Bernard L. Schwartz Annual Lecture With Matthew Prince of Cloudflare

Cloudflare Cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince discusses developments in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity technologies, countering national security threats and advancing technological research through public-private partnerships, and his perspective on navigating geopolitical crises as the leader of a multinational company.

The Bernard L. Schwartz Annual Lecture on Economic Growth and Foreign Policy series focuses on two areas: the evolution of the relationship between business and government in the making of foreign policy, and ways for government to make better use of business in solving foreign policy problems.

RUBENSTEIN: OK. Have your attention, please? We’re going to get started. So I am David Rubenstein. I have the honor and privilege of serving as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. And I assume everybody here is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Is anybody not a member of the Council of Foreign Relations? (Laughter.) OK.

We’re going to have the annual Bernard Schwartz Lecture this afternoon. Bernard Schwartz, for those people that don’t know, was a gifted entrepreneur, friend of mine. He built a company called Loral into one of the more significant aerospace defense companies in the United States, and was a very, very committed philanthropist and to a wide variety of causes. Passed away in March of last year at the age of ninety-eight. And he was very, very, I think, philanthropic with respect to the Council on Foreign Relations. And this lecture is in his honor.

Our guest to perform the lecture, which is really an interview, is Matthew Prince. Matthew Prince has an incredible background. Let me just go through it very briefly. He’s a native of Utah. Went to college in the east coast, at Trinity, where he was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper for the Trinity College in Connecticut. He then went to my alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School. And like me, he decided maybe he didn’t want to practice law, but he—after he graduated he did some other technology-related things. And then went to another place that has a pretty good reputation, called Harvard Business School. And at Harvard Business School he met some other people who helped him ultimately start a company in 2010 called Cloudflare, which today has a market capitalization of $42 billion. Now, the company is now just fifteen years old, a market cap of $42 billion. Not bad. And he’s the—as I say, the cofounder and the CEO. And we’re very honored that you come here today. And he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well.

So thanks very much for coming.

PRINCE: Thanks for having me.

RUBENSTEIN: So you went to a good law school, and you didn’t practice law. You went to a very good business school, and you didn’t go join McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, or every other place that people seem to go. How did you come to the life of starting a technology company? And we’ll talk about the company in a moment. But how did you go from Utah to starting this company without being Indian, Stanford graduate, or having the usual background that people have who start technology companies?

PRINCE: (Laughs.) I have actually applied to Stanford five times, including summer camp, and was literally rejected five times from Stanford. But they were—they were a small investor in Cloudflare early on, so I’ve made them tens of millions of dollars, even having been rejected from the school sometimes. So hopefully someday my kids will get some benefit from that. (Laughter.)

RUBENSTEIN: OK. I’m sure that’ll be the case. Look, John Doerr told me that he was rejected at Stanford Business School. He went to Harvard Business School. But he gave Stanford $1.2 billion to start a school. So I’m sure they won’t remind you that they rejected you, and they’ll probably come after you as well.

PRINCE: So we’ll see. But you know, I think it—when I was six, in 1980, my grandmother gave me an Apple II plus for Christmas. And I remember just taking to it like a duck to water. And grew up in Utah. And the University of Utah has an incredible computer science program. My mom would take—sign up for continuing education classes in computer science. And I would basically do the homework for her. And so had done that, and went to—went to college thinking I was going to study computer science. And, as an arrogant kid, you know, got into, you know, computer science, you know, 101 and was just bored out of my mind, because I’d already taken all of the things. And came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything there for me to learn.

So I actually switched my major from computer science to, you know, the highly lucrative field of English literature, and did that. But at the same time, this was in the early ’90s. And the school—the internet was just starting to really develop. The school was looking for students on campus who understood networking, understood computers. And so I got hired as one of the first student network administrators. And that helped me learn about how networks work, and I would do that. We also negotiated—there were three of us—we negotiated that we got first choice in the dormitory lottery. So we got to pick whatever room we had on campus, which was the biggest benefit of it.

And when I got to the end of college, I had job offers, you know, from Microsoft, Netscape, Yahoo, to be a product manager. And I didn’t actually know what a product manager was. And I thought, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in front of a computer or writing code. I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to law school. And I was pretty good at—

RUBENSTEIN: Nothing adds more to value to society than having more lawyers.

PRINCE: Yes, exactly. That’s right. And I—and what I didn’t understand until a few weeks into law school was that what lawyers do is not what you saw on Perry Mason. But what lawyers do is sit in front of a computer writing code, but they don’t have a debugger. (Laughter.) And it was at that same time that the internet was just taking off. It was 1997. The internet was just taking off. And I thought, wow, I made a just terrible mistake. But I’ll fix it. And I thought I would actually go work as a securities lawyer. I actually interned in summer of ’99 at Latham & Watkins out in San Francisco. We took six companies public over the summer. My plan was I was going to go help, you know, companies go public, and then I’d find one that was really great, work for maybe six years at the firm, and then go in-house and work for a, you know, hot, fast-growing, you know, technology company.

And then went back to school. Third year of law school, which is kind of a total waste of time. And was sitting around when a call from Latham came and said, hey, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the whole dot-com bubble has burst. We don’t need any more securities lawyers, but we have lots of room in the bankruptcy practice, and it’s basically the same thing. (Laughter.) Which, look, I actually today kind of—that’s true, from a lawyer’s perspective, but not from a perspective if you’re going to plan to join the firm that is your client, since that firm won’t exist after the bankruptcy happened, And I didn’t know what to do. So I—and so I was talking to a young law professor who was there. And his brother was starting a startup that raised $6 million. They were doing a B2B insurance benefits brokerage. And they said, hey, we’ll match your salary from Latham, which was what seemed like an extraordinary amount of money to me at the time. And we’ll give you this thing called stock. And I was like, sure, that seems great.

And in eighteen months, that company blew up in a million different ways. But it was so addicting to be at a place where a group of people from what was just a blank piece of paper, you know, created something. And I remember being really struck that, you know, we lost the $6 million, but we did—there was no fraud. There was nothing that was wrong. It just it didn’t work. And the investor—no one went to jail. Like, the investors were like, oh, that sucks. If you do something else, let us know. And I remember thinking, huh, that’s interesting. That was kind of fun. And, again, no one went to jail. And so then I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out could I—could I do that again.

