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Matthew Prince

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
See mentions of this person in podcasts
608 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

So we're not running on top of AWS or on top of Azure or Google.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

We actually had to build the network out ourselves.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

That takes a significant capital expenditure.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

And so that was something that would have made this a very cost prohibitive business to bootstrap.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

That said, I think we've been incredibly cash efficient.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

We knew from the beginning that our business was about how can we process a byte of information cheaper than anyone else can.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

And so we've always respected that cash.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

And I'm proud that we have still to this day, more than half that still in the bank.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

Yeah, we haven't as much.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

We experimented with that a little bit.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

But the challenge with that is that because most of our equipment is deployed outside the United States,

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

it becomes a lot harder to get traditional like equipment financing or otherwise, especially when you're at a smaller scale.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

Today, where we're at a much larger scale and we can actually talk to more sophisticated global banks, that's been an option that we've explored, but it's not something that we've prioritized today.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

I mean, I think the only thing that we've said publicly is north of $100 million.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

And and we're well north of that now.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

Uh, gosh, a couple of years ago now.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

Um, uh, I don't, I can't remember.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

I think that we, we got to the metric I remember is that we went from zero to $50 million in, I think, four and a half years, which, um, puts us in some pretty, pretty amazing company with companies like Salesforce and Workday and others.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

So we again, we you know, I've always thought that that entrepreneurs who brag about how much they raised or what their valuation are, it's sort of like if you brag about how big your mortgage is.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1331 How CloudFlare Broke $100m in ARR Securing The Internet, No $2.5B Amazon Acquisition

It feels sort of distasteful, but we've said that we crossed over a billion dollars in valuation in the round that we did in December of 2014.