Matthew Prince: Sure. So I think the thing that is at the core of Cloudflare is our network, the reason that our ticker is NET and not CLOFLARE is because of the fact that we are fundamentally a network. And that network has taken us over 12 years to build. And it is not something that you can just throw money at and buy your way into, it’s not something that even some of the large hyper-scale public clouds have. And so we hear regularly from companies like Microsoft that they’re like, wow, you guys have something very special in the network you’ve built, and it is very different than anything else that’s out there. But somewhat counterintuitive a bit about our network is that as we expand into further corners of universe, whether that’s opening an additional data center in St. Louis or going into Djibouti, any of those things actually help us lower our costs because it drives down the cost of delivering all of our services.
And the other important bit is that unlike some of the competitors that are out there, whether those are competitors in the application services space that have grown through a series of M&A acquisitions or even in the Zero Trust space, someone like Zscaler actually runs multiple independent networks to provide their various services. And that means that customers that are using those different services not only is it more inefficient for them to service those customers, but those customers experience very performance setbacks when they’re delivering their services. And that’s something that a lot of the customers that are switching from Zscaler to us note time and time again. What’s different about us is we have relentlessly said that we run one single network.
And every single server across our entire network is capable of running and performing any of the functions that we may need it for. And so that means that as we grow our services, it allows us to deliver them incredibly quickly, incredibly efficiently and anywhere in the world, and that is paying off today by allowing us to continue to scale as efficiently as possible. And so I think that it was a unique period of time, 12.5 years ago when clouds got started that allowed us the conditions and opportunities to build the company. I think it would be very challenging today for somebody to replicate the network that we have, and that network continues to allow us to deliver more and more services, whether that’s our traditional application services, the act one products; our Zero Trust services, the act two products or even the super cloud products that we have with brokers, which are our act three products, all of those rely on that network and the efficiency that it has.
And I think that’s where the fundamental barrier to entry to our products is. The other thing which is important is we just experienced significant network effects, and that comes in a number of different ways. One is just with every piece of data that we see, we’re able to make our security products significantly better. So the fact that consumer ISP is rolling us out to all of their customers that use their security bundle, that’s just feeding data back into our system, which makes us smarter and smarter across that. But it’s more than that. The fact that we are today somewhere in front of 20% to 25% of the web means that for customers that use our Zero Trust products, if they are going to that 20%, 25% of the web that uses us, then they never have to leave Cloudflare’s network, and we can deliver a much more significant product.