RUBENSTEIN: When you went to Harvard Business School, and you were a Baker Scholar, which means you’re in the top 5 percent of your class, so you must have done pretty well at business school. When you graduated did you then say, I’m going to start my own company?

PRINCE: Yeah. So, first of all, like, how I got to business school—I had—after the startup blew up, I actually tried to go back to law firms. And I was kind of off the track and I couldn’t find my way back in. And so I tried to do a bunch of other things. I tried to actually teach in the Chicago Public School system. And they said, you have a law degree, so we don’t trust—the union doesn’t trust that you won’t do something—(laughter)—you know, they literally wouldn’t let me be a teacher, even though there was this massive shortage of computer science and math teachers, and I’d done well on all the exams. I taught LSAT prep courses and GMAT prep courses. I worked as a bartender for a while. And I worked at a—I got an adjunct professor job at a law school that is so bad that it doesn’t exist anymore.

And so that was—I was—I was trying to figure anything else out. And I started a company at that time that didn’t really succeed. Meanwhile, my dad had a bunch of really bad restaurants. And, again, he had provided for us as a family. You know, we were—we were a solidly upper-middle class family. And, you know, anything we had ever needed to do with education or anything, he’d always been an incredible provider. But he was getting older. And he called me. And he said, well, you know, nothing you’re doing is working all that well. I’m getting older. I’ve got this series of bad restaurants—and when I say bad, he owned the only Hooters in Utah. (Laughter.) So pretty bad. And I remember him saying, I need you to come take over the family business.

And I was, like, well, what about my younger sister? And he’s, like, she’s a fashion designer. That’s not going to work. And I remember sitting in my apartment in Chicago, and having—starting on a second bottle of wine thinking, what am I going to do? Because I really don’t want to run my father’s Hooters. And I thought, I know what I’ll do. I’ll apply to business school. So I applied to eight business schools. Ended up getting rejected from seven of them, including Stanford. Got into HBS. Called my dad and said, hey, I can’t run the Hooters because I’ve got to go to business school. He’s like, that’s a great idea. Went off there. And I spent that entire two years trying to find anything else that I could do. And Cloudflare had to succeed, because otherwise I’d be the general manager of my father’s Hooters.

RUBENSTEIN: So is that still around?

PRINCE: No.

RUBENSTEIN: OK, so—

PRINCE: And he is—and he is—and even though he’s made more money off of being a small shareholder in Cloudflare than he ever did in the restaurants, he’s still a little bit resentful. (Laughter.)

RUBENSTEIN: So for those people, like me, who are not technology aficionados—I’m what I call a last adopter. I would still be using a BlackBerry if, like, I could find the parts for it. What does Cloudflare actually do?

PRINCE: (Laughs.) At a very, very, very simple level, Cloudflare makes the internet faster and protects it from bad guys. That’s what Cloudflare does. At a slightly more detailed level, in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, when the original internet protocols were being laid down, they never thought about things like how do we make this more secure, how do we make this, you know, more efficient, how do we make sure that no matter what, anywhere in the world, it’s going to be incredibly reliable, how do we—how do we actually make sure that it’s going to be as performant, as fast as possible? Those were all kind of afterthoughts. It was kind of, like, let’s just get this done, and see if this science experiment works.

And as a result, we have all these holes, especially around security but also around performance and reliability and just cost. It’s way too—I mean, it’s amazing that we’ve gotten six billion people connected to the internet today, but to get those last two billion people connected we’re going to have to actually drive the costs of that connectivity way, way down. And those were just not really thought about in the original protocols. And so what Cloudflare is doing is we run a giant network that is essentially an overlay on top of the internet. And we solve those problems. And whether that’s adding security, making sure that we stay in front of things like, as you know, quantum—as quantum computing is coming online, how do we make sure that encryption standards keep up with the new technology which is coming? That’s what we are doing every single day.

RUBENSTEIN: So how many employees do you have?

PRINCE: About 4,500.

RUBENSTEIN: And most of them are technology geeks who can program, coding and other things? Is that what they are? You wouldn’t hire anybody like you, would you?

PRINCE: We hire a lot of people like me. But I would have a very hard time getting a job at Cloudflare today.

RUBENSTEIN: So explain this to me. I’m not a technology expert, but some—my people are always coming to me saying, you got to make your computer secure, make sure nobody’s eavesdropping, and so forth. Who are the people that are trying to get into my computer? Are they people that are just trying to have fun and just see if they can get into it? Are they people from Korea or Iran who just want to cause problems for my business? Are they people that are trying from foreign governments to kind of get some secret information? Who are the people that do—or the ransomware people? Who are the people that are the most active and most sophisticated in breaking into computers like mine, or anybody else’s here?

PRINCE: So the answer for you is probably all of the above, in terms of that. In terms of kind of from least sophisticated to most sophisticated, constantly there are systems online that are scanning around anything connected to the internet looking for anything which is not particularly secure in order to be able to take that thing over. And the reason that happens is nothing personal. It’s not about you, in that particular case. In this case—in the least-sophisticated case, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to build up a bunch of resources online that these people can resell to more sophisticated people. And the reason they want to resell that is that if that camera in the corner is compromised, or, you know, if one of your laptops is compromised, that can be a jumping off point. We’ve all seen that terrible movie where it’s like he’s bouncing his signal through six different relays so we can’t tell where he actually is. That actually happens. People bounce their connections through that camera or through something else in order to hide what their actual identity is.

RUBENSTEIN: How do I know that my computer has been invaded? I’m monitoring my computer. I’m doing whatever I’m doing. Is there any signal that I can get that somebody has invaded it? Or do I need your software to make sure that it hasn’t been invaded?

PRINCE: Yeah. So we’re—so we don’t do as much on keeping your computer itself safe. We are much more about the network that’s there. We partner with organizations like a CrowdStrike, or a Symantec, or others that really focus on making sure the device itself is secure. From our perspective, what we would notice is across the network we would see your computer doing things that, like, well, you know, David gets up and he reads the New York Times, and he reads the Wall Street Journal, and reads the FT, and he does all these things that are normal. If all of a sudden he’s going, you know, to, like, launch, you know, a million requests to some Chinese gaming site, we think that doesn’t quite make sense for what we would expect from this.

