Matthew Prince

But one of the things that I think that we've always done is we don't talk a lot about the money that we raise or anything else.

So every round that we've done, we've kept secret for at least nine months after we did it.

So the round that we raised in December of 2014,

We actually announced finally in September of 2015.

So it's, you know, I think that raising money is sort of a necessary part often of building a business like Cloudflare, but it's not necessarily something to be proud of.

It just means that you didn't actually generate enough revenue yourself to cover the costs that you had.

And so, you know, I wish that more people would focus on

you know, how, how quickly you've gotten to sort of break even, how quickly have you actually ramped kind of your revenue rates?

Um, cause that's, that's what really matters for, for a business.

So we're growing still high double digits, um, at, at the, at the rate that we're at, which is, uh, which is really, really, really, um, you know, amazing.

Yeah, we certainly weren't considering going public in 2017.

And I think that what we're really proud of is that we've built a real business that can be a standalone, sustained business.

And, you know, we run the business at basically breakeven value.

uh, today.

And, uh, I think that as you get to a certain size, whether you're public or not public, you have a responsibility to run your business as if it is a public company.

And so making sure that you have the controls in place, that you're doing the right, the right auditing, the right other systems.

And so those are things that there's a lot of bullshit though.

So I'd push back on that.

I think that there are reasons that you have rules.

And if you're taking people's money and if you're taking people's time, especially, and trading that for equity in the company, then it's really important that you make sure that you're actually putting in place the systems and controls to run that business responsibly.