The Cogito Brief

Good morning,

I want to introduce you to a company that you probably use every day, even though there’s a good chance you have never heard of it. That company is Cloudflare.

When you think about technology companies, you probably think about businesses that create products you can physically see and interact with like Apple making iPhones, Netflix streaming movies, or OpenAI creating ChatGPT.

Cloudflare is different because it works almost entirely behind the scenes. In fact, if the internet were a city, Cloudflare would be one of the largest invisible companies keeping everything running smoothly.

Here’s the easiest way to think about it.

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Imagine you decide to open an online pizza shop. Your website has a menu, an ordering page, and a payment system. Everything is running perfectly until one day a famous influencer mentions your pizza shop to 20 million followers. Suddenly, thousands of people rush to your website at the exact same time.

At first, that sounds like a great problem to have, but there’s a catch. Your website was built to handle a few hundred visitors, not tens of thousands all at once. The website begins slowing down and pages stop loading. Customers become frustrated and leave.

Now let's make things even worse…cybercriminals notice all the extra traffic and decide to launch an attack by sending millions of fake visitors to your website. With this goal in mind: they want to overwhelm your website until it completely crashes.

This is where Cloudflare enters the picture. Instead of allowing all that chaos to reach your website directly, Cloudflare acts like an intelligent security checkpoint. It quickly determines who’s a real customer and who’s fake traffic. It blocks bad actors before they can create problems and directs legitimate visitors where they need to go.

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Cloudflare has built a giant network of servers spread across hundreds of cities around the world. Rather than making information travel long distances, it stores pieces of websites closer to where people live. The result is a faster and safer internet experience for you, whether you are:

This is becoming increasingly important because of AI. As more businesses build AI products, more information will move around the internet every second. Therefore, these companies building AI cannot afford outages or delays, especially when customers expect instant answers and smooth experiences.

That’s creating a huge opportunity for Cloudflare. If NVIDIA is building the engines that power artificial intelligence, Cloudflare is helping build the roads and traffic systems that allow everything to function.

And sometimes, the companies that quietly keep the entire system running end up becoming some of the most important businesses in the world.

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You may never open an app called Cloudflare on your phone, but there’s a very good chance Cloudflare will continue working in the background every time you use the internet.

Before I go, I want to thank you for being a part of this community and welcome everyone who recently joined.

I am continuing to build my YouTube series to help you learn AI in a more visual and practical way. The video I posted on Friday shows why manipulated text, images, emails, files, and documents cannot always be trusted until you verify them.

If you want to keep learning, I highly recommend checking it out here.

See you Tuesday,

Zack Wright