And what we would then pick up is that signal which would say, something has gone wrong on your device. And what you as an individual user would see is all of a sudden we might be saying, hey, before you can go anywhere online prove that you’re a human in a sort of way. And, you know, you’ve all seen the Google version of this, where it’s, like, click on the traffic lights or the crosswalks. We try to make that a little bit less sort of obnoxious, and a little bit less painful. But behind the scenes, we’re doing the same thing. We’re trying to figure out that your machine is actually being used by David, and not by an illegal actor.

RUBENSTEIN: But your clients are big companies that have networks. So it’s not me personally, but it’s my company might be a client. So and you are—how many different networks or do you have around the United States that you’re operating?

PRINCE: Yeah, so we run one network ourselves that is—that has presence in more than 350 cities and, you know, thousands of actual datacenters. And then we interconnect with essentially every other network on Earth. So about 60,000 different networks that we will then connect to.

RUBENSTEIN: So has your computer ever been hacked, that you know of?

PRINCE: We have—we’ve had incidents where there was a kid who bought my Social Security number off of a Russian website. The Russian hacking group had gotten that from Wells Fargo, that they had hacked. And I had a mortgage through Wells Fargo, so they had my Social Security number. He then used my Social Security number in order to convince Google to redirect—or, actually, excuse me—to convince AT&T, who was my cellphone provider, to redirect my cellphone to a voicemail box that he controlled. Once he had control of that, he initiated a password reset on my personal Gmail, which Google then called that, got the voicemail box, and he walked basically the Google agent through resetting it.

He was then in my personal email. He used that to privilege escalate, using a zero-day vulnerability in Google’s corporate email system, to get into our corporate email. From that—I was an administrator on that—he then got into one of our administrators’ email accounts. And then went in and redirected one of our customers to a website that he controlled. It was a fifteen-year-old kid. This is in the—this was both sophisticated, but also just a kid screwing around. He could have redirected the Central Bank of Brazil, or the FBI, or a number of things. He instead went after a site called 4Chan, which is basically just a bunch of miscreants doing miscreant things.

RUBENSTEIN: So what happened to this person?

PRINCE: He was fifteen.

RUBENSTEIN: Now he’s a member of Congress, or something? (Laughter.)

PRINCE: No. (Laughs.) No, actually, stranger still, last I heard he is now a professional male model. (Laughter.) Which, I mean, not the end of the story I would have predicted.

RUBENSTEIN: OK. So let me ask you, today—I used to read about ransomware a lot. People were calling up. It’s often from Russia, or they were getting into somebody’s system. And they say, we promise we won’t disclose this information if you pay us X million dollars. And a lot of people paid. And a lot of people who did pay didn’t seem to have the information made public. So this system continued. But I don’t read much about it anymore. Is that because people don’t want to talk about it, or has ransomware gone away?

PRINCE: It’s still very much a business. I think it was—a lot of the ransomware gangs were actually made up of both Russians and Ukrainians. And they were—and so you saw a dip in the amount of ransomware that was going out in the early 2022 timeframe as the gangs literally tore themselves apart. And a lot of the gangs actually, as they were falling apart, the Ukrainian side was actually releasing all the secrets and the decryption keys to be able to do that. We are seeing those now reform as some purely Ukrainian, some purely Russian gangs. But a lot of that activity happened in that part of the world. And while there’s, you know, incredible tragedy that has come out of—out of the war in Ukraine, one of the—one of the consequences has been a decrease, although we’re seeing it ramp back up again, in the ransomware attacks.

RUBENSTEIN: So the United States government often says that certain governments, Korean or Iranian, are invading our computers and trying to get information. But we don’t talk about much the fact that we’re pretty good at that too. So we presumably go after other governments as well. Here’s what I don’t understand. That they—the people who are really good at this are really brilliant people, and they often go to great schools. They could get jobs anywhere. How does the U.S. government and NSA or CIA get people who are paid government salaries where they could go to Google and get—or Cloudflare—and get salaries here? How does the government hold on to these people who have the technical skills necessary to do that kind of stuff, but they’re commercially more valuable than they’re going to be paid at the CIA or NSA? Is that a problem or not?

PRINCE: I think it is a problem. I think, though, that what I have found—and has surprised me, honestly—is there’s—because a lot of the developers who work for Cloudflare could probably make a lot more working for Carlyle, and yet they stay at Cloudflare. And the question is why. And I think it’s the same question of why do they, you know, stay in the U.S. government and not go to Cloudflare, or to Google, or to anyone else. And, you know, at business school there were professors—like, leadership professors would say, you know, mission matters. And I remember thinking that’s total BS. And I really thought that the missions of most companies—and I actually still think this is true—the missions of most companies were made up by the marketing team and were there to just attract employees, but they were kind of BS at the end of the day. And so we didn’t have one in the beginning. Our mission was to take advantage of this unique opportunity in the marketplace, and hopefully, you know, make it so I didn’t have to go work for my dad’s bad restaurants.

And that was, you know, very much what we were doing. At some point though because of the way we went to market, where in order to build Cloudflare we needed not Fortune 500 companies but we needed small companies to sign up, because we were flaky in the beginning, we provided—and we thought it was going to be small businesses. But what happened was every humanitarian, every civil society organization in the world had small budgets but big security problems. And we were perfect for them. And it was just amazing. Day after day after day we get these stories of how we had helped protect these organizations.

And out of that Cloudflare’s mission came of how can we help build a better internet? And it’s really deep into our DNA. And so what I see from the best people on our team, what I see from the best people at the NSA or the CIA, is they are very mission-oriented. I mean, mission matters often more—like, they want to be treated fairly in terms of what they’re paid, but they want to make it so that the work that they’re doing really matters. And I think it’s part of the reason we get—we get—last year we got 1.5 million people that applied for a thousand jobs. Which is extraordinary. I mean, that’s, again, much—I would never get hired at Cloudflare today. And that’s—and that’s that is an order of magnitude bigger than most of our peers—

RUBENSTEIN: Well, the thousand you hire, are they computer geeks from Stanford? Are they—you know, what are—what’s their background? You’re looking for somebody who’s a brilliant technology person, or a humanist? What are you actually looking for?

