Matthew Prince

Cloudflash started with a really simple idea, which is how could you take a firewall and put it in the cloud?

And one of the challenges we had was we knew that in order to be successful, we had to then someday sell to big banks and governments and healthcare organizations and things like that.

But we were tiny.

And so the challenge was we didn't have a big network.

We didn't have the data to really stop the most sophisticated threats at the time.

And so one of the things that we did was we made a stripped down version of the service available to everyone in order to basically help us bootstrap getting the network built and also to help get the data to be able to identify what the threats and challenges were.

And, and, and the combination of decisions really caused us to then have what were just a series of almost endless problems.

You know, next thing we knew, we had every human rights organization in the world that signed up, which meant that then every sort of authoritarian regime in the world was attacking us trying to knock them offline.

And so we had to build, you know, not just a firewall, but now we had to do DDoS mitigation.

We had hacker kids that were, you know, trying to, you know, literally steal our domain.

So we had to build a registrar.

We had our own employees that were getting, you know, attacked as they would go online.

So we had to build our own VPN service that was there.

We even had to build our own developer platform in order to be able to keep up with all the feature requests and be able to build things ourselves.

And so the story of Cloudflare has really been, like,

start with this simple idea, how do you put a firewall in the cloud, make it available to as broad a set of people as possible, have a series of problems that that then creates, and then solve those problems for ourselves.

And then it turns out, you know, if you're building, you know, whether it's an AI company today, where 80% of the major AI companies and labs are customers of ours, you know, in the in the crypto space, almost 100% of the crypto space uses Cloudflare today.

And

And then across, you know, Fortune 500 and Global 2000, you know, we're seeing, you know, closing in on 30, 40, 50% of those companies that are relying on us as well.

And so today, you know, what we really think of ourselves as is what's the next generation cloud?