DK

Dane Knecht

Things Dane Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Dane Knecht has been a guest on No Priors , The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors , The Stack Overflow Podcast , SaaStr AI: How To Sell, Scale, and Win and On The Frontier .

Recently: “Democratizing Security for the Agentic Web with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht” on No Priors (October 2026); “Partnerships can keep open source sustainable” on The Stack Overflow Podcast (July 2026); “Building AI Infra at Cloudflare - Dane Knecht (CTO, Cloudflare)” on On The Frontier (October 2025); “Adding AI to SaaS: Inside the AI Product Strategies of Figma, Cloudflare, GitHub and Ramp” on SaaStr AI: How To Sell, Scale, and Win (January 2025); “SaaStr 786: Adding AI to SaaS: Inside the AI Product Strategies of Figma, Cloudflare, GitHub and Ramp” on The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors (January 2025).

What They Said

“We don't have a token leaderboard. We don't encourage it. We encourage people to focus on the output. They're not graded on if they used it. They're graded on what they've shipped and what they've built.” — Dane Knecht, No Priors

Asked how Cloudflare manages AI token spending. The guardrails are light: an employee gets an email past $300 in a day, their manager hears about it at $500, and a VP at $1,000.

No Priors · 2026-10-23 Permalink → Listen →
No Priors Around 23:57 into the episode
Dane Knecht

It's definitely changed. And each model kind of makes you rethink it as the cost dynamics change. But, you know, in general, I think it's kind of silly that we're actually asking humans to decide which model to do each task. Like

Sarah Guo

it should be intelligently routed. Yeah, exactly.

Dane Knecht

…go back and you have one of the frontier models, do the reviews and the red teaming and things like that. Now, all that today is fairly manual. But I think as we start to learn and experiment, I think people become intelligent. And over time, there'll be more governance on that. Cloudflare has been in a place where largely we've let people use the models and tools that they see fit for the job. We don't have a token leaderboard. We don't encourage it. We encourage people to focus on the output. They're not graded on if they used it. They're graded on what they've shipped and what they've built. But then we do have some kind of, we found like just kind of giving people notices. If you happen to use $300 a day, they'll just get an email, right? Like says, hey, did you know? And because most of the time people didn't realize they were doing it. And they're like, oh, huh. And then I think if it gets to like 500, it goes to your manager. If it goes to 1,000, it goes to a VP in a day. But…

Sarah Guo

Where do you think you are in your overall evolution of take things just for the current level of capabilities of models, assume no new development, of rethinking the way different things at Cloudflare are done from go-to-market to engineering to be

Dane Knecht

still so early? Conflict is something two years ago, we had about 200 interns. And what we saw was those interns, I think, were really the first fully kind of AI native, where you took AI away from them. I don't think they would be. To work. And is that good? Actually, I think it is. I think they…

Sarah Guo

5,000 person company.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“Previously on the internet, we would see these log4j moments or these shell shock type of incidents maybe once a year. And it would be all hands on deck internally at Cloudflare… These things are now happening weekly.” — Dane Knecht, No Priors

Cloudflare's CTO on how AI has changed his priorities. He expects more than half of engineering time to go to security for the next 18 months, until AI has worked through most of the old code.

No Priors · 2026-10-23 Permalink → Listen →
No Priors Around 03:16 into the episode
Dane Knecht

Yeah, yeah. There's been some jokes about renaming the show next year.

Sarah Guo

So with everything that Cloudflare is doing, what are your top few priorities at CTR right now?

Dane Knecht

…up exponentially. Previously on the internet, we would see these log4j moments or these shell shock or type of incidents maybe once a year. And it would be all hands on deck internally at Cloudflare to make sure how we protect not just our enterprise customers, but also all of our free customers, because we view it as kind of just a public good and making sure that the internet stays safe. To these things are now happening weekly. Not all of them are publicly reported on, but there are things that are as serious as the log4j type things, but just happening at a greater frequency. And I expect that through the rest of this year and in the next year, by the next 18 months, majority of teams' time is going to be spent on security. I think there's a stat that was put up earlier today that during one of our keynotes where it…

Sarah Guo

your you know visibility what do you know about the humans behind you know these attacks and harnessing these models and taking the volume of vulnerability discovery up so quickly like are they you know nation state actors are they script kitties like what what can you say about um uh how the uh…

Dane Knecht

uh well i actually think for some of these uh um some of these larger vulnerabilities that have come out more recently actually uh haven't been nation states they've been uh um you know high school kids even uh that are uh we're going to call them

Sarah Guo

agent kitties now yeah

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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