PRINCE: So we really—we look for, across the board, three things. First—or four things. First, we care about the mission a ton. So you’ve got to believe in the mission. If you’re like, eh, internet, take it or leave it, we’re not the right place for you. But if you think the internet is one of the great human inventions, it’s under real risk and real threat today, and it deserves somebody who’s fighting for it and protecting it—which, by the way, you haven’t heard a lot of people say the internet is good since 2016. Prior to 2016, everyone was like, wow, the internet’s a miracle. Since 2016 everybody’s like, oh, the internet’s nothing but problems. I think the internet is a miracle. And we want people who want to fight for it.

Second, we look for people who are radically curious and radically empathetic. And curious, easy to understand. Empathy—I think, fundamentally, empathy is an understanding that you don’t know everything yourself and you’re better as part of a team of people who are different than you, than people who are—than on your own, or a whole bunch of people who are the same. And then above all of it, sort of the capstone for us is what Michelle—and what’s more appropriate for me to say on this stage—should say, get stuff done. I replace the S with a different word. But that’s the way that we really think. It’s, like, who are the people who actually get things done? And then we have people who have multiple Ph.D.s sitting next to people who didn’t graduate from high school. But if they believe in the mission, if they’re curious, they’re empathetic—like, we’ve got plenty of people from Stanford, but we really tried hard not to have one particular type we hire for.

RUBENSTEIN: So, not them drop a name, but Jeff Bezos once said to me when I was interviewing him—he said that AWS, which is their cloud computing business, which was started as a way to use excess capacity—he said normally in the technology world you have a two-year head start before somebody realized you’ve done something. But he said he had a seven-year head start when he started AWS. It took a while for people to catch up. Is that your main competitor? Who is your main competitor right now?

PRINCE: Yeah. I think that Amazon is the company that I spend the most time thinking about. And I think they’re just a company that I admire so much, how they have thought about how you take every single cost in your business and turn that into an opportunity. And I think we try and replicate those things. We are very different businesses, fundamentally. I think businesses have personalities. They map to personalities inside of companies, at some level. Amazon is very much—if you’ve worked in technology, for those of you who are in the room, if you’ve worked with a DBA, a database administrator, Amazon is fundamentally, as a business, like a DBA. They want all the data to be inside of that, and the database is the center of everything, and they’re trying to hoard as much data as possible. What they do around networking is just to service getting data into the database.

We’re a—and database administrators, if you work with them, have their own quirks. And they’re often difficult people. There are other difficult people, which are often the network administrators. We are much more like a network administrator. We see the data as something that we’re about moving across it. And, yes, the database might be one of the destinations, but it’s different. As a result of that, our priorities are different. Amazon is better at databases than we are. We’re better at networks than they are. And I think while we compete kind of at the margins, and definitely the company that we compete with the most, I think there’s a role for both of us to play.

RUBENSTEIN: So tell me why I shouldn’t dislike you. (Laughter.) You’re very successful. You’re very wealthy. You’re happily married. You have two little kids. Your parents are alive. You know, you’ve got all the money you could possibly spend. Why shouldn’t I be upset that somebody is so successful compared to me? So why would—(laughter)—I mean, you ever realize how lucky you are? And how are you going to top what you’ve done in your first fifty years?

PRINCE: I don’t think I am. And, I mean, I feel incredibly lucky. And, you know, I think people ask me what the thing I’m most proud of at Cloudflare is. And I think—and I it sounds flip when I say it—but I say, you know, the fact that Michelle, my cofounder, and I, you know, still talk to each other, because that’s such an incredible privilege. And having built companies, you know, there can be these incredible tensions between the people who started. And you hear about, you know, how these things all break apart. And the fact that we, I think, are closer today and more excited to work with each other today than ever before, is, I think, just an incredible privilege.

RUBENSTEIN: So where’d you get the name Cloudflare? Did that come—(snaps fingers)—hit you right in the middle of the night? Or did you have a name consultant? Or how’d that come about?

PRINCE: (Laughs.) I was dating a woman who was a Ph.D. in English literature writing her thesis on Shakespeare. And we were riffing on a firewall in the cloud. And she said, what about Cloudflare? And I looked it up and the domain wasn’t registered. What I didn’t realize is that in English saying “cl” and “fl” next to each other is really hard. So everyone mispronounces us as “cloud fair.” For a long time we didn’t register that domain. It took us a long time to get that.

RUBENSTEIN: Did she get a royalty for this name, or no?

PRINCE: She gets—she should have negotiated better, but all she asked for was, “swag for life.” So she has a lot of Cloudflare T-shirts. (Laughter.)

RUBENSTEIN: OK. So what is your ambition now? You’re in your early fifties. You’re very successful. Unlimited amount of money relative to everybody else in the country, except for maybe Elon Musk. And you’ve got a great company. It’s doing well. What more do you want to accomplish with your life? Do you want to go into government? Would you like to run for office? Be a Cabinet officer? Just be a fulltime philanthropist? What do you really want to do in the next half of your life?

PRINCE: Well, the first thing is I think we’ve still got a lot to do at Cloudflare. The internet is a miracle, but it’s not inevitable. There is no institution in the world that is more globalist than the internet. And it’s not a popular time to be globalist. And so around the world, the internet is very much at risk. For a long time, there were two models of internet governance. There was the U.S. model that almost everyone followed, which was kind of everyone connects to everything. And we regulated a little bit, but fairly lightly.

And then there was this Chinese model, which was fully—in order to be online, it has to be permission based. And for a long time, the Chinese model didn’t make sense to me. And someone finally said, it’s like the FCC. You have to have a license to put up a radio station. In China, you have to have a license to put up a website. And then you have a certain set of rules that are a part of that, some of which are technical, some of which are political. And, you know, in China the rules are things, like, you can’t advocate overthrowing the government. Which, again, as a U.S. citizen, I’m like, well, that’s absurd. And the Chinese people were, like, well yeah, but you put up a radio site and there are seven words you can’t say online. That’s absurd, too. Ours is at least a little bit less absurd. I’m, like, yeah, it’s kind of true.

But it’s—but those were the two models. And the world flocked to the U.S. Starting with Snowden, following up with, you know, a lot of what happened in 2016, around the world—not just in the U.S.—that mode switched. And the world is looking for a different model to how to govern. And in Iran, in Russia, in Turkey, to a lesser extent or different extent in India, to a lesser and different extent in Brazil, people are now saying, well, maybe that Chinese model is more of what we should follow. Maybe we should try and build that. That’s out there. And, you know, for a long time I always thought of Cloudflare as sort of the plucky little brother with five big brothers. And we could kind of pick a fight and then they would help us finish it. And those five big brothers were Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook/Meta. And regardless of what you think of those companies, those companies have been the defenders of the internet.

