S13E7: Reimagining Content, Provenance, and AI with Cloudflare’s VP of Product, William Allen

So I ended up sort of going there and helping to launch TED Talks for the first time with June Cohen, Jason Wishnow, and Chris Anderson, and that incredible Tom Reilly and that incredible team there. And that was also sort of a revolutionary idea of like, can we put long-form lectures online? And I remember the launch party was in sort of a dive bar in the basement in Manhattan, and there were like 20, 30 people and we're like, let's see what happens.

Welcome back to Season 13 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, can you believe we've been doing this this long?

No, it's been 5 years. So many episodes, so many incredible conversations telling the stories of some of the world's most iconic founders and funders. And whether our listeners are new for the first time today or have been with us from Season 1, we're so grateful for the community we've built.

Completely. Uh, we've had the mission to open the door to the room where it happens for those entire 5 years and have been able to do so over 120 episodes with hard-earned lessons from some of the top technology and consumer founders of our time.

And we've been through a lot personally as well.

We have indeed.

I built, scaled, sold my startup Pryve. You were our first investor, so you've been there through the entire journey. And you've also recently graduated from HBS. You're now building at Vercel. And through it all, we've brought the funder and founder perspective.

Yeah, it's really been an incredible journey, and I'm thrilled that I'm back full-time in San Francisco, and we're probably here to stay. Uh, that means that there's more for us in terms of growth, both inside and outside of the physical room. But what's important to have really out there is these stories and We've been able to do so over incredible guests from the CEO and founders of Flexport, Perplexity, Particle, Zapier, Zillow, Vanta.

I could go on.

These guests and their enterprises have generated over $100 billion enterprise value and really, frankly, moved the markets.

And growing, especially in 2025 with everything that's going on in AI. So I'm so excited to share Season 13 stories that are maybe a little bit more AI-focused than past seasons.

Absolutely. And you can find us IRL and URL, especially with our events such as our annual conference, Inside Summit, or upcoming SF Tech Week events.

Beyond.

And if you wanna get information around those events, subscribe to The Room Podcast and subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com.

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Today we're diving into the future of digital trust and creativity. We sat down in person with William Allen, Cloudflare's VP of emerging tech and AI, who has done everything from helping helping launch TED Talks in Manhattan to founding Behance, which became a global hub for creatives, ultimately acquired by Adobe. He went on to then lead Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative and many more initiatives within the Adobe suite. Will's journey has centered on one leading mission: building a more trustworthy internet. If you've been a longtime listener, you might remember when we sat down with Cloudflare's co-founder and COO, Michelle Zatlin, back in season 13. Cloudflare operates a global network that is secure and accelerates millions of websites, applications, and APIs while protecting them from cyberattacks and powering the modern web. This week, we're returning to Cloudflare 4 years later to explore how the company continues to evolve at the frontier of AI. Fun fact: when we originally sat down with Cloudflare, their market cap was at $24 billion. As of today, it's at $87 billion. In this episode, we Explore key insights and themes such as authentic architecture in an AI world, when to go big tech, and the new creative contract. Let's open the door.

Will, thank you so much for joining us today in The Room.

Thank you for having me here. It's great to be here.

We're delighted to have you. Um, and kind of just start at the beginning, uh, for the conversation and for your journey.

We're curious, where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in the Carolinas, so North and South Carolina, spent about equal time in each, born in North Carolina. So like elementary school there, middle school and high school in South Carolina, then went back to North Carolina for college. And there's just— it was an entirely different life. I lived in towns of fewer than about, I think, 6,000, 7,000 people up until I was 18 years old. So it was, it was a different world. In particular, back then I was— I had my full driver's license at 15, so I could drive everywhere. But the time I was in high school, I was driving like, you know, 50 minutes each way on sort of interstates at 15 years old, which feels like that was like an entirely different era. It wasn't that long ago, but I don't know, it just, it sort of shaped who I am and sort of shaped what I'm interested in and a lot of sort of like a slower pace of life and a sort of like real focus on community and folks that are around you. A lot of my family is still out there, and so I try to go visit them when I can.

Well, in that vein of early identity, did you always think that you were going to become a founder like you did with your company Chamber?

