Sunil Pai on AI agents, Cloudflare and React

Like, it's very boring the way I think about AI agents while everyone else is talking about, like, replacing programmers or, like, 10 x or this thing. I'm like, no, man. Like, how are people in banks going to use AI agents? Like, that's what I what I, like, care about. That's the thing that I want to, like, get to.

Like, my life has I I noticed this as a pattern in my life and my career. Like, my job is making technology accessible to accessible to stupid people because I'm stupid. Like, if I can't understand it, I I I can't do anything about it. That's why I loved React so much. I was like, this tech is made for stupid people.

Like, 100%. And that's why, like, I became a name in the React community. Like, it was it was a lot of fun. I don't know if so if you talk to old school React heads, which is very weird to say in technology space. So React launched in, like, 02/2013, and launched, like, really, really poorly.

Like, it pissed off everyone. People were, like, really mad at Facebook. If you watch the original announcement, speech, Tom Okino and Jordan Walker are giving it at JSConf US. People are walking out during the talk. Like, they're that mad because they're saying, oh, we have decided to use XML and JavaScript.

We like, it's effectively a new language. You can see people walking out. And it's weird because you can recognize some of the people walking out because a couple of years later, they become the biggest fans of React and do a whole bunch of open source around it. Okay. Fine.

I get it now, etcetera, etcetera. So between, let's say, 2015 to 2018 was like the golden age of React, what we like to call the golden age of React. I might annoy people by saying that, but it was fun because there was a lot of money flowing for, conferences, etcetera. So there was like a amazing conference circuit, like, across the world. So we ended up becoming friends with everyone we started overlapping with.

Like, you'd meet, like, six people here, eight people there, and finally, there's, a community. And at the time, because it was, like, new tech, a lot of the talks were about, like, invention. Hey. I learned this new way of doing this thing with React. There's a new pattern. Render props. This, that. Here's how you do, styling in a completely different way. That stuff, like, a lot. I got death threats for that.

I was involved in the CSS and JS community. Yeah. I had people in my Deaf friends. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. DMs telling me, hey. If you ever show up in so and so, city, then, you might not make it out alive and Like, bro, I wrote a CSS library. This is the stupidest Wow.

Like, they just hated the work that we were doing in React, Google, and it was it was a particularly interesting time. Anyway, so it was, like, super innovative. We were meeting all these people, And that's what I said. Like, React was made for stupid people to, like, innovate and do something. Finally, you didn't have to be you didn't have to be a very good programmer to build very good websites.

That that's what, like, accessible technology really does. Right? Like, it's an amplifier. You don't have to know have opinions on functional programming and monads and shit. And, like, React took all of that. Was just like, hey, bro. Like, write your HTML and events and here's NPM. A whole bunch of things happened at the time. The rise of like Babel. Js, so like modern JavaScript came along.

Modern JavaScript. It's like ten years old. It's nothing. And a whole bunch of like open source people. So in that space, like, I made like a name.

I mentioned this because I'm not so much a front end guy anymore even though I spent so many years doing that. I when I joined Cloudflare in '21, I knew something special was going on with, like, edge compute. I was like, okay. Like, this is fundamentally different than your AWS, your other hyperscalers, or even, like, VPN companies. And the way that happens is that you speak to people from the company.

Like, it durable objects were the beta was announced in 2021. No. In in August of twenty twenty. Right? Do like, in the middle of the pandemic. I think, like, we're we're just getting signs that there's going to be a vaccine, and things were, like, starting to look up and stuff. And I saw durable objects. I was like, I've never seen anything like this. I started asking them for access. And even at the time, they were all extremely online.

I didn't even know Cloudflare was like as a bigger company or whatever it is at the time. So Rita Kozlov, lover. She's amazing. And she's been my friend, like, through all of this. She got me access to durable objects.

I started using it, I started complaining about how the DX is. And, we recollect it in different ways, but the consensus is that Rita basically after speaking to them, like, for a month, two months, Rita DM being like, are you just going to keep complaining about it, or do you want a job to come fix it? And I was like, okay. Like, that's that's what we're going to do. Evan then rewrote their CLI from scratch, like the Cloudflare CLI.