And we—about a year and a half ago we lost—we and Google were sued in France over a product that we give away for free, which is a DNS resolver product. For those of you who are technical we have a product called 1.1.1.1, which is an IP address. And it helps make sure that everything you do online is a little bit faster. And, again, we just give it away for free to consumers. And we were sued in a French court. And the French court basically said, we’re going to make a list of websites. And if we put a website on that list you have twenty-four hours to block it. And if you don’t block it, you’re going to face a fine. Block it globally. And, again, these aren’t even customers of ours. These are—these are just things that get blocked. Google lost the case as well. They have a similar service called 8.8.8.8. For 1.1.1.1, we do about a trillion—actually, two trillion now inquiries, requests to this service every single day. But Google does twenty trillion. So we’re still much younger brother.

What’s terrifying about that to me, in the first order, is that this is a French court in a small county in France that has said that they have the right to decide what can and cannot be on the internet globally. And that’s incredibly disturbing. And so we called Google up and we said, hey, big brother. Like, we know how to fight this. Let’s go in, you know, across the air traffic control system, the train system, the government, they all use our services. Let’s just say that in thirty days if we don’t find a resolution here we’re just going to turn them off in France. And the Google team said, you’re absolutely right. This is a terrible ruling. But we don’t have the appetite for another fight right now. And so good luck, but you’re on your own.

And we hear something similar from Apple. And we hear something similar from Facebook/Meta. And we hear something similar from Microsoft and Amazon. And I think that, you know, it’s a little bit like the Lilliputians, that they’ve gotten kind of pulled down, these internet giants, by all of the different nicks and cuts of regulation around the world. And, again, that might be right. That might be fair. They may have made mistakes that they should be punished for. But the consequence is that no one is standing up for the internet today. And so I think what I hope, in both what I’m doing at Cloudflare and what I’m doing outside, is that that we will be one of—and, boy, I hope somebody else joins us—but we will be one of the voices that still says the internet is a miracle, it needs to be fought for, the U.S. model for regulating the internet is the best model for the future, that internet is good for U.S. interests globally, and we need to start fighting more for it.

RUBENSTEIN: Wow. OK. It’s a big mission. So we have time for questions now. Just please stand if you can, or if you don’t want to just raise your hand, and identify your name and the organization you’re with. So right here first, and then we’ll go here and there. OK.

Q: Bill Drozdiak. I’m an author and journalist.

How do you think AI is going to transform your business? And do you think, in contrast, that there is much too much hype surrounding that subject, and that it won’t pay off in commercial businesses?

PRINCE: So, from most boring to maybe most interesting. Most boring, we use AI to help our customer support agents answer questions better. Doesn’t mean we don’t hire customer support agents. We still do, but they’re better at their jobs because we use it to predict when a client is going to pay their bills late, or when they might want to upgrade. And it’s been actually really helpful for us. We also, at some level, Cloudflare’s always been an AI company. We would never describe it that way, but the whole philosophy was can you get a giant stream of data flowing through, run that through machine learning algorithms, and then predict what security threats or what routes are the most efficient across the internet?

In the same way that I think all of us about two years ago had that moment of playing with ChatGPT and going, oh my gosh, about two years ago our machine learning systems internally started to identify cybersecurity threats online that no human had identified before. And it was one of those sort of, like, whoa, that’s pretty amazing. And that has gone from something that was—had never happened before, to now is happening on a daily basis across our systems. And so that means that because so many people use Cloudflare, we can help using those systems to analyze just an inconceivably large flow of data in a way that—and machine learning systems help you do that. And in the parlance of today, that’s AI.

I think the—then there are other things, where you can run AI inference now inside of Cloudflare’s network, and then do that around the world. I think that most AI inference will happen on the device that you have, but there will always be some model which is too big or too power consumptive to run on your phone or in your driverless car. In that case, we’re the next best place to run it, because we’ll be a few milliseconds away from whatever your device is, and you don’t have to ship that back to Ashburn, Virginia or The Dalles in Oregon. You can do that locally globally. And that’s something that we’re able to provide.

I think the most interesting thing, though, in AI that I’m thinking about is AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last fifteen years has been search. One way or another, search drives everything that happens online. And if you look back ten years ago, if you did a search on Google you got back a list of ten blue links. And we have data on how Google processed those ten blue links. And the answer was that for every two pages of a website that Google scraped they would send you one visitor, right? So scrape two pages, get one visitor. And that was the trade. Over that period of time of the ten years some things have changed at Google. One thing that hasn’t changed is the crawl rate. They’re still scraping at the exact same rate that they have over that period of time. But now it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor.

What’s changed? The answer is that today, 75 percent of the queries that get put into Google get answered without you leaving Google, get answered on that page. So if you want to ask, when did David Rubenstein start Carlyle? About ten years ago it would take you to maybe a Wikipedia page or something else. Today, the answer comes up right on the page, and you don’t have to go anywhere else. The consequence of that means that original content creators that are creating that content, if they were deriving value through selling subscriptions or putting up ads, or just the ego of knowing that someone is reading your stuff, that’s gone, right? That’s has fallen off a cliff. And that’s the good news. So it was two to one ten years ago for Google. It’s six to one today. What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one, right?

And so the business model of the web can’t survive unless there’s some change, because more and more the answers to the questions that you ask won’t lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source. And if content creators can’t derive value from what they’re doing, then they’re not going to create original content. And I think the smartest AI companies out there, Sam Altman at OpenAI and others, get that. But at the same time, he can’t be a sucker. He can’t be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free. And so something has to change with that business model. And we sit in between 80 percent of the AI companies use Cloudflare, similar—you know, 20 to 30 percent of the web uses Cloudflare. And so we sit in the middle of that. And I think part of what we’re thinking about is that.

In terms of, is AI a fad, is it overhyped? I think the answer is probably yes and no. I would guess that 99 percent of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1 percent is going to be incredibly valuable. And I can’t tell you what 1 percent of that is. And so maybe we’ve all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that one dollar that matters.

RUBENSTEIN: Right. Can you just identify yourself and organization.

Q: Alan Raul. Practicing lawyer and lecturer at Harvard Law.