No. And actually, I started my first company a long time ago, actually, the first year out of college. Yeah, it was sort of an incredible, you know, 3, 4-year experience that I had sort of straight out of college. And it was, you know, my father had run sort of small businesses. My grandfather had done the same thing. My uncle sort of has done the same thing. So I had people done sort of small businesses, you know, varying levels of success for many years. But it was in particular a close friend of mine from college, UNC Chapel Hill, a guy named Matt Curtis, an amazing friend. I left college, went to New York City. I was going to be a paralegal. So I thought I wanted to be an attorney. I studied philosophy in college.

It's a good path. Your parents, you say, I'm majoring in philosophy, but don't worry, I'm going to become a lawyer.

Well, my ultimate choice there, actually, even in going to New York City, was I was either going to be a paralegal and sort of go on to law school, or I was going to be an outdoor sort of guide, like take people on sort of longer, like outward-bound trips. And so I ended up choosing the paralegal path. My good friend from college was a couple of years ahead of me, called me up and said, what are you doing? You don't want to be a paralegal. And he was right. Within like 2 months, I was like, oh, this is not for me. He was like, let's start something. I was like, what do you mean, let's start something? It's like, let's, let's have our own business. I've got this idea. And I was like, I don't know what any of that means. Like, tell me what those words are. Like starting our own business. What are we to do? So almost immediately we started. So 2005, 2006, He had this idea. He was like, let's basically, you know, transform how people back up their data and do an online data backup service in 2005, 2006.

Okay, so kind of pre-cloud.

100% pre-cloud. Literally, we bought a big Dell server, put it in the back of a cab, drove it to a data center in Staten Island and installed it in a rack and sort of custom wrote some software and made— I mean, No clue what we were doing, but I really credit Matt with basically saying like, let's do this. What do you have to lose? Let's like, let's take a swing for the fence here and try to build something new and interesting.

So you had exposure to being an entrepreneur, right? In the purest sense of the word from a young age. But then ultimately this idea of being a founder crystallized with this friend and kind of you went through this roadmap. Is that when you went from there to Adobe?

No. So we did that for probably 4 years and sort of we did that first one with trying to do online data backup. I had, again, no clue what I was doing. I remember I walked into things like the New York City Economic Development Corp. And this was, you know, basically pre-blogging and everything else. And I was like, we need money. Like, I don't have— like, I was literally like, I mean, as broke as you could possibly be. We'd like leveraged all of our credit cards to buy the server to go put this in this data center in Staten Island. I just need to fund this thing. And they're like, well, why don't you go to a bank? And that was it. There's like no there's no community really around them that I was aware of. This is in New York City, in Manhattan, around sort of venture capital, around angel funding. It existed, but I wasn't exposed to it. And so our entire exposure of that world was go to a bank and ask for a loan. And of course they laughed us out. Like we went to like 6 banks. They're like, there's not a chance in the world that we're going to give you anything. And so that sort of led us on the path. That one didn't work out. But then we started an agency. We started doing basically consulting for people who wanted to create their first podcast. Yeah, they wanted to write blogs. This is around 2006, 2007. 2007, 2008. Um, and we did that and had an incredible time.

Incredible. I mean, the early content journey and ecosystem was a really interesting one, just as like the entire frameworks that defined the web were changing and being built. And you could have audio-first content on the internet. You could have photos. I mean, it's crazy to think that we have to say that, but it's true. That wasn't the norm at the time.

I mean, it was a huge deal. And so that actually led us to meet, uh, the people who were running TED.com. So TED Talks. So I ended up sort of going there and helping to launch TED Talks for the first time with June Cohen, Jason Wishnow, and Chris Anderson, and that incredible Tom Reilly and that incredible team there. And that was also sort of a revolutionary idea of like, can we put long-form lectures online? And I remember the launch party was in sort of a dive bar in the basement in Manhattan, and there were like 20, 30 people. And we're like, let's see what happens. You know, TED had been this amazing sort of exclusive but sleepy small conference. And, you know, June and Chris and team had this idea of let's put these online and see what happens. Happens. Uh, and it was this rocket ship, um, of sort of like redefining how content gets across the world. Um, and you know, we live in this obviously incredibly interesting world of AI today, but at the time, like taking 20-minute videos, 18-minute videos, and, you know, distributed them and, and podcasts, and I wrote the first RSS feeds and all those things was just an amazing experience. Uh, an entirely different world.