It was one of the it's one of the few projects that is a rewrite from Rust to TypeScript, whereas the rest of the industry does it in the opposite direction. And that went, like, really well. Anyway, point being, you speak to people inside Cloudflare, and you realize not just that the technology is different, but also the people are different, the way they think about it. I think that comes, like, from the way the founders think, like Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlin, amazing people. They are they play the long game.

You look at Cloudflare as a company that ships so much, which by the way, like, it feels like we're shipping faster nowadays. We were just talking about it at dinner yesterday. Like, we're like, how are we doing this? And we're like, no. We already always had the capacity to ship. I think we're just doing a better job of telling the story. And it's why if you follow me and Cloudflare employees, your timeline just gets us Cloudflare stuff, like

Like, are actually, like, in the solution business. What what is a unique way of using this planetary computer that they've set together wherein and what is, like, your moonshot idea, and how do you work backwards from that? That's how Cloudflare workers happen. I think you were asking me that Cloudflare is good at making, like, small acquisitions. Right?

And we talk about that in a little more detail. But in about seven, eight years ago, I don't I actually don't know the timeline, Cloudflare acquired a small company called Sandstorm. This is back when Cloudflare was still effectively a CDN and a security company. You protect your website by putting Cloudflare in front of it. And it acquired a person by the name of Kenton Werther.

Kenton comes in, looks around, does a little bit of work, and then he's like, okay. I need to disappear for three months. You can talk to me why this story might not be true. It's my thoughts after all. But I like believing that it's true.

Where he said, you can contact me through my EM and PM. They are the only people I talk to, but don't talk to me for like three months. By the way, this is unheard of. Nobody you don't get to do this kind of thing in Cloudflare anymore, like disappear for three months and do something. But he and like which is why I think the story is also but he shows up and he's like, we are going to build Cloudflare workers.

All these things that we have for CDN, are going to run JavaScript on them, which is very different from a company like AWS that builds massive data centers to run their thing. They're like, no. That means, like, you have just a few data centers. No. We are going to take this.

At that time, it might have been a hundred cities. I think now it's, like, 300 plus cities and, like, some number between 10 to 15,000 POPs. We are going to run JavaScript on all of them. That means the JavaScript is going to run, like, ten to twenty milliseconds away from a human on average, which is unheard of. This is how we are going to scale it.

Apparently, he had the idea for durable objects back then. He was like, yeah. And by the way, this plan takes five to ten years to do. Everyone's like, okay. He's like, no. First, are going to do it by shipping it as a thing that you can put in front of your website for middleware. Change headers on the website. Then we are going to ship this. Then we're to ship this. And you see this way of thinking, like, with a lot of things.

Like, Rita is also a person who's who'll write down a memo, and I go back to her old memos a lot now, by the way. I find it in the Wiki, where she's like, hey. Like, this is where the world is headed. This is where we want to be as a company and as as a technology and as a solution. Working backwards from it, this is what we can do. The reason I've been telling you all of this is to get to the point of, like, agents.

This seems expensive, but then I built an integration with them in about twenty minutes that I had spent two days banging my head off the wall trying to build it directly with Okta. And then with Workhorse, I then have, like, many, many SSO providers, like support instead of just one. So yeah, like for me WorkOS is one of the nicest developer experiences I've encountered in the last like five years probably. And it's not surprising because a bunch of the developer team are ex GitHub and therefore very good at their job.

Right? What is a business? What exactly and it doesn't matter what whether you're a software company, a hardware company, retail, hospitality, whatever. You basically construct a machine made of people, software, and some hardware into which you put, like, $1 and it spits out $2. The simplest way of, like, thinking about it.

And the inputs to this are customers in your into your website. They fill in a form and they add things into their cart and they buy things and you send them and you take payments from them. It's it's market conditions. It affects your stock. There are all these inputs that go into the company.