And, by the way, I’m really surprised your lawyer lets you talk about that fifteen-year-old who compromised your system. So we should have a talk. (Laughter.)

So, back a number of years ago the federal government introduced a technology called EINSTEIN that it applied to federal government networks to try to protect it from malicious traffic, to identify and block or disrupt, you know, cyberattacks coming online. Is there any promise of a network-based technology that could be applied more broadly than EINSTEIN was, with regard to the federal government systems, that would, you know, be attached to the network and could identify malicious traffic in order to, you know, block it, identify it, disrupt it, or, you know, do something to reduce the scourge of cyberattacks that are being transmitted from Russia, China, you know, Iran, North Korea?

PRINCE: So let me answer the first question quickly—or the question you asked quickly, and then actually talk about your first—the first thing you said, which is more interesting. I mean, the answer is Cloudflare. I mean, that’s what we do, is we do that. And we work with DHS and a number of federal agencies to do that as well. We don’t have as cute a name as EINSTEIN, but that’s fine.

Your first question, though, is actually the more interesting one, which is why did our lawyers let us talk about hacking events? I think what the most valuable thing about me having gone to the University of Chicago Law School is that I can push back when lawyers get overly conservative. (Laughter.) Dead serious. And I think that fundamentally, Cloudflare is in the business of trust. And we have to be trusted. We ask you to do something pretty crazy, which is route all of your network traffic through us. And you have to be trustworthy. I am the, I believe, largest gifter of Aristotle’s Politics to others, because I send copies of it out. And it was the thing that I was reading as I was trying to think about how do you actually build trust? And that was all about how governments build trust, but actually organizations like technology companies, I think a lot of the AI companies today, could learn from what that is.

And Aristotle really focuses on three things. It’s transparency, consistency, and accountability. And so we try to be just radically transparent. When we have a mistake, we outline every single aspect of what went wrong. And it’s uncomfortable. And it feels very, very embarrassing. But I think the biggest mistake that technology companies make today—it that goes back to Fairchild Semiconductor and a lot of things, is this sort of cult of secrecy that is out there. And the best thing that technology companies could do to actually reengage and be trustworthy again is be transparent. And we’re not perfect. And we make mistakes. And these issues are hard. And we don’t always get it right. And sometimes we have outages. And when we have outages, bad things happen.

I remember getting a call from one of our customers who—when we were having an outage. And he said, when is it going to be fixed? I’m like, it’s coming back online. We’re so sorry. He said, that’s good, because there are certain planes in the air that can’t land if your network isn’t offline, and they’re running out of fuel. So we take this super seriously, but we also think that we have to be incredibly trustworthy. And trustworthy requires transparency, even when it makes it lawyers uncomfortable.

RUBENSTEIN: OK. So what we have one more—any question here? OK. One more question here. And then we’ll go over here next. Over here—one more question here, then there. OK, go ahead.

Q: Thank you. Galen Hines-Pierce with the Minerva Fund.

And my question is just could you speak a little bit about the space internet constellation race. You were talking about the fracturing of the internet with terrestrial internet. How and if that’s intersecting with some of the things you’re seeing and thinking about keeping the internet open, free, and global?

PRINCE: Yeah, I mean it’s—so we have a—we know the SpaceX team pretty well. We know the Blue Origin team, you know, well. At some level that—you know, the content lives on Earth. And so that has to get back down to Earth. I think, for all of the talk today of things like space lasers, where you are shooting data from one satellite to another, that’s a much harder regulatory problem than you think. And the easy example to think of that is China. That is an incredible threat to China’s ability to run the internet the way they want. And so for the most part, all of these constellations—the traffic goes up and then it trombones back down in country.

There are certain countries that are allowing you to actually cross borders, but even if you don’t go to the extreme of China if you look at places like Africa, the largest source of tax collection is from telecom, telecommunications tax. And if, again, you can subvert that tax by going up and over, then it becomes really tough. Maybe we figure that out. There’s no technological reason that keeps that from happening. But I think it’s a—from a regulatory and policymaking perspective, it’s actually very, very difficult to cross borders through space without government starting to say, now we’re going to shut you down locally.

RUBENSTEIN: OK, right here. Identify yourself and your organization.

Q: I’m Paula Stern. And I guess I’ll identify myself with the organization that’s prompting my question, originally set up twenty years ago by the National Science Foundation, then called the National Center for Women in Information Technology, NCWIT. The word “women” has gotten to be an unpopular term around here in the last couple of months. My question—therefore, we call ourselves NCWIT.

I’m interested in your observation and your thinking on what difference it makes in the workforce in which you have been so successful that there are so few women participating. The numbers, the statistics in computing science, for example, just graduating, is still at the same ratio that it was twenty years ago, twenty-one years ago when we got started. Does it make a difference? And do you—I’m interested in your general workforce issues as well with regard to immigration matters that are permeating the topics here in Washington. And thank you.

PRINCE: Sure. So before Cloudflare, I started a company called Unspam Technologies. And I started it with two other people who I’d gone to junior high school together. In fact, we had lockers next to each other in junior high school. We were all the same age. We’d all grown up in—basically within three blocks of each other. We were all white guys. We were all within about two inches of each other’s height. We’d all basically studied some—we were all geeky, wonky nerds, basically, and studied some combination of computer science, and humanities, and law. And it was a disaster. We fought like dogs. And fundamentally the reason why was we’re the same person. And while they were at the time good friends—actually, none of us speak anymore—(laughter)—we were all fighting over effectively who was in control and who was in charge. And if the—you know, the org chart said a certain thing, but at the end of the day we could have spun that around and anyone else could have, you know, been the CEO, and someone else could be the CTO, and someone else could be the COO.

And so when I started Cloudflare, I was like, OK, I learned that lesson. I’m not going to make that mistake again. And so I was really very keenly aware of what my limitations were and where I had blind spots. And, you know, one of the great things about a place like the Harvard Business School is you’re surrounded by a cohort of other people. And there was this woman in my section who was, in some ways, a terrible business student. She was sort of the person who would raise her hand, and instead of, like, making the really great point, she’d be, like, hey, I think Bob’s point a few minutes ago was really good. Could we go back to Bob? And I was like, you’re doing this wrong. But she was really just searching for the right answer and searching for truth. And she had—she hated being the center of attention. She had ego in sort of a Freudian sense of ego, but no vanity. And I was like, huh, that’s the opposite of me. (Laughter.)