Okay, so I'm hearing that you're my in with Ted. Um, I will take and run with this offline. Actually, I would say TED is probably the reason I had gotten into podcasts. I, like, became obsessed with watching early TED Talks, particularly the Brené Brown one that went so viral at the Houston TED. And for me, I think that was really this, like, moment of, oh my gosh, like, you can do storytelling in this way. I went on to be a history major and, like, you know, this isn't about me, but the point is actually I, like, love that. And I feel like content is such an engine and the internet became this amazing space for content to empower people. And then you did ultimately you joined Adobe and you were there for 9 years, which of course is one of the original platforms that helps small creators, uh, and people think about how to supercharge their own kind of, you know, ability to tell stories.

So after TED, I was looking for what to do next. I was actually, I was still there and met this guy named Scott Belsky. He's an incredible founder, incredible, um, you know, entrepreneur and angel investor. Uh, and he was running the site called Behance. And so if you don't know Behance, it's like LinkedIn for creatives, for designers.

I used to be a Behance scroller.

There you go.

Good inspo there.

Uh, and if you are any sort of anyone whose work is visual, you should go there, upload build your work, help you get jobs. And so I met Scott and they were running Behance as a small startup pre any outside funding. Um, and I, I met, obviously knew him, met the team and knew they were onto something special. So I joined them. Yeah. Uh, as sort of the startup, we helped, you know, we raised our first round of outside financing and we ended up selling that to Adobe. Yeah. Um, so I came into Adobe through that acquisition. Nice. I'd been the COO of Behance, came in, uh, to Adobe, and then ultimately sort of ran Behance for the decade that I was there.

Well, tell us like a little bit about what you learned during that time and how it informed what you realized was what you wanted to do with the rest of your career.

Well, I have no idea what I want to do with the rest of my career.

We're figuring it out actively.

That's why we're asking you. Look, I learned there's— I mean, I learned an incredible amount of things with that team at Behance. And, you know, as we sort of like kept running it there and sort of built more things there, some of my closest and dearest friends still. I think some of the core things are just if you have a mission that you're working towards, and for us at Behance and still for the team who's there, it's how do you empower creators and designers and photographers and interior decorators and architects to do their best work, to get attribution for their work, and to find more opportunities. And that was, that was the core mission. That was sort of what we did. And at first we did it as a startup and then we did it sort of as a, as a BU or sort of as a team inside of a bigger company inside of Adobe. And they were incredibly aligned with that mission. And so just learn the power of an incredible mission, right? It rallies people to a cause. And when you believe in it, everything else sort of becomes easy. All of the hard work, all of the grinding that you're doing, all of the uncertain decisions kind of just fall into place because you have this framework of like, what are we trying to do? How are we trying to impact the world? And that's where we stayed anchored, was like, how do we build this to be the best possible site for designers, for creatives, and to really keep them first? And anytime there is sort of some level of confusion about sort of what we're trying to do, how do we monetize, how do we build this other part of the business, we just always came back to that mission. Um, and it was an, just an incredible experience.

It's been so cool seeing how AI has completely transformed the creator landscape, the creative landscape, and I'm sure there's a ton of incredible things that are happening with the Behance product and Adobe more broadly, but I'd love to kind of dig into now you being at Cloudflare and focusing on Cloudflare AI a little bit. Tell us about what your role is and how you came to be at Cloudflare.

Yeah, so I, uh, decade at Adobe, incredible time there, started the thing about the C2PA and the Content Authenticity Initiative. And a dear friend of mine who passed away, you know, not too long ago from brain cancer, but he'd been the original CTO at Behance and just a close friend. Basically we said, let's do it again. Like, let's go back into the startup world. So Brian and I started a startup called Chamber. We ran that for 2 years, incredible experience. And we sort of hit this point of we were looking to sell the company because we felt like it would sort of work better inside of a bigger one. During that process, I met the team at Cloudflare, basically saying, hey, would you buy my startup?

Right.

I have this great product for you. Early conversations. And they ended up saying no, but they're like, oh, we like you. And so we stayed in touch with them after sort of the acquisition of Chamber. And I just kept sending them ideas because I felt like they were at this interesting— they were, and Cloudflare is today at this interesting intersection of of content creators, news organizations, of publishers, and AI. And how do you sort of like bring these two sort of worlds together? And I just felt like they had this unique perspective and this unique spot in sort of the market that I felt like I could help both from my sort of past experience and my sort of my shared interest there. And so I kept sending Dane, the CTO, and those ideas of like, Dane, you should do this. And at one point he said, you should stop telling me what to do and come actually join us and build it.