They can be in a structured format or unstructured format. Inside the company, people convert it from one format to another. Right? Like, they send out emails to each other or they work on, like, databases. They generate reports.

They do a bunch of things, analysis. They the database, have inventory management. And that ends up with outputs like products and software, and then like it feeds back into itself. You analyze There are three things that LLMs are amazing at. Converting unstructured data to structured data, like taking, like, normal text and generating JSON from it.

Converting from different into from different types of data formats Mhmm. From one shape of JSON to another shape of JSON, whatever, then converting structured data back to unstructured data, generating a report looking at an Excel sheet. Have they ever made a technology more well suited to automate the out of everything that happens? Like, things that humans have to do like like, 70% of work that humans have to do, they don't have to it you can do it way more accurately the moment models get enough and they're starting to get like Yeah. Really good.

You can tell. They can work through the night, like, can like keep them going all the time and you can actually have humans do like meaningful work instead of checking someone else's work or forgetting a zero when they fill in a spreadsheet and copy numbers over. I keep hearing the Citibank I I do you know about this? Some dude lost, $14,000,000 because he put the wrong number of zeros and stuff. Like, LLMs actually won't do that soon and with the right controls.

Point being, in a world where this is how businesses are and, are so well primed to be taken over by LLM technology, the way that's going to happen is what we call AI agents. These things that can just run-in the background when inputs come in, convert from one way to another, do very basic customer support, check market conditions, and send reports to the right numbers of people, all of that jazz. You want these things to be running on computers extremely close to you that are very, very resilient, that you can write JavaScript on, and ideally a company that's already spent ten years obsessing over security. This is why AI agents is a big deal. This is why cloud it's it's a big deal, I think, like, for Cloudflare, like and magically, over the last five, six years, we have built the technology that can take advantage of this.

Like, I keep talking about durable objects as, like, game changer tech. It's at some point, Kenton's gonna listen to this, and he'll be mad at me that I said it. Worst named technology on the planet, but the best technology on the planet. Like, it's so good. The idea is that, serverless technology is how we think about servers and computers right now.

And a serverless function is something that takes a request, looks at a database to get some user information, some session data, etcetera etcetera, gives you a response object, and then forgets everything. Mhmm. I call it goldfish technology. Right? Like, every three seconds, it has to reconstruct the planet, like, from scratch.

Durable objects don't do that. Like, the moment you spin up something with a name or an ID, it sticks around. Not only does it stick around, it can keep working even when, like, your browser's not connected or anything. You can run JavaScript in it that runs on alarms or inputs or webhooks or whatever it is. It's it's like having a VPS or, like, a VM, but it can start up instantly.

And when I say instantly, I mean, like, zero milliseconds. It's alive. You can connect to it with WebSockets. And when you're not using it, it goes back to sleep. And unlike VMs or VPSs, which are, like, so expensive, etcetera. No. These things are cheap. You can have, like, millions. If I understand right, there is at least one customer that spins up trillions of these objects.

So it's as cheap and as easy to spin these things up as it is to do a function. So in a space like that, where this technology runs all over all the time in the background, how are how it's inevitable that AI agents, like, just take over the space. And, like, that that's why we are trying to move so quickly. The other thing, which is I I was explaining this to you, which is working in Cloudflare is an exercise in being comfortable with never shipping a finished version of anything. Like I said, you're never going to be given three months to think about something where no one is allowed to talk to you and only Kenton gets to do that.

And again, I think that story is bullshit. But we were thinking about AI agents, like, for a while in the background, and we were doing like a whole I I did some writing on my blog. I don't mean to be that guy who says, like, read my blog, but you should read my blog. And we were doing a whole bunch of experiments, and at one point, a lot of our customers started asking, hey. I see everyone's talking about AI agents.

Do you folks have what can I do AI agents on Cloudflare? And we had that all, like, should we wait for three months while we build like a full end to end solution thing or should we do it the way that Cloudflare does it? Ship something really small but polished enough Mhmm. And something useful enough for a small for an interesting set of use cases, and then iterate like in public. And we did that, like, I was I don't I don't usually grind so much at my age anymore, but I do work, like, so hard.