And I was, like, I’m starting a business with her. And so that’s Michelle, who we started the business together, and she’s done very well. And Lee was—Lee was just a technology genius. And he was—he was sort of that other person. And we were fundamentally different people. Like, just radically different people. And as a result, I think we’ve had this incredibly stable foundation. And then that has allowed us to build on top of it incredibly stable things. And so we never leaned—like, I always—Michelle would say, this whole DEI thing feels really artificial. It feels—it’s not us. But we also look at the just data and we see that organizations with a more diverse workforce—and diverse on every—again, multiple Ph.D.s sitting next to people who didn’t finish high school. We don’t want all the Stanford grads. We want one Stanford grad. But then we want somebody else who’s IIT, and somebody else who’s somewhere else. And we want—we want real diversity across every different metric, and that includes gender.

And so, you know, like, I think we do better than a lot of our peers. But we—but I’m not going to tell you what the statistics are because I doesn’t—like, I think that’s a distraction. The real thing is to focus on how do you get people who have different perspectives and bring them together? And, yes, that means different sexual orientations, and different races, and different ages, and different educational backgrounds, and different college majors. And I think anyone who says, you know, I’m just going to hire this exact footprint, or—and I think the—when people say, I want to hire for cultural fit, I’m like, ugh. That’s hiring for who you want to go have a beer with. And it’s great. Your friends should be like you and they should think like you because you want it to be comfortable, and you should, like, like the same music and root for the same sports teams. But the people who you work with should challenge you and be different from you. And you probably shouldn’t want to have a beer with them.

RUBENSTEIN: So, in that regard—

PRINCE: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: The zeitgeist of the era in Washington today is no focus on diversity because it’s inappropriate. Has that changed your view on hiring people of diverse backgrounds, or it hasn’t affected it at all?

PRINCE: It’s we focus on winning. And the best way to win is to look out across a team and go, what are we missing, right? And the goal is not to create a family. The goal is to create a great, high-performing sports team. And if you have a basketball team, you got to have a really tall guy who’s good at, you know, blocking shots. But you got to have a, you know, short, fast guy too that’s out there. And again, those are—you want those different perspectives. So, no. But we never—there’s nothing that has changed in either direction. When it was all the fad to be, like, DEI, we didn’t—we didn’t sort of swim that direction. And when now everyone’s like, that’s—you don’t do that, we don’t swim that direction either.

RUBENSTEIN: OK. Questions? Right here.

Q: Hi. Thank you so much. Martina Vandenberg with The Human Trafficking Legal Center here in Washington, D.C.

And you have said that the internet is a miracle. But it’s also a place of massive amounts of fraud. And I’m wondering what role your company plays in cooperating with law enforcement, for example, on the pig butchering scam centers in Asia, where people are trafficked into forced labor to scam people all over the globe, including the United States?

PRINCE: Yeah, we have, you know, incredibly close relationships with law enforcement around the world. We work with legitimate law enforcement wherever we can. We’ve won awards from the FBI and others in terms of how we have helped them. I think we also need to make sure that there is some rule of law, there is some process that’s there because, you know, increasingly, you’re seeing places where that rule of law isn’t necessarily being followed, and people want to co-opt our network in order to do things that I think would be—would make us very uncomfortable. But we’re a law-abiding organization. We operate in a lot of places around the world. We have to follow the law in all of those places. I don’t know exactly what we’re doing on pig butchering scams. I’m not an expert in those things. But, again, if it’s something that law enforcement is working on, then we make it very easy and have invested in the legal compliance and policy team heavily.

RUBENSTEIN: Let me ask you, there was a company in Israel that developed a technology, which I guess is outlawed in many places now, where you can tap into somebody’s phone and you can hear exactly what they’re hearing and get everything that’s on their iPhone. And I think many countries didn’t allow this technology, and I think even Israel it’s not allowed unless you have government permission. Does your company help prevent that kind of thing from happening? If I have an iPhone, or whatever kind of phone I have, can you—if I give it to you, can you tell me whether somebody’s tapping into it, or listening to it, or infecting it?

PRINCE: So we are not—we would be able to potentially see indicia across the network of your phone is doing something that we wouldn’t expect, but we don’t run the software which is on your phone. And in, you know, the case of an iPhone, you know, Apple makes it actually really difficult for anyone else to run software that can run that low. On the other hand, Apple is worldclass at protecting their software. And if you look at what is the cost of a vulnerability that somebody finds, some sort of an exploit that is able to infect an iPhone is the most expensive vulnerability that you can buy on these markets. But there are a number of these—sort of the malware that you’re describing, I think, is a piece of malware called Pegasus that was used to infect even a lot of reporters’ phones. And it’s—and it is a very murky area, because the companies that build these say that they only sell them to legitimate, like, rule-abiding governments, but they keep finding their away into another course.

RUBENSTEIN: OK. Do have to worry about this? You’re the leading company in the world doing this. If somebody wanted to embarrass you, they would infect your system. And if your system became infected, and people knew it, people would say, well, these are people who are the best in protecting, they can’t protect their own system maybe they’re not so good. You ever worry about that?

PRINCE: Oh, we worry about it all the time. And I think when—again, I gave you an example of a time that that that happened, I think the key though is just being very transparent. Everybody—every single company out there—you know, makes mistakes. And the key is not—you know, you should work as hard as possible not to make mistakes. But when you do, you need to be just as transparent as possible. And what I’m proud of is that, you know, when CrowdStrike had their massive outage about a year ago, they called us and said, we need help being more transparent in how we describe it, and really followed our advice. And I think they actually have, you know, not only really rebuilt trust, but if you look at, you know, their market cap, they are twice as big as they were when that outage happened.

RUBENSTEIN: Right, all the way in the back. Can you stand up, get a mic.

Q: Hi. Thanks. Jason Pielemeier with the Global Network Initiative.

You spoke about the—kind of the internet that we take for granted. And a lot of that internet runs on protocols and standards that were developed early on, and there have been successive waves of efforts by governments over time to try and sort of reformulate that underlying set of agreements and protocols. We’re coming up on a pretty critical juncture this year, something called the World Summit on the Information Society will have its twenty-year review. And that is going to be another opportunity for this recurring debate about whether the internet should continue to be sort of multistakeholder and bottom up, driven by the technologists and the companies, and the civil society that has sort of built it into this, you know, pluralistic space that it is.

