Originally aired on September 17, 2022 @ 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT
The World Economic Forum at Davos brought together a fascinating array of people. Join Cloudflare’s João Tomé as he speaks with attendees about tech trends, how Davos has changed, and more.
My name is Maria Fujihara. I'm the founder and CEO of Sinai Technologies. I'm originally from Brazil, but I live in San Francisco. I've been living there for six years. I'm Andrew Edgecroft-Johnson. I'm the U.S. business editor of the Financial Times. My name is Anastasia Radina, and I'm a member of the Ukrainian parliament. Hi, I'm Mark Terrell, and I do stuff. I do have some companies and stuff. I just do stuff. I'm Lindywe Matlaji. I run a non -profit called Africa Team Geeks based in South Africa. I'm the founder and CEO, but I'm also a founder and CEO of a technology company called Epiditis. My name is Antti Penninen. I'm from Finland. I've been in tech for 25 years, and I'm currently running a company called Spacetime, and I'm the founder of the company as well, building decentralized infrastructure for Web3. I'm Professor Gail Whiteman from the University of Exeter, and I'm the founder of Arctic Basecamp. I'm originally from Canada. My name is Anthony Brown. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Music Breaker. Music Breaker is a two-sided marketplace that connects the best record labels in the world, independent artists that are undiscovered, and even mid-tier artists that haven't been found yet with influencers all around the world. I'm the chair of Indonesia's Chamber of Commerce and Industry. My name is Arshad Rashid, and here we are at the Ulaanbaatar Forum in conjunction to introduce about Business20. Indonesia is currently the president of the G20, and we are hosting both the G20 and also the Business20. It will happen in November in Bali. My name is Anak Bakera. The company is Swiss Mobile Data. It's my own company, and so I'm a board member there. Originally, I come from Israel. I live in Switzerland. I've been living here for the last 30 years. This might be my 10th Davos. I don't count them anymore. I've been coming here many years. My name is Peter Young, and I'm an angel investor, and I invest through my holding, Peter Young Holding. My name is Fatima Zahra. I am from Morocco. I'm a psychologist, poet, and global shaper. At the same time, I am serving on the advisory council of the global shapers community as well as on the expert community at Origin Global, which is this mental health organization that specializes in youth mental health that's based out of Australia. Very first time at Davos. Inon Kostika. I'm from Tel Aviv. Yeah, I'm a global innovator for Wiz.io. It's a cloud security company that does agentless scanning of any cloud environment and provides a risk assessment within minutes. Hi, I'm JX Chen. I'm investor relations for FIRE, FIRE Foundation. We are based in Dubai, but originally you are from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I'm Lauren Birch from FDI Consulting. And you? And I'm Roxanna Fariborz from FDI Consulting. So, I'm based out of New York City. And I'm based out of Brussels, Belgium. And if I think about Davos, I've been going to Davos since 2008. And the World Economic Forum nominated me a technology pioneer back in 2008 for my first company, Imaginatic. And then I was nominated a young global leader back in 2010. So, I've been very close to the World Economic Forum. So, we've been coming to Davos with the Arctic Faith Camp tent. That's a real Arctic science tent. We camp in it. We've been coming since 2017. So, this is actually kind of a summer rainy camp. And usually it's a very snowy, very cold camp here at Davos. It's unbelievable. I mean, the level of attendance is extremely high. We meet people from private sector, governments and NGOs that are occupying these incredible positions. We are a technology pioneer. CloudFair was a technology pioneer too at the beginning. And I think Davos, the World Economic Forum, has been doing a good job in bringing new companies to participate in these conversations because ultimately we are the ones that are building the future. And if these big corporations don't understand how to transition and how to manage their risks, they are actually going to go out of business. It's probably the best networking event I've seen because people are very eager to connect. I think that if someone gets to Davos by now, you probably expect them to be interested. So, it's easy to connect. It's easy to meet. And the mixture between the private sector, the public sector, academics is really interesting here. So, it's very heterogeneous as a conference. I think it's one of those things where it's a very rare occasion in life when you have the ability to bring some of the best minds in the world across multi-discipline sectors. That's the thing for me. I came here to speak, but I'm really here to learn. What do you think of the event so far? I think that it is very important. This moment in history is actually crucial for all the civilized world to make sure we still have world order based on law, where events like Davos make sense, where economic cooperation makes sense, and where countries are discouraged from increasing military budgets as opposed to increasing economic opportunities. And this has direct relation to Ukraine, because should now the world not support Ukraine, there will be no need in Davos anymore, because countries will have a message that the best way of international politics is doing war, and countries will invest in war effort and not in economy going green or any other issues discussed in Davos. I think in terms of networking, I met people I probably would never have met in my entire life, right? So, who would have never been in my