And then, like, two, three weeks I wanna say two weeks, actually. First week, we built out all the moving pieces, got it working, showed everyone internally. And in the next week, we built out, like and when I say we, it was, like, Matsurovlak, Rita Kozlov, Brendan Orov. Like, there were a lot of people involved in this, just to be clear. The website, docs, examples, etcetera, all just came together.

And we shipped it and it, like, it landed, like, really well. And when I say landed well, you because I'm the egocentric human being that I am, like, me, Twitter validation is, like, what matters. And while a lot a bunch of people, like, like my tweets about this, it turns out in the background, way more people are enjoying this. The the most common story is a customer will come up to us and say, yo, we saw your AI agent's email that you sent out. So we give it to, like, a junior engineer to say, hey.

What can you do with this? And twenty four hours later, they come back with, I have a full chat agent that's connected to our data sources that we can like chat with and do things, and it worked. Oh, here's the URL. You can use it like right now. Yeah. This is amazing. Can we talk to you more? What what else can we do about this?

Like, add it as a couple of tools to the AI chat agent that we have. Add a little bit of logic that spits out a chart, and, yeah, it works. Like, that's the universal interface. So right now, a lot of the I see a lot of people using these agents building interfaces to make sense of, their data and the systems that they have in very like lightweight ways. They don't actually want you to build like a whole website and like over engineer a thing.

If this works, it works. Mhmm. The other thing that yeah. Our the reason that Cloudflare agents are good is because it's very easy to attach UIs to them. Not just chat UIs, but any kinds of UIs.

Durable objects can literally host complete websites. Oh, I forgot to mention this. Right? Like well, I made a startup called, like, Partykit, which was built on, like, real time technology and building, like, interactive UIs and multiplayer and all of that, and that's what powers AI agents. We need to talk about that acquisition angle again, like, in make sure I don't make sure we don't forget it.

So it turns out building UIs on top of a a Cloudflare AI agents is like really fast. Like, it's a thing that you can do like really really quickly, whether it's chat or something else. Someone showed me a fake Linux turn terminal that they've built on top of the Cloudflare Agents SDK. Kind of amazing. They receive emails as text files in this fake computer. Can't wait to share

Mhmm. You have to literally get a bunch of VMs or VPSs and like host so that you can do web sockets well. Now that means

It it does that like really well. And it scales horizontally across the planet. So otherwise, if you're like in a big company, you can't solve the real time thing by putting everything in US East 1. Mhmm. Because then your your users in Europe are going to struggle.

The ones in India are going to struggle. The users in China are going to struggle. No. Cloudflare durable objects across the planet. The thing about durable objects is they instantiate closest to you just like a regular worker, which means the AI agent I'm talking to is ten to twenty milliseconds away in London when I spin it up.

I just love that tech. So it's fast. It's instantaneous. Like, you can put two devices next to each other and they're synchronized. So Cloudflare agents takes care of all the infrastructure things magically for you because Workers is this crazy tech with durable objects and stuff.

And then running the code is when I say it's easy for a junior developer to take care of, it's this is what I mean by dumb technology, by the way. It's not because I solved a lot of hard problems in building the library. It's just that I made it more accessible of telling a story around it. The word durable object means nothing to nobody. When you say no, it's an agent container and you can host a chat agent in it.

Here is where you put your React app. Here is where you write code for what happens when a message comes in, a chat message comes in. Here's a tools file where you can connect your database and your Notion and your internal linear, all of that. Just copy paste this, dump it in it. And they do that and it works and they're like, oh, shit.

Like, works. Like, we're kind of done. So this isn't about this is this is what I mean when I say, like, the Cloudflare people, like, kind of, like, think differently, and I just count myself lucky to be, like, included in that group sometimes. It's it's very good boring tech and I want to do the exact same thing to like AI agents right now. Mhmm.