But the Trump administration’s approach to multilateralism has raised a lot of questions as to the extent to which it will, the U.S. government will, continue to be a strong voice in support of that—the multilateral and multistakeholder approach to internet governance. So Danny Sepulveda, Ambassador Danny Sepulveda is here today, and I were, around ten years ago, at the State Department when this debate last took place. And it was a tricky one. And this was in the wake of the Snowden revelations. But we managed, notwithstanding those headwinds, to sort of preserve this multistakeholder approach. Just curious what you think, from where you sit as Cloudflare is a company that relies on and benefits so much from the internet as we know it today, about its future in this near-term debate and what the Trump administration’s approach to multilateralism might mean for it, and beyond that as well.

PRINCE: So I can’t speak to what the Trump administration’s approach will be. I will say that we very much believe in the multistakeholder, bottoms-up governance of the internet, and are quite concerned about efforts by the ITU or others to say that they should be the governing body. I think that, you know, the parties that have historically pushed for this have been Russia and China. And maybe the good news right now is that, at least in Europe, Russia is more distrusted than they were ten years ago. And so I think that that may help in these conversations. But what I think mostly I worry about is that I don’t know who’s paying attention. I mean, I think we are. I’m glad you are. But I’m not sure who else is. And so I think we might make some mistakes through compromises that don’t seem like they’re a big deal, that could potentially be a very big deal for the long-term governance of the internet.

I think the good news, though, is that, you know, at some level the internet is a collection of networks. Those networks have to accept the protocols. It may be one of these things where the ITU says we’re now in charge, and large networks say, no, you’re not. And so I’m not quite sure—I think that that’s a little bit the safety valve, on the other hand, is the internet itself is a bottoms-up governed, you know, multistakeholder organization. And so just because, you know, the ITU says, oh, now we get to designate these things, I’m not—you know, I think we’ll see how that—how that plays out. It is crazy, at some level, some of these things that still persist. The fact that the University of Maryland runs one of thirteen of the core root servers—you know, why the University of Maryland? I mean, because they do.

And China would love to have one of those. But they’re—but I think that just the ability to preserve that stasis and the status quo is actually pretty powerful at not—I mean, it would require a lot of change for those things to happen. And actually, a lot—not just someone coming in and saying, OK, now we’re going to change it. You’d have to actually have multistakeholder buy-in in order for some of those things to change. I hope we don’t get to that point, though.

RUBENSTEIN: Do you ever turn on your computer and try to do something and it doesn’t—the computer doesn’t work, and you cuss at the computer, or you never have those problems? It always does what—it always works the way you want it to work?

PRINCE: (Laughs.) Sometimes. The thing that frustrates me is often when I’m in the middle of, like, a CNBC interview, and the IT message pops up saying, you need to upgrade your computer right now. (Laughter.) I’m like, could we just not plan this with a little bit more—you know, maybe not right at market close every earnings season.

RUBENSTEIN: So it quantum computing going to happen in my lifetime? And should I wait around for it before I die, because actually I’m going to get so many great benefits out of quantum computing. Or it’s not worth waiting for?

PRINCE: I heard this was a topic you’re excited about. So I think the answer, of course, has to be, yes, you should wait around for it. I mean, I think—so what I think—quantum computing might be really interesting. What I think is—what worries me about quantum computing today is it requires a ton of investment without a clear payoff, and so a lot of the people who are promoting it are promoting it on the fear of what it’s going to do and how you have to get ready right now for it. And it’s true that quantum computing does pose a risk to some of the cryptography standards that we’ve had to date. We’ve taken the approach of, well, then let’s just solve the problem.

And so we partnered with Google. We ran a giant study across a lot of your and everyone in the world’s internet traffic in order to figure out what are post-quantum resistant encryption standards. And while a lot of companies are out there saying we’re going to charge you to make your systems post-quantum resistant, we were, like, that’s table stakes. Everybody should get that. And so even if you’re using the free version of Cloudflare, 100 percent of the traffic—if you’re if your client supports it, and Google and others are supporting it, now is in a post-quantum safe world. And, again, that’s going to hurt some people who are out there trying to, you know, make everyone scared so they’ll give them money, but in the meantime I think that organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Google are racing forward in this. And I do think that you’ll be able to solve some really interesting problems with it.

RUBENSTEIN: So if the internet had not been invented and developed, would people be happier today or not happy? (Laughter.) In other words, has happiness in the world increased because the internet is there, or it’s not clear?

PRINCE: You know, I am, I think—so I worry a lot about some of social media, and that we have hyper-optimized around, just kind of the entertainment. I mean, it’s—I’m not a TikTok user, but as I watch people watch TikTok, I mean, it’s just—it’s just a dopamine addicter. And that’s regardless of who controls it or anything else. It just is designed to take you down rabbit holes. My college thesis was, first of all, on why the internet was a fad, that Cloudflare is basically a penance for that. But, secondly, how the very nature of the internet over time would allow us to find our own weird little niches that were out there. And it would make the antisocial, social. And I think that that’s a real problem that that we as a society have to struggle with.

And I think there are places where, you know, if you—you know, if you’re a paraplegic and you can find a community of other paraplegics, I think that that’s made paraplegics a lot happier. On the other hand, if you’re, you know, a child abuser, and you can find a whole community of people who are child abusers, that is a net—like, that’s a net horrible thing for society. And how does that net out? I think it nets out pretty positive. I think that it’s actually been better for the world than it’s been worse. But for a long time—pre-2016 we didn’t talk about any of the downsides of the internet. It was like, the internet could do no wrong. Post-2016, the internet can do no right.

I’d love us to get back to a place where we are actually balancing these things. And thinking about how do we solve the real problems while appreciating the miracle that long-distance phone calls don’t cost anything anymore. You know, you can—you can get access to the totality of the world’s information from your pocket. Like, those are miracles. And we should—we should celebrate those miracles while appreciating there are downsides to it as well.

RUBENSTEIN: It’s a very impressive story, incredible creation that you’ve come upon with—that you’ve developed, and great background. And thank you for giving us this time and your insights. And we appreciate it very much.

PRINCE: Thank you so much. (Applause.)

RUBENSTEIN: Thank you. OK. Thank you all you.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.