Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter
Cloudflare launched 15 years ago this week. We like to celebrate our birthday by announcing new products and features that give back to the Internet, which we’ll do a lot of this week. But, on this occasion, we've also been thinking about what's changed on the Internet over the last 15 years and what has not. With some things there's been clear progress: when we launched in 2010 less than 10 percent of the Internet was encrypted, today well over 95 percent is encrypted. We're proud of the role we played in making that happen. Some other areas have seen limited progress: IPv6 adoption has grown steadily but painfully slowly over the last 15 years, in spite of our efforts. That's a problem because as IPv4 addresses have become scarce and expensive it’s held back new entrants and driven up the costs of things like networking and cloud computing. Still other things have remained remarkably consistent: the basic business model of the Internet has for the last 15 years been the same — create
Cloudflare launched 15 years ago this week. We like to celebrate our birthday by announcing new products and features that give back to the Internet, which we’ll do a lot of this week. But, on this occasion, we've also been thinking about what's changed on the Internet over the last 15 years and what has not. With some things there's been clear progress: when we launched in 2010 less than 10 percent of the Internet was encrypted, today well over 95 percent is encrypted. We're proud of the role we played in making that happen . Some other areas have seen limited progress: IPv6 adoption has grow
related reading
- Content and Community – Stratechery by Ben Thompsonstratechery.com
- Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.stratechery.com
- A year of new avenuesrobinsloan.com
- Deep Dive: Building an AI-Native Company | Contrary Researchresearch.contrary.com
- How Cloudflare Plans to Build the Internet of the Future | RBCCMrbccm.com
- The AI Unbundling – Stratechery by Ben Thompsonstratechery.com
- The Agentic Web and Original Sin – Stratechery by Ben Thompsonstratechery.com
- Paid in Full — Real Lifereallifemag.com
- Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data showsnbcnews.com
- The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Contentli.substack.com
- Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access | The Cloudflare Blogblog.cloudflare.com
- Swiping Rightblog.tompaulus.com