Matt F. Thompson

Operator/investor. AI-native builder. Building product and service businesses at @kovaventures.

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

Scraping + crawling data has been WIDE OPEN thanks to agents and platforms like Firecrawl.

However, new tools like @Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control might start closing the flood gates.

Controls like these will - by an order of magnitude - increase the value of proprietary data.

https://t.co/947P4L92eG

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@16vchq NRR. It’s a North Star metric bc it can’t be bought. CAC, growth rate, logo count — all purchasable.

Expansion revenue only comes from customers getting real value.

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

AI Karen 😂 This actually seems extremely useful.

Definitely solves a frustrating / time-consuming pain point if it works well.

https://t.co/tTzGWNyCBm

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

Super useful tool for aspiring founders who need to see the viability and back into the burn rate of a product.

Cloud World Model:

https://t.co/x49uDaPpRT

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

GenAI demand is growing 3× faster than any prior IT wave — and revenue is compounding ~90× faster than it was in 2023.

Superusers are driving this boom with huge usage demands.

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

I don’t think many people realize there are real constraints to the proliferation of AI.

For example, Apple is raising the cost of devices due to the “the rapid expansion of AI data centers.”

Here are the major constraints I see:
- Power and data center capacity
- Energy and water limitations
- Usage / interference costs
- Availability of data (mark my words, this is coming)
- Enterprise integration, security and adoption speed + barriers

And sooner rather than later (as we’ve seen with Anthropic Mythos: government regulation)

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@denk_tweets @Cloudflare @beehiiv This is great

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@Ben__Springer The use case should be for pitches and POCs not completed films

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@gregisenberg Some great stuff here, but the most difficult part is the beginning - getting access to decision makers and selling an unproven product in a chosen industry/vertical.

Founder-market-fit is real.

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@geoffwoo Wouldn't more people have trouble understanding if a company/product was too early?

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

one good girl is worth a thousand GPUs

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@Danhightower Why not an S Corp?

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

One of the tidal shifts of 2026 is the move towards the agent web.

Here are the companies powering that. Am I missing any key platforms?

Firecrawl — Best at turning any site into clean LLM-ready Markdown/JSON. Crawling + agent tools.

Apify — The full scraping platform with a huge marketplace of ready-made Actors.

EXA (https://t.co/RdHuQHCuXF) — Semantic search engine for meaning-based discovery (embeddings > keywords).

Parallel — High-accuracy deep research and verifiable answers for agents.

Tavily — Fast, structured real-time search purpose-built for RAG/agents.

Browserbase — Managed stealth browsers so agents can actually interact with the web.

Honorable mentions: Bright Data (enterprise proxies), Kadoa, Skyvern.

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@0x___ygen A lot of companies are using Dub to manage them. Still digging into the data to see the impact/best practices.

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

Every consumer/prosumer company should heavily leverage a creators program.

[Jeddi @antinertia]

last year, I spent $1M on creators

this year alone, I’m already at $3M

Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic are going hard on whitelisted ads

i see them everywhere

creator-led growth is the way

don’t sleep on it

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

Critically important read for any professional in tech

[Wall St Engine @wallstengine]

Cloudflare CEO Prince on how AI changes who gets laid off first:

Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world. I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it.

We haven’t found another example in U.S. business history of a public company growing at more than 30% that laid off more than 20% of its workforce. Yet what we did is likely going to become the norm over the next year. This is a story about artificial intelligence, but executives and commentators are misunderstanding how it will disrupt business and who will be affected.

AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.

For Cloudflare, internal audit previously picked a handful of business risk areas to scrutinize each quarter. Now we’re moving to a system in which every business risk is audited continuously. We’re closing our books faster. We’re making fewer mistakes and catching the ones we do more reliably. And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars.

The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively.

We consolidated our operations functions into a single group that can support teams across the business, using AI to gain specific expertise when needed. We significantly reduced our marketing team, which, like in most companies, was teeming with measurers. Across our finance team, we found opportunities to consolidate and automate.

We received almost a million applicants for 1,111 paid internships this summer. The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI-native. They’re all builders or sellers, and we expect that the majority will get full-time offers.

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

@tsungxu So clean looking

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

Usage limits are the #1 thing holding back AI-generated apps right now.

You can build fast… until you can’t. The real product work starts when you’re fighting rate limits and quotas instead of building.

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

Where could we improve Composer 2.5?

We're working on the next model and would love your feedback.

Lots of work to do (our CursorBench evals below) in the coming weeks!

[Matt F. Thompson @mattft]

The web is changing fast — and it’s no longer designed primarily for humans.

Websites should ditching flashy carousels, endless scrolls, and heavy JavaScript.

Instead, we’re seeing more clean data schemas, structured markup, and APIs built so AI agents can read, understand, and act instantly.