber attacks.

More challenges lie ahead and we won’t shy away from them. Well intentioned governments around the world are increasingly seeking to regulate the Internet to protect their citizens. While the aims are noble, the risk is creating a patchwork of laws that only the Internet giants can successfully navigate. We believe it is critical for us to engage in the conversations around these regulations and work to help ensure as operating online becomes more complex, we can continue to make the opportunities of the Internet created for us when we started Cloudflare available to future startups and entrepreneurs.

Over the last 10 years, it's been sad to watch some of the optimism around technology seem to fade. The perception of technology companies shifted from their being able to do no wrong to, today, their being able to do no right. And, as we've watched the industry develop, we've sympathized with that shift. Too many tech companies have abused customer data, ignored rules, violated privacy, and not been good citizens to the communities in which they operate and serve.

But we continue to believe what we started Cloudflare believing 10 years ago: the Internet itself is a force for good worth fighting to defend. We need to keep striving to make the Internet itself better — always on, always fast, always secure, always private, and available to everyone.

It's striking to think how much more disruptive the COVID-19 crisis could have been had it struck in 2010 not 2020. The difference today is a better Internet. We're proud of the role we've played in helping build that better Internet.

And, ten years in, we're just getting started.