Well, I'd love to rewind like one second because I also recently sold my startup but decided not to go to the company that acquired us. And I'm now an operator at a larger company. And a lot of people are like, well, tell me about that decision. Like, why? I'm curious, um, kind of what that transition like was for you personally.

So I've been through two acquisitions and they couldn't be more different. Um, both of them I feel very fortunate to have been a part of. One was sort of Behance to Adobe. Um, and then sort of we sold our startup, uh, to a, like a later stage crypto security company, a great company called Casa. Very, very different sort of outcomes. And, and, you know, one, I stayed at Behance for a decade, right? So when I was there for a long, long time, um, I felt like with Behance, I had unfinished business for a very long time. And I wanted, I was like so drawn to that mission and what I wanted to do and sort of operate inside of a bigger company. With, with this last one, I felt like I wanted to get the team sort of, you know, jobs. I wanted to make sure the tech lived on. So I was very proud of the tech that we built and then sort of set it up for success. And I felt like they were able to then take it and carry that sort of like core tech forward and build it out there. And the rest wasn't for me, right? And it was an interesting spot to having, you know, spent prior a decade, you know, post-acquisition at a company and really sort of identifying and having an incredible career and time at Adobe. To this one, it just felt like the right thing to do.

Well, at Cloudflare, you're kind of sitting in the intersection of infrastructure policy, a lot of new things that are happening with AI. You mentioned pitching ideas to the CTO. What was one of the ideas that finally made you join the team?

Actually, some of it was around this, this C2PA. So one of the things I worked on when I was at Adobe was content provenance. And so 2000— I forget the exact date— 2019, 2020, where we sort of like peeked back into the researchers, what they were working on at Adobe, and we saw the sort of upcoming world of deepfakes. So, you know, pre-ChatGPT, OpenAI had started, but they sort of hadn't sort of launched ChatGPT at that time. And we realized, it was myself, Dana, who was the chief legal officer, Scott Belsky, we were like, okay, this is going to transform the world if this actually happens. If we actually sort of go off and the ability to sort of create deepfakes of people's personas and voices, it's going to have amazing benefits and some really interesting drawbacks. So we need to build something around it. So we built this provenance technology, and the thing that I was pitching to Dane, I remember was like, Dane, you gotta incorporate this. Like, you gotta build this in. This is the missing link that this provenance tech and sort of standard needs to get global adoption is what you can do at Cloudflare. Mm-hmm. Um, so it was one of the first things that I pitched to him, and then more ideas as they came up.

That's incredible. Well, we had Michelle Zatlin, um, back on the podcast in 2021, and one of her kind of salient thoughts was how important diversity of thought is in a company. And I think with AI today, there's so many opinions around how AI should be shaping infrastructure, product, what we should be scared of. Is AI going to take over the world? Is it actually not a threat? Um, how has Cloudflare sort of cultivated a strategy around how do you defend, protect, and embrace AI?

Uh, it's complicated and multifaceted, and there are different answers in different sectors. and we can both be sort of extremely leaning in to what it means for the future of sort of agentic commerce and sort of AI-powered commerce, uh, with agents on sort of one hand. And on the other hand, think about how do content creators retain attribution and credit and ultimately monetization for their work in the world of sort of insatiable crawlers that are ingesting data. Those might feel at odds, but I feel like we, we sort of walk that line very well. Because both of it, it's just everything is being transformed. And so you have to look at everything from sort of first principles, which is how do we help our customers? How do we help build great products to help them then build the things that they want to build? Um, and how do you do the right thing? And, you know, our, our phrase, our mission is to help build a better internet, help build a better internet. And so we always sort of anchor back to that of how do we sort of go forward and, and work towards a better internet with many other parties and many other collaborators in there. Um, but it's, yeah, there's so many different areas you could take it in, like whether you're a developer and you're using Claude Code or Codex or, you know, uh, 2.5 from, uh, Gemini and sort of working in that world and sort of supercharging your development stack. If you're thinking about how do you automate sort of more back office things that sort of have been sort of the drudgery that people haven't enjoyed. Um, how do you think about, again, content creators and rights holders in the world of AI and how do they How do you sort of allow certain crawlers to access their content and not others? How do you incentivize and empower and keep local news throughout the world when so much of our consumer experiences are being driven towards a couple of core focal points and sort of demand generation? Each of those has different implications. It has different implications on the security side, on the sort of the different parts, but you have to just look at them almost in isolation to think about sort of like What's the right thing to do here? How do we help build a better internet and how do we build great products and experiences for our customers?

