In conversation with Dane Knecht, SVP at Cloudflare

In this episode of Tractable, Orb CTO Kshitij Grover interviews Dane Knecht, the SVP of Emerging Technology and Incubation at Cloudflare. Together, they explore Cloudflare's innovative approach to infrastructure, AI integration, and developer platform. The conversation spans a discussion on their custom-built infrastructure as well as an upcoming product launch focused on AI, and includes insights into Cloudflare's unique positioning at the forefront of internet software products. Join us as we discuss the complexities of AI, developer platforms, and the future of the Internet.

Kshitij Grover [00:00:04]: Hey everyone. I'm Kshitij, cofounder and CTO here at Orb. Today, I have with me Dane Knecht. Dane is the SVP of emerging technology at Cloudflare. Dane joined the company back in 2012 as a head of product, has seen the company grow, and has a unique perspective having been there for well over a decade now. Cloudflare, as almost everyone knows, is one of the most used Internet software products today, powering customers as diverse as Shopify, Polestar, and Broadcom. Dane, welcome to the podcast.

Dane Knecht [00:00:31]: Thanks for having me. Looking forward to chatting today.

Kshitij Grover [00:00:34]: Awesome. Well, most folks probably know Cloudflare best from having globally deployed DNS, a bunch of security infrastructure, and really playing a pretty critical part in protecting the internet from security threats. Over the last few years, Cloudflare has also done a ton of work in the developer platform space. So maybe you can just kick off by telling a little bit about what your team does at Cloudflare, kind of the products you manage, and how you think about Cloudflare's product suite overall, especially given that you joined as a head of product. Dane Knecht [00:01:06]:When people ask me what our product is, I really think of it as a network. That's kind of the core of everything we do. We built one of the largest globally distributed networks in 300-plus cities, and 500-plus data centers, and have about 20% of the Internet sitting behind it. We start out by building that network and kind of the first, what we like to call it, the first act was providing infrastructure protection. How do we protect websites, APIs, and servers from attacks on the Internet? And as a side effect of how we built it, we're able to also do performance as well.

Dane Knecht [00:01:38]: So where you get, everything from WAF, DDoS, CDN, caching, all of that together to provide a great experience for delivering your content to everyone, globally. Then our second act was we kind of flipped the network around. It's how we protect users and devices from the rest of the Internet. And that's where we launched the 1.1.1.1 on the consumer side and warp, and then brought those upmarket, with our 0 trust products and kind of complete a full SaaS solution. The way that product came about was, about about 6 years ago, 7 years ago, we kinda split product engineering into 2 parts. We have one part that's, kind of the core product engineering where kind of typical what you expect them to do. They focus on how we grow revenue. What will the customers need next quarter? What does the sales team need to close those deals? What are our customers asking for? And, that's about 80% of, R&D. And then, we create a new group, which, the group that I lead, the emerging tech and incubation, which we focus on basically how do we deliver new products to the market, things things that customers aren't even asking for, kind of invent the future for Cloudflare.

Full transcript here.