Windsurf Madness, Big Tech Wins as the Silicon Valley Ecosystem Erodes, Cloudflare Wants to Fix the Internet Economy

A week of news surrounding Windsurf and Google (and now Cognition), why the Silicon Valley ecosystem as we've known it appears to be coming to an end, and why the hiring and acquisiton conventions emerging now are a clear win for big tech. From there: A counterfactual on the founding of OpenAI, and various reactions to Cloudflare's plans to block AI crawlers by default and offer a pay-per-crawl model to LLMs and websites. At the end: An email about having a second child spawns a discussion about parenting. To email the show: email@sharptech.fm @SharpTechPodcast Channel — YouTube @Stratechery Channel — YouTube Google and Windsurf, Stinky Deals, Chesterton’s Fence and the Silicon Valley Ecosystem — Stratechery Update Cognition Buys Windsurf, Nvidia Can Sell to China, Grok 4 and Kimi — Stratechery Update Cloudflare on the Edge — Stratechery OpenAI, Artificial Intelligence and Data, Data and Recruiting — Stratechery Update Cloudflare’s Content Independence Day, Google’s Advantage, Monetizing AI — Stratechery Update Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers — New York Times Get all episodes of Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, Asianometry and the Dithering Podcast as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.