I'd love to dig into some of those products for your customers. A lot of our audience are founders that are building and are thinking about infrastructure decisions and how their product can help build a better internet.

Yeah.

What tactical advice would you have for founders as they're thinking about building a stack that will be resilient and safe?

Yeah.

In this new world of AI?

Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm very biased. We have an entire developer platform and one of the ways I actually, I got to know Cloudflare, I'd known them a long time, I was like, oh, it's the DDoS company. But when I left Adobe to do my, my last startup, my co-founder was like, we're building the entire stack on Cloudflare. And I was like, the DDoS company? Who's that? Right? And he was like, just trust me, we're going to build this entire thing. So I spent 2 years in the Cloudflare dashboard building on workers, building on R2, sort of our entire development stack. And as someone who was not an engineer by training, it was a great user experience for me, uh, to be able to get in there and to be sort of increasingly technical and increasingly sort of engineering driven. And so I knew from like firsthand experience is an incredibly powerful spot to build. I mean, I think as you're, if you're looking to build, like you got to go fast, you got to go with somebody who, um, is going to listen to you, uh, and respond to your needs, um, and scale with you from, you know, the first, uh, you know, worker you deploy to like the in the scale that you're doing, 20% of the internet sort of routes through Cloudflare. So we have like the biggest of the big, but the responsiveness of the team to the actual customer needs that they have on the developer side is phenomenal. Uh, the teams care deeply about it, and I felt that on the outside as, you know, as a customer, and I really see it in action now, uh, from the inside of sort of pushing forward. So I don't know if that sort of directly answers the question, but just go with the company who cares, go with the company that's pushing innovation and that's sort of looking to sort of, again, make your life easier as a founder, as a developer, as an engineer.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, with bots constantly changing, deepfakes, synthetic data, all of these kind of new things, I'm sure when building new products in kind of this current day and age, there's a lot of known unknowns and a lot of like new things that we're encountering. Yes. What is, something that didn't quite go as planned in kind of building and launching a new product?

Uh, in general or in Cloudflare?

Maybe at Cloudflare.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm part of sort of a group they call it sort of ETI, which is Emerging Tech and Incubation. And the goal there for us is to in some ways have a high miss rate. Um, it's to really try to push innovation forward. And I mean, we're like 2 weeks into the job, Dane, my boss or CTO, was like, just get a lot of shots on goal. Like, just, you know, build with conviction, launch with conviction, build something amazing. But it's not always going to work. And so that's perfectly fine if you sort of launch something out in the world and it totally flops. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase says like that action produces information. Just getting your actual product in the hands of real-world users completely transforms how you think about things. One of the mistakes we made at my last startup was we built a really intense security product and we waited too long for feedback. Now, do I second guess it? Sure. In some ways, would I make the same, you know, decisions again? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard when you're building a security product where you can't screw it up, but just getting things in the hands of users is incredibly important. So I don't have like a perfect example yet because I feel like we've had, you know, pretty decent success in, you know, my one year that I've been there on things that we're building. But they often go, uh, they often just take you in directions you didn't fully expect. Um, like we built this core part of, so a lot of what I think about is, um, crawlers. So like, uh, bots that are out there sort of ingesting data across the internet to do training for AI companies have this insatiable sort of desire for content. Um, and so we help site owners, website owners, content creators decide, hey, which bots to let through and which ones to sort of block. One of the things that I found interesting is that at first we had a very aggressive, just sort of blocking mentality in that dashboard that we built for them of like, here's all the ways that you can sort of block these bots. Now that works for some people because some, some content creators and rights holders want to sort of like write for humans only, but it doesn't work for a lot of others. And so that was an interesting sort of pivot we made pretty quickly was that I sort of thought this is what we were hearing from our customers, but there was an equally big contingent of customers who said, No, no, I wanna write for the superintelligence. I want this to be in every LLM possible. And so don't show me how to block, only show me what's getting read, how often is it getting read? Like, how can I tell them that I've got more interesting up-to-date information? And so balancing those two things was an interesting sort of, you know, I maybe I could have arrived at that by at first principles, but it really took launching that and feeling it, um, to hear that customer feedback.

