3 ms·

You guys had an undisclosed (in the piece) investment from Qualcomm and then touted their products without clearly stating conflicts. It's: * a PR piece -- yo

by nimish 8y ago

You guys had an undisclosed (in the piece) investment from Qualcomm and then touted their products without clearly stating conflicts. It's: * a PR piece -- you guys are making the case for your/qualcomm's tech on a blog, designed for public relations for Cloudflare * you didn't disclose serious conflicts of interest that taint the conclusion of Qualcomm's tech being better You might not be the NYT, and you may not have had a PR firm pushing you, but it's not morally different. For the record, I was very interested in there being a real competitor to intel/amd in the server processing space. Now that the only real win they have is tainted, that's seriously disappointing.

jgrahamc 8y ago
I stand by my objection to you calling this a "submarine PR piece" which implies that somehow Qualcomm got us to write this.
- nimish 8y ago
  Great, but you are not a disinterested source on this. You are an insider (C-level exec) who allowed someone to write a potentially conflicted PR piece without disclosing that the beneficiary of that piece has a non-trivial investment in your company. I don't even see a clear disclaimer that says "Qualcomm is an investor in Cloudflare" in the blog post. The SEC doesn't usually like a technical distinction on potentially-material information (huge win for Centriq!) about something that could move QCOM done underhandedly by a company that didn't disclose that it received a lot of investment by QCOM.
  - jsgo 8y ago
    per the comments section, it appears that the engineer is open sourcing or maybe has already open sourced (discussion was 6 months ago) their testing setup so perhaps someone can check his work? Maybe the lack of notice of investment should have been noticed earlier (or perhaps should be amended to include), but I'd assume an engineer isn't aware of details of who is providing funding (don't work for them, though, so maybe they do). The engineer specifies the metric that matters most to them is long term cost (performance per watt) so with that, I don't get the feeling that their conclusion is flawed when comparing ARM vs Intel in consumer space. We host a few pre-core ASP.NET web applications so I'm fairly certain we wouldn't come to the same conclusion due to use cases. I will say, though, based on the Bloomberg article vs the Cloudflare one, I'm a bit bummed as it seems like long term it'd be a good avenue where applicable and losing a competitor is unfortunate.
- PakG1 8y ago
  There is being honest with integrity and there is being above reproach. Being above reproach is better.

by nimish 8y ago

jgrahamc 8y ago

I stand by my objection to you calling this a "submarine PR piece" which implies that somehow Qualcomm got us to write this.

nimish 8y ago
Great, but you are not a disinterested source on this. You are an insider (C-level exec) who allowed someone to write a potentially conflicted PR piece without disclosing that the beneficiary of that piece has a non-trivial investment in your company. I don't even see a clear disclaimer that says "Qualcomm is an investor in Cloudflare" in the blog post. The SEC doesn't usually like a technical distinction on potentially-material information (huge win for Centriq!) about something that could move QCOM done underhandedly by a company that didn't disclose that it received a lot of investment by QCOM.
- jsgo 8y ago
  per the comments section, it appears that the engineer is open sourcing or maybe has already open sourced (discussion was 6 months ago) their testing setup so perhaps someone can check his work? Maybe the lack of notice of investment should have been noticed earlier (or perhaps should be amended to include), but I'd assume an engineer isn't aware of details of who is providing funding (don't work for them, though, so maybe they do). The engineer specifies the metric that matters most to them is long term cost (performance per watt) so with that, I don't get the feeling that their conclusion is flawed when comparing ARM vs Intel in consumer space. We host a few pre-core ASP.NET web applications so I'm fairly certain we wouldn't come to the same conclusion due to use cases. I will say, though, based on the Bloomberg article vs the Cloudflare one, I'm a bit bummed as it seems like long term it'd be a good avenue where applicable and losing a competitor is unfortunate.
PakG1 8y ago
There is being honest with integrity and there is being above reproach. Being above reproach is better.