Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

James Breen: Thanks for taking the questions. Just one is a little bit of a runoff from that one. Just around some of the new products that you launched, the one full in the back half of last year, R2 being one. Could you just give us some commentary around how that’s picking up and launching those into maybe more challenging sales environment as it helped keep the DDR a little more stable than otherwise could have been? And then just financially, Thomas, if you can just talk a little bit about the decline in operating income sequentially into the first quarter, the seasonality there and what’s happening? Thanks.

Matthew Prince: Yes, Jim. So I’ll start and then Thomas can take the second part. I think we’re really happy with the ramps of these new products. Cloudflare, we’ve always thought of ourselves as stacking S curves one behind another. And so I always think of sort of our application services products as sort of our first act. We think of our Zero Trust products as our second act. And we think of our workers products as our third act. And so I think that they’re maturing at rates that continue to make us very excited and happy and we’re seeing more and more new use cases that are coming from that. I think some of the trade-offs around DNR have been interesting here. One of the things that we really talked about last quarter optimizing for was just on how we did cash collections and converting customers to paying upfront.

And I think that one of the things that we made a trade-off on was at times saying we would optimize for getting more customers to be paying us upfront. And that might not allow us to expand those customers as much in this quarter. And I think that’s the right thing for us to do. We want to optimize in these times, making sure that we can collect cash as quickly as possible, can be paid upfront as much as possible. That continues to be an ongoing effort for us. But I think that that was more of a drag on DNR. I think you’ll start to see as those new products come online that those will be positive. But remember that DNR only starts to kick in for a customer that’s been with us for an entire year. So for those products that are new, even if they are wildly successful, the expansion won’t actually show up in our numbers until 12 months after the products were actually in the market.

Thomas Seifert: All of last year was a year where we did very active management of our expenses. And we reacted really early to the slowdown in the macro environment by slowing down our hiring, especially the velocity of hiring. And we’ll stay committed to this course during the course of this year and align our spending to the development of the business. So there were a lot of companies out there during the season’s earnings calls that talked about efficiencies. I always like to point out that efficiencies in the DNA of the company of Cloudflare, that is something that Matthew and Michelle already wrote in the founder letter for their prospects for the S1. So this is what you want to expect from us, not only for the first quarter, but for the remainder of this year as long as the environment is what it is.

James Breen: Great. Thanks.

Operator: We’ll go to Shaul Eyal with Cowen.

Shaul Eyal: Thank you. Good afternoon, guys. Congrats, Phil, on the new role. Looking forward to working with you. Actually two product-related questions for Matthew. So actually starting with workers, so earlier today, Shopify came out with a press release discussing speeding up their storefront in 2023. like it is based on Cloudflare workers. I think back in the summer actually, they also had a blog where they confirmed the shutdown of their internal project Oxygen opting now to Cloudflare. So can you talk to us, Matthew, about Shopify relations, maybe just a flavor on workers and an additional win rate?