So for those content creators who are leaning into this agentic world, but perhaps are not technical themselves, and right, let's be honest, like most fashion bloggers, like, are not agentic native. And so how are you guys thinking about your ICP, like, and how do you communicate them today?

Because I think of Cloudflare as being a pretty technical company.

It is. It is. I mean, it's, it's absolutely a very technical company, um, which actually is, it makes it an intimidating place to join for some people. Um, But look, I think the amazing thing about whether you're firing up Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini today is that I really think everyone can become pretty technical pretty fast. You know, the phrase was like, you know, there are no dumb questions out there. Now we have the ability to ask every possible dumb question to ChatGPT. And my first weeks at Cloudflare, I was in Gemini every day asking like, oh, what's this mean? Well, what's this mean? Because it's such a broad tech stack that goes so deep in so many areas. That it's a lot to sort of get accustomed to. So first of all, I think everyone can become technical. Just ask the questions, ask the questions. There's so many great ways to learn that don't let these things intimidate you and sort of just like, you know, go into learning mode in Claude and say, hey, walk me through that again, you know, and sort of slower. So that's the first thing. But then I think the second thing is just a lot of our work is like, are you building a net new application or do you have sort of some sort of internet-connected property that you want to protect and sort of get across the world? And so then Inside of that, that can be true for the biggest of big enterprises, and it could be true for a brand new startup. I think it's actually pretty intuitive for a brand new startup to sort of, you know, get a domain over and sort of start to see what's going on. A lot of what I think about is try to, you know, bring my old, you know, entrepreneur hat in there and say like, okay, what would I have wanted to see as the CEO? What would I have wanted to see as the COO instead of the head of engineering? Because those are like, you know, maybe sort of very comparable important needs on both sides. But sort of different dashboards, different desires, different data that you wanna see.

Let's take a bit of a pivot in the convo to talk more about like the policy side of your job and how you're thinking about communicating to stakeholders who are probably like very, very far outside of Cloudflare's core customer. In particular, you talked about the Content Authenticity Initiative, which you helped to start, bring, and it's a nonprofit if I have that right.

So the, um, the C2PA is part of the Linux Foundation, which is like the standards body part of it.

Okay. Well, how can we think about that as a stakeholder that now you're working with, with inside of Cloudflare externally?

The Content Authenticity Authenticity Initiative is an initiative run by Adobe, uh, by my dear friend Andy, who sort of runs it there now. And then we set up as part of that, it's the C2PA, which is basically the technical standards body. So how do you, like, when you're writing metadata to a file, how do you do it in a consistent way that anyone across the world can read and understand? And you do that through standards bodies, which is what the C2PA does. As part of sort of the CAI's mission, Content Authenticity Initiative's mission, is to sort of promulgate those standards and get more people to adopt them that's out there. I knew that we have like the ability to capture this, you know, provenance data from cameras, Nikon, Leica. We knew it was incorporated into editing tools like Photoshop and others and Lightroom and others. But we also always knew that like that last mile of having it show up to an actual user viewer was incredibly critical. And having— and so the CDN developer architecture was this important part that hadn't been solved yet. And so I felt like it was like a core mission of mine when I got hired. I was like, I'm going to solve that. I'm going to solve that last mile part of to make sure that if you are using Cloudflare, in particular Cloudflare Images, which is part of our developer platform, you have the ability to sort of, you know, maintain that provenance data when it goes through. And so what's that workflow look like? I have the new Google phone. I take a picture. It's got those content credentials, that CTP metadata baked into it. I pull it into Lightroom or Photoshop, I do some light editing, I then upload it to my blog or website that uses Cloudflare, that same provenance data to know that, oh, it came originally from this, this Pixel camera was pulled into this editing tool and then sort of distributed across the world. The end viewer, that end consumer can see that and trace it back. Exactly. And so that for me was like closing this chapter that I had known since since 2019, and I felt like, I don't know, I still just am very proud that we got that out the door. Technically, it was like challenging, but not the world's most challenging thing. Mostly we just had to do it. And so the team was amazing and we got it out the door.

