Velvet Jones
5.5K posts

Velvet Jones
@VelvetJones3
De Omnibus Dubitandum

CLOUDFLARE CEO EXPLAINS HOW HE CHOSE WHICH EMPLOYEES TO LAY OFF DUE TO AI This man just laid off 1,100 people during Cloudflare's best quarter in company history. $639.8 million in revenue. 34% growth. Record free cash flow. He then wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining how he decided which employees to replace with AI. His framework: every company has 1) builders (engineers) 2) sellers (salespeople) 3) measurers (middle managers, operations, HR, finance, analytics) According to him: AI replaces the measurers. He admitted he could not find a single example in U.S. business history of a public company growing at 30%+ that simultaneously cut 20%+ of its workforce. So he made himself the first. The stock dropped 24% before rebounding steadily the past two weeks. Nearly 1 million people applied for 1,111 Cloudflare internships. He cited that as a sign of opportunity. Read that ratio again. That is 900 rejections for every single acceptance. So, I wonder: if AI truly made your employees more productive, wouldn't the rational move be to keep them and capture more output? You only cut if this is about margins. Not transformation. Margins. Cloudflare has over a dozen roles open in India on LinkedIn, and has filed for 251 H-1B employees in the past 24 months.


































