Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s op-ed: “How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI”
Article excerpt
Matthew Prince, the chief executive of Cloudflare, has spent months defending almost every sentence he wrote about his company’s AI-driven layoffs. The one line he keeps at arm’s length is the headline, which happens to be the most honest sentence of the lot. “How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI.” That was the title The Wall Street Journal ran over Prince’s op-ed in May, shortly after Cloudflare cut 1,100 jobs, roughly 20 percent of its staff. When Nilay Patel read it back to him on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Prince pushed back: “I didn’t get to choose the title, because again, the way media works today is they create the titles, but yes, but I wrote the rest of it.” The rest of it is a method. Borrowing from Peter Drucker, Prince sorted the company into builders, sellers and measurers. Builders and sellers stay, and Cloudflare says it wants to hire as many as it can. Measurers were the majority of those let go: internal audit, finance, legal, revenue recognition and a layer of middle management. “AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers,” he wrote. His examples are specific. An investor-relations team of about 20 people used to spend two weeks assembling earnings documents; Cloudflare cut that to three minutes. Managers who once averaged six direct reports now run up to 12, which flattened the org chart and, by...
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Extracted from this sentence
“I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling,” Prince wrote, and the numbers support him: first-quarter revenue of $639.8 million, ahead of analyst estimates and more than 30 percent up on the year.