A lot there's a lot of hype in the market right now and I hate AI thread boys who are like, wow, Google launched Gemini Gemini six Dude, I don't even know model names anymore. Like, there are just too many stupid names out there. Everything's changed. Here's 12 things you should know. I Sorry. Yeah. That that's not that's not how I can even think about technology. No. The thing that matters to me is, hey, you're a nine to five developer. You have users.

Here's how you can build a thing that makes just some things easier for your users and customers. Yeah. They like it. Our durable objects, another thing that I really like is that they have scheduling built in, and you might have heard this meme about AI agents being spicy cron jobs. That's all they are.

But we have spicy cron jobs like in built into the thing. You can tell it, hey, every Friday evening at 9PM, check the the Japanese stock market is called Nike. Is that right? Check it and, summarize the top headlines and send it as an email to me. Mhmm. And like, yes, sir. Thank you. We have scheduled it every Friday 9PM. We're gonna make these API requests magically in the back end to you, generate a thing, send it to your email.

Because as technology, it's not something you can own. Right? Like, it's it's just a standard. It's a protocol. But because of the way MCP right now requires like a persistent connection and like there was a story around how do you do auth and stuff, it turns out durable objects are a crazy good fit for that as well.

Yeah. And we saw it. We're like, okay. I guess we're like leaning into this, like we're doing it more. The nice but the way I think about MCP is you can now and this is gonna be the experience within the next couple of weeks.

Just watch. You can you will be able to add MCP servers dynamically to an app without doing any software deploys. What that means is there's a world where an MCP translates to tools, the tools dot t s file, where right now you still, as a developer, need to write code. Instead, there's an experience where you will say, hey. What are interesting MCPs I can add into this chat here?

Like, you will ask the chat. Yeah. What are interesting MCPs I you can add? Or you will say, hey, could you add an integration for Gmail? Like, yes, absolutely. Here's the button for you to log in. Now I magically have access to your email. Zero code deploys. All your and every company is coming out with an MCP server right now. PayPal built their production version in, two days. Shout out to Heyman. Like, I spoke to him. He saw our thing. He built it in two days. Even we were like, wow.

You moved fast for for PayPal. Like, cool. Like, we didn't expect that Yeah. To happen at all. David Kramer Zig, he just built the Sentry MCP. Again, like on Oh,

It works. Here's this here's the code. And it was awesome. So now in a world where every SaaS company has a publicly facing remote remote MCP is what they call it, but these MCP servers, and you have all these chat clients that can add it dynamically, how is I don't wanna say it's like game over, but that's like most software. No?

Like, things are gonna get interesting really quickly. Bro, I'm everything's moving so fast, man. Like Yeah. Every two days like that, like, new things happening. Anyway, so yeah. So the chat agent is, like, a thing that I think we're going to invest a lot more time in. Right now, I'll be honest, I feel like it's actually quite bare bones. It's literally just a text box and, like, messages. You want sessions. You want images.

You want generative UI. You want a way to, like, almost debug. Hey. Show me which tasks have scheduled, etcetera, etcetera. You we should have a first class auth solution, so you should be able to add, like, log in to it, like, really quickly.

But it looks like chat is a very is going to dominate as a as the UI of choice for these things, like, for a long time for a long time. I I I know there are people who want it to be different, but it's just humans love this shit. Yeah. I think what we'll we another thing we will do is we'll make it multimodal, which is we'll make it easy for you to talk to it. I think we I I don't know if you noticed today, Cloudflare announced something called real time kit.

We'll start with some early customers and then we'll do a public beta. It's WebRTC infrastructure in the Cloudflare's Cloudflare way. So WebRTC right now, if you do it naively, you'll be able to do five to 10 people in a shared session. Cloudflare lets you put like 10,000 people listening to like a shared session. It's we we can do that and like dirt cheap like yeah.

Like yeah. It doesn't break the bank. But we are also shipped, announced at least a whole bunch of front end components to build these apps together. So like if you want to stitch together your own Zoom, like, oh, here are, like, Avtar things, little video things. Here's the thing for, like, choosing which camera you have, etcetera etcetera.

