Skip to main content
CloudflareNews

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s op-ed: “How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI”

What happened

Cloudflare reported first-quarter revenue of $639.8 million, a 30% increase year-over-year.

Source

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...

Keep reading with a free account

The rest of this article, and every signal for Cloudflare, is in your free account.

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.

Extracted by Autobound

From the Signal API record
Event
News

What this signalsRevenue results often set the next budget cycle.

The full record

From the Signal API record

Numbers

Amount (USD)
$640M

Extraction

Confidence
90%
Detected
Sep 27, 2026
signal_type
news
signal_subtype
has_revenue

Use this data

Get every news signal for Cloudflare and the companies you sell to, in the tools you already use.

  1. Ask Claude about it

    Connect Autobound to Claude, Claude Code or Cursor with MCP. Then ask: “What changed at Cloudflare this week?”

  2. Send it to your own tools

    The Signal API returns news signals for any list of companies as JSON, for your CRM, warehouse or app.

  3. Try it free

    Sign up and spend your free credits on the companies you sell to.

    Start Free1,000 free credits

The API returns more than this page shows

This page shows a preview. The full news record in the Signal API and MCP can also have these 8 fields. Some fields are empty for some signals.

Company

  • linkedin_urlValue in the API
  • industriesValue in the API
  • employee_count_lowValue in the API
  • employee_count_highValue in the API
  • revenueValue in the API
  • descriptionValue in the API

Signal

  • signal_nameValue in the API
  • associationValue in the API
Show the full JSONThe record on this page and the API request

GET /v1/signals/2cb3cf9b-268d-1c15-08a0-7d9b5827b21d returns this record as JSON. POST /v1/companies/enrich returns every signal for cloudflare.com.

{
  "signal_id": "2cb3cf9b-268d-1c15-08a0-7d9b5827b21d",
  "signal_type": "news",
  "signal_subtype": "has_revenue",
  "detected_at": "2026-09-27T11:29:24+00:00",
  "company": {
    "name": "Cloudflare",
    "domain": "cloudflare.com"
  },
  "data": {
    "url": "https://www.martincid.com/business/matthew-prince-cloudflare-employees-replace-ai/",
    "title": "Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s op-ed: “How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI” - Martin Cid Magazine",
    "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 Prince’s...",
    "summary": "Cloudflare reported first-quarter revenue of $639.8 million, a 30% increase year-over-year.",
    "planning": false,
    "image_url": "https://images.martincid.com/2026/09/quote-1790508523.png?f=orig",
    "confidence": 0.9,
    "published_at": "2026-09-27T11:29:24Z",
    "article_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.",
    "amount_normalized": 639800000
  }
}

Long text fields are shortened on this page.

Looking up one signal by its id is free. Enrich costs 2 credits per signal returned; a call with no results is free.