@jaminball: Get in the Token Path

The article argues that the biggest infrastructure winners of the cloud era monetized the core consumption primitive of their platform, and that AI infrastructure companies should likewise get into the token path, since tokens are now the core primitive. It contrasts Snowflake, Datadog and Cloudflare, which charged for compute-linked activity, with Docker, which it says monetized adjacently through seats, support contracts and consulting and never captured its share of cloud compute spend. It cites Cursor reportedly reaching $2B ARR and says its revenue is coupled to token consumption, while the author also warns that being in the token path is necessary but not sufficient, citing Limelight Networks as a CDN that saw declining revenue despite record traffic.