Fireside Chat with Michelle Zatlyn and Oren Yunger at ICON’s 10th Annual

Hi. Okay, Michelle, thanks for joining us today. And just for everybody's benefit, when I asked Michelle to join us, she immediately said yes. So many here are familiar with Cloudflare, but not necessarily grasp how amazing of a business you built. Can you share some stats with the audience?

Sure. So part of the reason why I said yes so quickly is that I used to come to a lot of events like this when I was an early-stage founder. I got a lot out of learning from those who had walked the road ahead of me, and so I always like to pay it forward and give it back because I used to be a very eager founder. I was invited to a lot of cool events, I would go to a lot of cool events, and I learned a lot from people in front of me. So I started Cloudflare. We're coming up, I'm 14 years old with two founders. So some of you have co-founders. I started with two co-founders, three of us, and we're about to turn 14 at the end of September. So we're 14 years old. In that time, we started from nothing. Now, last year, this year, we're on track to about 1.6 billion in revenue, which is, I think many of you, if you were a founder, would be happy if you had 1.6 billion in revenue in about a decade. That's a good run rate, up and to the right. We have about 4,000 people around the world. So just to kind of give you a sense, from nothing to 4,000 people, that's been my journey. Happy to help do that.

What Cloudflare does is, it's interesting, if I had met you 10 years ago, I would have had a hard time describing what Cloudflare was. Some of you I did meet 10 years ago, I had a hard time describing it. Now we say Cloudflare is the world's leading connectivity cloud. We can talk about what that means. And our mission is to help build a better internet. And so we work with businesses, both startups up until the Fortune 100, we really do help make sure that their employees, their applications, and their networks are both fast and secure while reducing complexity and cost. Super important in today's very complex and cost world. And so that's what really Cloudflare is delivering. And so security is one of the things that we care a lot about. Yesterday, we helped stop 187 billion cyber attacks on behalf of all of our customers, which is pretty powerful and again, pretty cool that we were able to build that in less than 15 years. And so it's amazing when you can take an idea that you see as a founder and then really make it come to life. And I guess that's what I've been able to do the last 14 years.

Thank you.

Sure. Okay, so here's the thing. I do these things because I want to be helpful to all of you. It's not really about what Cloudflare's doing, it's more about what did I learn that maybe could help save you some heartache or gray hair along the way. And so it's interesting when I think about the journey from zero to, you know, 1.6 billion in revenue, there are different natural stages. There's kind of like the first 20 people that were at Cloudflare, trying to get that first revenue, the product-market fit piece. And then it was kind of, okay, once we had that, getting to 100 million was its own stage. 100 million to a billion was its own stage. And now I'm in a new stage, and it's been an inflection point to go from 1 billion plus. I kind of now frame it as one to five, and we're early in that journey but well on our path. And each part of that has been different. And so today, I'm our president and chief operating officer. Today, I run all the go-to-market organization. So we have a sales team, we have a marketing team, we have partnerships, all of that reports up to me on the go-to-market side, plus our people and places organization. And it's actually really fitting because the two best parts of my job are the people I get to work with and our customers. So it's great that those are part of my roles or responsibilities on a daily basis.

If you zoom back to like when we were a $100 million business or before that, that was not my job. My title was not president or chief operating officer. It was one of those things where I kind of earned it and grew into it over time. And so I think that's interesting. And I remember early, early at Cloudflare, we were just getting started. We were first-time founders. We showed up in Silicon Valley, and the premise, the promise of the valley really paid dividends to us, where venture capitalists gave us some money to go prove it. But we were unproven people. I was just kind of a regular person. No one knew we didn't have a reputation here, let's put it that way, or a track record. And I remember we went to the first board meeting, and we took capital at the time from Venrock. They were a big cybersecurity investor at the time. And remember, we were really excited. This was back in 2010. I was so excited. We were about to hire somebody who was coming from Facebook, and at Facebook, he was a senior director. And so VP was a super important title for him. And I remember on this slide, we went to the board meeting, we're saying, 'Great news, we're about to hire a VP of production engineering,' thinking that, like, technical operations, thinking this was going to be a no-brainer because it was like he had great pedigree. He was Yahoo and Facebook, and back in 2010, that was a big deal. And I remember our board member being like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're giving the VP title? How many people has that person hired? How many people has he fired? Why are you giving a VP title? If he doesn't work out, how are you going to hire above him?' And it was so interesting. I remember driving back home. We were down at Sand Hill Road. We didn't have an office at the time. We were meeting at Venrock's office. We drove home from this, or our office wasn't very nice at the time, so we went to their offices, I should say. We were driving back to the city, and I remember saying, 'Okay, we are going to have a very flat org because we have to prove ourselves a lot. We have to show.' And so for a long time, the first kind of five years of Cloudflare, my business partner Matthew, he was our CEO. You need one CEO, but like, I was just user experience, and Lee, my other co-founder, was lead engineer. And that was it. And we kind of didn't have titles for a long time because it was clear we had to prove ourselves. And I think that it's interesting as I've kind of scaled, and now when we go sell to United, I mean, you want a big title to go match the CTO of United. You want that to match. But when you're getting started, sometimes you have some time to figure that out. So that was kind of a lesson learned, that it was interesting that kind of being like, 'Fine, I just won't take a big title early on,' set the tone that anytime we went to talk to the next person we were trying to hire, we're like, 'We don't really do titles here.' And because Lee and I were playing along with not big titles, everyone else kind of got along in line too. And so those are a little bit stories about kind of what my roles and responsibilities have been over the time.

Everyone's, well, you know, it's interesting. I needed some title, and I didn't like marketing. I didn't want product marketing. And so I was like, I need something better. And back in 2010, this is, you know, the cycle of tech, Marissa Mayer was doing great. She was at Google, and she was head of user experience, and she was like all over all the magazine covers and everything back in 2010. And I thought, wow, if it's good enough for Marissa Mayer and Google, it's good enough for me.

Oh, it's great.