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Zac Smith has spent 25 years building the internet underneath the internet. He got into it in 2001 out of music school, hosting websites for musician friends, and ended up helping build the New York Internet Exchange back when moving bits cost $2,000 a megabit. He co-founded Packet, the bare metal cloud that made physical servers programmable, and sold it to Equinix for $335 million. Now he is CEO of Datum.
His argument is that the internet needs an upgrade, for three reasons. Policy is fragmenting: the splinternet is real, and increasingly you need to control who you exchange traffic with and where. Data has stopped being centralized; we spent 25 years with smart servers and dumb clients, and now the clients are smart and the data is everywhere. And infrastructure has fragmented across dozens of providers, which makes your perimeter enormous.
His answer is a private backbone for every application, built on SRv6, segment routing over IPv6, which lets you put policy into the header of the packet itself rather than letting the public internet decide where your traffic goes.
The part that should make you uncomfortable is his answer to what AI is about to invalidate: the assumption that the computer your software runs on is safe. "I think you just can't trust pretty much any of your infrastructure." Design from there.
We also get into a soccer club in Denmark he helped crowdfund out of bankruptcy and the open source media system he built for it; why the data center industry's instinct to hide behind a fence is a mistake; the security asymmetry where defenders are refused the AI tools attackers use freely; what happened to Intel and why Jensen Huang is determined not to repeat it; and what the Luddites were really fighting for, which was not the machines.
Learn more about what Zac’s building at Datum: https://www.datum.net/
Want to contribute? Join Datum on Github: https://github.com/datum-cloud
Check out AB Copenhagen on Github: https://github.com/AB-Copenhagen