circle, you know, from people like Andrew Cohen to people like Jean-Philippe Becquart of Microsoft. So, amazing people that connections that I believe is going to really, you know, take our work to the next level. So, that's really the beauty of Davos. I think this is my seventh time. I think Davos is all about networking and also making new friends, because once you are here, then like, you know, you can just go to talk to anyone. And that's the beauty of Davos, I would say. Like, once you have figured out your way here, whatever way it is, you can meet so many amazing minds, and like, they are willing to talk with you. That's, I think it's beautiful about Davos. And the reason why we come is not because we are trying to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. It's really because we try to speak science to power. And it's clear, power comes to Davos. I think when I talked to delegates here, they didn't need to come. They could have zoomed into any of these panels. They could have watched the formal program from the comfort of their laptops in their second homes. In practice, they came, some of them to be on the panels and to get their point of view across, but most of them to meet their contacts, to make new contacts, to really feel what the conversation is. To just stick their finger in the wind and work out where that conversation is going. It's the unexpected encounters you have in Davos that often drive ideas, business opportunities, and strategies over the longer term. I'm just really grateful that there are panels around mental health because that is something that I really care about. I'm also really grateful for the opportunity to be speaking at those panels, to be contributing my voice as a young person, as a lived experience advocate, as also somebody within the mental health space that comes from a very different background, from kind of the European reality, from the Western reality. Usually they say that there's two events in Davos, the one on the Congress Center and the one outside the Congress Center. But they're both important right now. Yeah, I mean they're hugely important. So for Arctic Basecamp, we will always have stuff outside. We were deeply honored to have Prince Albert II of Monaco do a keynote with us here actually in the Basecamp tent. It was fantastic. We did a number of sessions where we launched the Arctic Risk Platform down at the SGG Center. My most memorable conversations throughout the past days were with random people right next to me in panels or even like also in the panel discussions that I was part of. I think Davos should be careful in not becoming another sort of policy event and with all the good intentions. I know the slogan is to make the world a better place, but maybe a focus on the economy and a focus on business and focus on entrepreneurship and focus on innovation would be very appropriate. So more of that, really? Yes. When we met the last time, we had no idea what's coming up with Corona. Now people think maybe Corona may be over. I'm not so sure whether it will go away at all. And maybe we have to live with that. Maybe the time before Corona was the exception and maybe a time which is coming now. There's disruptions. Then we have war and we have inflation. So we have a lot of things to deal with. And it may well be that the last few decades were an exception and that the world is coming back more to normal with economic problems. So I think to concentrate on that, what I said at the beginning, would be a good idea. And there is definitely a need for that and maybe a lack of focus in many countries, the lack of innovation as a basis for economic dynamism. Well, this year is totally different. First of all, no snow, less people. I have to say it's much more convenient. You don't have to wear your moon boots and take them off every time you go in and you go out. I wish they moved this whole event to the summer instead of January. Changes that I've seen over the years, it became bigger and bigger. That's the main thing. It was extremely crowded before the Corona. And now it's sort of calmed down a bit, which I think is positive. First time? Yes, first time. And what do you think the event so far? It's great. I feel that we can produce a lot of high impact partnerships and looking forward to collaborate more as well globally. I think technology is much more dominant today. There were years when the forum started talking about Industry 4.0, etc. But this was marginal. And today when you walk here first, you see all of the crypto and blockchain. And not to talk about the fact that on the promenade, on the main street, you see the pavilions of the companies. And this is a reflection of our reality. So you see Meta, Salesforce, all the large technology groups have immense presence. No, this is not my first. I've been coming here since 2012, every year. I'm delighted that we can actually be able to meet again in person. And this is a different Davos. The feeling is warm. Usually what we call is a white Davos. This is like a green Davos. But at least there is a green thing. So it's a green transition discussion that we need to have. It's been fantastic. We've met all kinds of amazing people from all over the world, actually. It's been very warm as well, which I think is new this year. But it's great. I mean, everybody's out about talking, connecting. And that's what Davos is about, right? What I think is fascinating right now, and I actually think Professor Schwab is a very interesting guy, because this whole notion of, let's say, centralization versus democratization, it's fascinating to, let's say, look at it as a technology world, but it's fascinating to see it actually play out in real life. Now, what do I mean by that? So Klaus was very interesting in sort of the forum to bring in