Stitch it together, put it all together. And I can't wait to take all of that and chuck it into my AI agent thing now because I you can imagine, like, collaborative sessions with an AI agent. Right? Like Mhmm. If you think about it, all these chat AI assistants right now, ChatGPT, Claude, etcetera, they're single player.

You don't you don't share a session with someone else and talk to them. So that's I want to change that. I mean, I'm a part I'm a multiplayer. It's a party kit Yeah. Product anyway. Yeah. But not only should it be voice, but you can imagine then that having an AI agent join a meeting, not just as a meeting notetaker, which by the way, again, shout out to Granola, you changed my life, bro. Like, thanks, Chris.

It can, like, correct you. You can talk to it while you're in a meeting and doing other things. Just like you would automate, like, your email stuff with it. Yeah. So I think we will put video audio as a story for AI agents like soon enough.

Like, that is so entitled. It's amazing. Don't get me wrong. Like, it means all our stuff is like actually quite good, which is crazy because twenty years ago, it was considered a toy language. Point being though, but if I had to build something today, I would pick a normie vertical.

I would go for healthcare, hospitality, and I would build like AI agents in that space. That shit would be I I I don't wanna say a money machine because who knows and there are so many people trying right now, but it would definitely be interesting. Like, there's so much to uncover and like redo. Compliance work. Customer support, of course, they're throwing it at it.

The other day, was in Cambridge and I called up the Ivy, which is like one of my favorite restaurants because they have those thin zucchini fries. It's delicious. Okay. And they have a pea soup that I think is amazing.

Sorry, sir. We don't allow pets. It identified itself as AI in the beginning, by the way. But it was like clear, fluent, no like long waits. No. We don't allow pets here in this in this location. What time are you open until so and so? Yeah. We're today, we're open until 03:30 today because we, we have a private event happening in the evening. I was like, bro, like, it's like sci fi.

Like, I didn't expect it would go mainstream so soon. And then I was like, I would have liked to have built this for them. Yeah. So that's what I would do. Like, I would just take like use cases. Ping three point one, that's me on Twitter, by the way, like say, hey, like, I'm interested in this use case. Can you help me out with it? Like, here's your docs. Here's the starter kit. Here's the thing.

What else can we build for you? Oh, we have the real time thing if you want. We can hook you up. Yeah. And if you don't have something, let us know. Like, we'll build it for you. I would kind of go after that. Even in the dev tool space. Okay. Here's another thing.

There is an opportunity in the dev tool space to actually start thinking about what AI native dev tools are. I'll give you a simple example. Take a JavaScript framework or library. If I was building React today, this is not to say I could I'm capable of building React. That code base is crazy.

And I say this as someone who spent a year on that team. Not only would I be building out the library and the API, I would be building out a one pager thing that you can dump into cursor rules so that cursor understands it immediately. My docs page, I would obviously power with a VectorDB so that you can ask it like semantic search. Hey. How do I build this?

Well, here are four docs pages. I would probably try to ship a coding agent, small version that spits out good, or at least give you a prompt, etcetera. Mhmm. But point being, you have the capability of building actually magical dev tools right now, and it's actually strange to me not a lot of them are doing it just yet. Especially people who want to innovate or want to build like something new.

And I said this for like the stupidest example. Right? Like people JavaScript fatigue is a real thing. There are like 200,000 JavaScript libraries out there for every but if you take a step back, how would you build it in 2025? There's like a new way of thinking about these experiences for developers. It's of course, I would ship a remote MCP for my JavaScript framework.

It'll be cheap as So in the dev tool space, I think I would definitely like take a step back and and play the long game. Like, if you're trying to make moves to capture people within the next one month, it might work, but some the the the next news cycle will steal that away from you anyway. What you want to do is have like the moonshot where you're like, okay, I know that in six to twelve months, the models are going to be a lot better. Like, g p t five is going to be released. It's out there.