That's incredibly exciting and cool to see something that started with a vision kind of even pre-AI was mainstream into today. We're now, to your point, it is like quite relevant and it is quite an active macro discussion. Our government's getting involved in these conversations and it's helpful to have, you know, third-party platforms that are also closely coupled with large tech organizations that are also public companies. Thinking through this all in concert, just how is Cloudflare thinking about, like, communicating its thoughts and strategy to some of our policy stakeholders?

We've got an incredible policy team. Alyssa, uh, at Cloudflare runs that. She's phenomenal. One of the smartest people I've ever met. Um, very intimidating when you're talking to her because it's going to be a very high-charged, high-caliber conversation. Um, and that's all I— that's what she does is to think about sort of like like every jurisdiction that we were in across the world. How do we think about AI? How do we think about content creators? How do we think about, you know, security, all these different things? And so she wears a lot of different hats and, and, and does that on our behalf. She does a phenomenal job at that. When I think about it is, is I think about what are the tools that we can build today, right? And so what are the, what are the products? What are the solutions? What's the engineering tricks that we can bring to help solve those problems today for our users? Because sometimes, uh, you, you wanna move fast. The world, is moving at a faster clip than anything I've ever experienced, which means new opportunities and new challenges to solve. And so, so much of what I try to think about every day is, again, how do I anchor back to what are our customers asking for? How do we sort of just build for, for that world?

Okay, well, you're spending every day thinking about building for today. I do want to take us to the future. Let's get a little futurist here. You know, honestly, it's probably a little bit too late for Claudia and myself. There's probably already deepfakes of us on the internet. Yeah, I built my first Delphi, which is like the personified self, and it was actually a really good experience. This is not an ad, but I was able to upload all of our content from the pod. We're 5 years in. It identified 260,000 unique words of Madison on the internet. This is not including Claudia. And I said, oh my, I did not know that I had that many words on the internet. And it does a really good job. So it's too late for me. In 5 years from now though, like what is content creators whether they're leaned in today or will lean in tomorrow, relationship be with these AI model providers?

I think we, we could be entering this golden age of creativity. I, uh, and again, if I think about my old colleagues, um, some of whom, uh, Scott Belsky is now at sort of A24 and all of my old colleagues at Adobe, um, and all these different spots. And you look at things like Runway, the ability to create and to sort of democratize access to that creation. I think is incredibly, incredibly powerful. Um, and this is with, uh, all due respect to my former colleagues, but when you first open up Photoshop, it's like you're trying to fly a 747 and you've never been a pilot before. It is incredibly powerful and phenomenally overwhelming, but just unbelievably overwhelming. Um, and so you don't always have the context of what to do. Now, I think the ability, and including, uh, in there, but inside of Figma, Figma Make, instead of what's happening in Canva, what's happening in other areas, you have the ability to make your vision come true without some of the drudgery that's in there and without some of the needing to sort of really know where every little dial and knob inside of whatever UI, um, that might have taken you years before. Now you can do almost instantly. I think that's a phenomenal thing.

Completely.

We just had our Insight Summit a few weeks ago, which is our annual conference, and we had the Gamma CEO speaking on stage. And as someone who went to school with a lot of consultants and who has built a few Jacks in my time on the venture side, I'm like, of course a deck should be able to just be built with words now, right? Like, that is just so obviously what it should be. Um, and, you know, Claudia and I are incredibly bullish for what AI is going to mean for us, but also we understand the fear angle too, a little bit. I mean, we're creating content. Our livelihood is based off of these great in-person human conversations. So I understand kind of like some of the fear components too, but, um, I love your take. I think it is a rising tide as long as we figure out how to do it all well.