tech pioneers quite early on. He was quite interesting to bring in groups of younger generation entrepreneurs and social good people with young global leaders. And it was about energizing this sort of, maybe the older world, the old established traditional world. He was sort of breaking things up and he did it deliberately. Very clever. So I think then, but what we now see and looking at Davos in 2022 is almost this sort of culmination of the decision to say who's going to win centralization or decentralization. I think right now what's very, very smart that he's done is actually fostered this decentralized Davos. Several of our clients are here, so it's great to be able to connect with them, because otherwise, with busy schedules and everything, especially for the more senior people, this makes it much easier to meet with them. And I think it's really about learning about the new emerging tech players out there, but also the different platforms and things like that, which I think with a lot of our clients, they've got a lot of partnerships with and things like that. So it's good for us to connect dots and try and help that. However, I do know that if I keep coming back here and I hang out with my cool friends and we share ideas together, I know that the future in 20 years time will be worked on in about five years time, maybe 10, if not now already, whether it's quantum. I had a good chat on quantum computing yesterday because that's going to be a game changer. But these things will emerge. They will bubble up. Why do I say that? Because eventually they'll need to get funding. Somebody who's an angel investor will need to say, that's a cool idea. I'll give you your first 50k. So this is how you make the future. Because everything else is like the sort of, it's not bullshit, but it's sort of essential, like sort of the little things beetling along. But if you're going to make big, meaningful things, it is kind of a conveyor belt and it's hard to describe it unless you've been there. This year we actually were able to get one of our youth activists because we also have a youth tent. They sleep in the big tent over at the back and we bring youth from around the world so that they have a place at Davos. Because they just, you know, you can't get hotel space. You can't get that. And we got a ticket for her inside the zone. And that's Cassidy Kramer from Alaska. The whole point is that if you really want to know what's going on in global risk, you have to know what's happening in the Arctic. But I think what's also interesting, and this is sort of what the forum has brought, is that how do you connect together policymakers? How do you connect together journalists? How do you connect together families? How do you connect together regions and everything else? And that's something you don't get at a tech conference. I had a conversation earlier today with somebody who's an American trying to do basically a data collection business in Europe. And he doesn't know what GDPR is, but he's going to do it anyway. And I had to say to him, listen, dude, the guy sitting next to me is a lawyer from Switzerland. And right now, I will tell you that if you don't stop your thing, my buddy here is going to see you and I'll help him. Because the thing is, I mean, this is a global thing, but there are local rules. And it's all very well you're saying. I mean, it's like when Uber came out and said we could do anything. It's like and then Paris said, well, yes, you can. But there's a price. Well, what three? You have been walking on the prominent. I think that's like the trend that you see everywhere. Everybody's talking about that. And then sustainability, of course. And of course, well, the war in Ukraine, that is horrible. So I'm really happy to see that there's so much support from the international community for Ukraine. And I was just having this, you know, hearing the speech from the first lady of Ukraine. And yeah, it was amazing how much people were asking great questions and everybody was super silent. Listen to what she has to say. A big part of my work and my passion that I hope to be my life is work and legacy is to is to really inspire, support and raise the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs, not just from Africa, but from all developing countries, because we have the same problem, because the reason you don't see the same issues we see in Africa is that in Europe is that many people are exposed. They have the education. They can think for themselves. The majority of people in Africa in poverty, most of them don't have good quality education. They can be easily influenced, you know, to agree to things they don't agree with. So what I feel we need to do is to raise young people with the opportunity, with the options so that they can choose. Because I think, unfortunately, we are victims of the leadership we've elected. So if we can make sure everybody is inspired, is exposed and they've got the knowledge they need to discern, to say, OK, you know, this guy is promising to build a bridge, but there's no river, you know, and that is really important. And that's why I'm hopeful. You know, the reality of science is pretty stark, but every every bit that we do and every push that we make now in the next two to 10 years is actually the moment. And I, you know, I saw so many unexpected things happen with the pandemic where we saw governments around the world put humanity above of the above the economy. And that gave me hope at a very dark time when we were all scared about the pandemic. So we can do this. Let's do it with climate change and let's do it now. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know Cloudflare. My name is Aditya and I'm one of the founders and CTO at Luma Health. We partner with over 500 healthcare systems across the United States to deliver a platform that they use to build their own patient journeys. Starting last winter, we launched our vaccine operation solution, which is a full suite of solutions that let healthcare systems craft, deliver, and manage their COVID-19 vaccination strategies. We partnered with Cook County, Illinois, the second largest county in the United States with a population of over 5 million residents. As demand ramped up, our platform began to see over 500,000 requests per second. Hundreds of thousands of patients were looking to get scheduled for their vaccines, getting checked in at clinics and mass vaccination sites, getting text or email reminders about their upcoming vaccinations and more. At Luma Health, we've been a customer of Cloudflares for over six years, but to continue to scale further, we partnered with Cloudflare's Project Fairshot to utilize their waiting room. We were able to integrate the Cloudflare waiting room within 72 hours. We're able to fine tune the number of concurrent users within the Luma patient experience and provide accurate information about vaccine availability for users who are waiting. Layering the waiting room with Cloudflare workers has allowed us to scale up to virtually unlimited demand. The result, over 1.5 million vaccines have been scheduled via Luma Health and we're not done yet. We continue to work closely with our health systems and clinic partners to help address vaccine hesitancy, ensure vaccine access to all Americans and help all of us chart a way out of the pandemic. We are a food at work company. We know the value of Zero Trust architectures. We also know the incredible difficulty it is. So I know the only way I have a chance of implementing this well, that's scalable, that can support itself over time is having the right partners. And so I'm so excited to have Cloudflare as a security partner because they're able to give me that tool set to do Zero Trust well. My name is Connor Sherman. I'm the head of security for EasyCater. When you want to feed a workforce of people, we are the go -to shop to making sure you've got everything you need. It's my job to make sure anywhere you are in the world, you can safely log into our internal tool set. There's a lot of inherent risk with the traditional VPN structure. Part of the success of access for us is we were able to just bypass all that analysis. And it was so easy just to get it going that we were able to save having to hire a specialized person to focus on VPNs. As we are a marketplace, we have all this challenges, whether it be account takeovers, scraping, odd activity. So being able to have risk ratings based on who's arriving at that login page really helped us remove things that were clearly bots and then focus on dealing with more sophisticated attacks. Bot management was a bit of a godsend for us. It gave us a level of precision where we could show up with a scalpel, where historically we'd show up with a sledgehammer. We block over 1.5 million attacks a day through Cloudflare, web application firewall, and bot management. If EasyCater didn't have Cloudflare, we'd have a very bad day. Hi, we're Cloudflare. We're building one of the world's largest global cloud networks to help make the Internet faster, more secure, and more reliable. Meet our customer, BookMyShow. They've become India's largest ticketing platform thanks to its commitment to the customer experience and technological innovation. We are primarily a ticketing company. The numbers are really big. We have more than 60 million customers who are registered with us. We're on 5 billion screen views every month, 200 million tickets over the year. We think about what is the best for the customer. 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It also gives us fine-grained control on how much traffic we can push to which data center depending upon what, you know, is happening in that data center and what is the capacity of the data center. We believe that, you know, our applications and our data centers should be closest to the customers. Cloudflare just provides us the right tools to do that. With Cloudflare, BookMyShow has been able to improve its security, performance, reliability, and operational efficiency. With customers like BookMyShow and over 20 million other domains that trust Cloudflare with their security and performance, we're making the Internet fast, secure, and reliable for everyone. Cloudflare, helping build a better Internet. Hi, we're Cloudflare. We're building one of the world's largest global cloud networks to help make the Internet more secure, faster, and more reliable. Meet our customer, Wongnai, an online food and lifestyle platform with over 13 million active users in Thailand. Wongnai is a lifestyle platform, so we do food reviews, cooking recipes, travel reviews, and we do food delivery with Lineman and we do POS software that we launched last year. Wongnai uses the Cloudflare content delivery network to boost the performance and reliability of its website and mobile app. The company understands that speed and availability are important drivers of its good reputation and ongoing growth. Three years ago, we were expanding into new services like a chatbot. We are generating images dynamically for the people who are curing the chatbot. Now, when we generate image dynamically, we need to cache it somewhere so it doesn't overload our server. We turned into a local CDN provider. They can give us caching service in Thailand for a very cheap price, but after using that service for about a year, I found that the service is not so reliable, turning to Cloudflare. 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The security landscape is difficult enough. I think that I feel like I have a fighting chance there with Cloudflare. you