What that means is that function calling is going to get way more reliable. Audio video solutions are going to be like way more powerful. Pricing on model inference is going to zero. Like, it's Yeah. It's still like it's not that expensive. You know what? At this point, like, it's like, it's worth the value. There are people who spend like $20 in a day on cloud code and it spits out like 6,000 lines of code. They're like, damn, $20 is a lot. I'm like, bro.

That's a that's three that's that's three round that's three beers at a London pub. Like Yeah. You're you're blowing through that last Yeah. Actually, I don't I've been in Newcastle for so long. Are beer still £6? I imagine.

I would not try to build a tool that is broad. Why would I? Like, companies and infrastructure companies are trying very hard to be in that space. But model companies and infrastructure companies want people building vertical solutions to build on them. Oh my I would just go after that.

I would absolutely pick something that that you're passionate about. Musicians, arts, a new kind of social network for your friends and family. The thing that I want to build next is a mobile app just for a single family. As an AI agent that you can chuck your grocery list into reminders to pick someone up from school that listens to your emails, etcetera etcetera. Who has built the this is the time to build the family app.

Mhmm. Like, hey, this is my family app. That's sorry. No. The very long way of Yeah. Answering this question is Build

After a meeting on my manager's calendar, I I was like, oh, bro, like I'm putting in my papers. And he's like, what? I'm like, yeah. I I just kind of like I have like very I'm I was turning 39 that year. I had like just a couple more years where I thought I could make like a big short start startup type thing. I had just gotten ILR in The UK, which meant I didn't need a visa sponsor. Nice. I was like, dude, I worked for other people forever. Yeah. And they're like, what can we do to keep you?

Because because nothing is wrong. It's not like you twist it anywhere. I was like, no. I gotta like really do this.

Yeah. But I love him. And, he was just like a one person, two person company at the time, couple of contractors he was working with. And he was trying to solve multiplayer, like, do you do synchronizing of a collaborative drawing board across screens, and how do you do it so that it doesn't break the bank? I was like, I know durable objects.

Let me help you with this. And I thought it would be like a three month, four month project. And I remember the timeline exactly within, to be clear, like, there were, David was there. There were a couple of other people who built the actual, like, synchronization code. I was just there showing them how to deploy it onto Cloudflare.

Within, like, a week and a half, we had our first prototype, and it worked great. And we actually demoed it at one of the first future of code Maggie. Yeah. With with that yeah. That was our first big test, by the way. 30 people in the room on the same dl raw board. We were so worried it was going to fail. It went wonderfully well. Shout out Maggie also for being just one of the most special parts of the London Tech community.

It went like really well. Sequoia Arc and all of those things. It got a whole bunch of traction. People loved using it. Just couldn't figure out how to make money with the damn thing, dude.

It's impossible well, it would have been many years of building something way more vertical. And I think I was more interested in the accessibility, like, story like like I said, like, making this accessible to developers, etcetera. So it like I said, like, the numbers were good. Still had a bunch of money in the bank, but like Cloudflare reached out and said, well, you've been doing a good job telling the story. Do you want to just come back Cloudflare?

We are interested in the space. We want to accelerate. We these few people to teams of like two, maybe five people look very interesting in the space and they're usually already building on Cloudflare. Just reach out to them, say, continue the journey inside Cloudflare. You don't have to worry about enterprise sales.

We give you the impact, etcetera. So at Partykit, it's like that. Baseline, shout out to Boris, Thomas, and Maxim, also some of my favorite people. We announced another acquisition yesterday, Outerbase, which is two people from Pittsburgh of all places. Wow. Love them. They're great. They're database they're they're intersection of database and UI nerds, which is why they have the most beautiful UIs for databases.

Our CTO is a Twitter nerd, dude. Like, he'll be sending me, like, four tweets through through the day. He'll send me an email saying like, help out this customer and stuff. We are just always there. We're well connected. So internally, are like, hey, like, how whose life do we make better today? That's what I think we mean by like engineering culture. Yeah. There are other ways of looking at culture but I like Cloudflare because it's fun. It's like so nice to work inside that.

Yeah. Dude, this is the second time I'm working in the company. Like, I better like it.