I mean, it's scary, right? Like, any time you have these massive transitions, It is scary. They are not without casualties. Like, it's also important to be honest about that, that jobs change, are changing. They will change rapidly. That is nothing new in terms of, you know, however many hundreds, thousands of years of technological innovation that's happened. That's just the way we evolve and the way we sort of get better and newer and interesting technology. You could be the bystander who gets, you know, your particular skill set. This particular area might go out of favor. I mean, it's really, it's like it's, it's it's tough, you know, and I think one thing that I learned from college, this one sort of particular lesson that's like stuck with me is that markets always find an equilibrium, but it's not always peaceful, right? So to like, they will sort of like find a new balance, you'll find a new thing, but that process of finding the new equilibrium, it's the creative destruction part of that world. And so people like, you might, you'll have to change how you do things, how you made a living as a musician 30 years ago was different than 15 years ago, which is different from today. Right. And that's that constant process of evolving and finding your voice and your story. That's what's, what, what's going to propel you forward. And is it going to be, you know, I don't know, will all podcasts be AI-generated based on a couple of prompts in 2 years? Maybe. I don't know. Who knows, right? The important thing is like, find your voice and go off and create. Um, and when you do that, I think amazing things happen.

As we kind of look to the future, I'm curious, like, what are you most excited about for Cloudflare AI maybe in 2026?

I feel like we've got this really interesting opportunity to rethink how content is accessed and paid for across the internet. You know, we launched this thing in collaboration with Coinbase a couple days ago, sort of announcing that we're going to create this, what's called the X42 Foundation, which is is a new protocol of how to basically transfer money online and sort of think metered API access, metered MCP access, or paying for content that your agent can do on your behalf, not just you sort of sitting behind there clicking. I think that's gonna open up an incredibly new world, an incredibly sort of powerful new world of how you get access to content. Like today, if I ask whatever deep research program to like tell me the latest, you know, the best restaurant in San Francisco, tell me the latest research about this particular health issue, it's gonna get stuck behind paywalls. All sorts of places. Um, and so it's going to circumvent, you know, it's going to sort of go around those and find alternative sources of information. But what if I want the best information, the most relevant content for my particular question? And what if I could load up my agent to say, hey, here's $10, $100, $1,000, go find me the best, most important information about this particular, you know, topic, summarize it for me, you pay for it, summarize it for me, and then help me learn. Learn about what's going on here. I think that is a world that is at our fingertips today. Um, and what we're, what's happening now is we're laying the rails, we're laying the foundation to allow that sort of like agent-first commerce, agent-first, uh, interaction for content that I don't think has existed. And I think could really unlock that ability to sort of like synthesize and understand incredible pieces of content.

We're excited for that. That's incredible. Um, as we also look to the future for you, Will, personally, What's next? What are you excited about?

Getting through my inbox. We had a lot of big announcements last week that we're working towards. No, a lot of it's this sort of like, you know, agentic payment rails, right? Sort of how do you sort of unlock content at scale? I feel like we've got this incredible, like there's just this phenomenal opportunity right in front of us to help sort of build, you know, build a better internet, to build sort of a new way that ideas can get transmitted online and ultimately compensated for. I feel like I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of what that could look like, and I'm excited to actually get it out there at scale. That's one area. And two, just to learn. I just, I feel like the most amazing thing for me personally with all of these tools is I'm in, you know, Claude in learning mode, or I'm in ChatGPT, and I'm just asking questions, asking questions, asking questions, and just learning about different parts of the tech stack, how these different things work. So I feel like I'm a naturally curious person. I studied I did philosophy in college, and so it's one of those things which is like, I like to ask questions. And now having sort of a thought partner where I can ask every possible dumb question, um, and learn new things. I feel like this is, you know, it's the golden age of creativity, uh, possibly for creators. I feel it's also the golden age of learning. Um, if you have a desire to learn and a desire to sort of improve, I think there are more tools at our disposal right now, and I'm personally very excited about that.

That's incredible. Golden age of curiosity.

Yes.

Well, as we come up on time today, we'd love to ask our hero question of the podcast. We ask this of all of our guests. The question is, who is a woman that has had a profound impact on your life and your career?

Well, obviously it would be my wife would be sort of the number one answer. Just the most amazing life partner for many, many years. No, I've— and sort of outside of that, in like different sort of professional contexts, being able to, you know, work with somebody like Michelle at CloudForge is an absolute inspiration. Our chief strategy officer at Cloudflare, Stephanie Cohen, is just a force of nature. And to work with her— I joined Cloudflare about a year ago— to work with her and to learn from her and to see her operate both in sort of like the minutia and the details, but also at the highest level is, is just amazing. And I feel like every day I'm learning more from her.

Incredible.

Well, thank you so much, Will, for joining us on the podcast today. So interesting to kind of peek under the curtain and just see all of the exciting things that are coming out in today's ecosystem. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast.

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