Cyber Stewards
Cloudflare’s Michelle Zatlyn on Trust, Recruiting, and Innovation
The vastness of the internet, as an entity, can be difficult to put into perspective. Cloudflare, however, has a clear sense of its scope, as it handles roughly 20-percent of internet traffic. To frame it with another stat: More than 70 billion cyber attacks are stopped by Cloudflare each day.
In this episode of Iconversations, Greylock’s Holly Rose Faith talks with Cloudflare Co-Founder, President, and COO Michelle Zatlyn about what it’s like to run a company that a massive constituent of users touch – often without knowing it.
“It’s been really amazing to help build this backbone of the internet — the infrastructure, the roads, the bridges that make everything work,” says Zatlyn. “You take bridges and roads for granted in cities, but when they don’t work, it’s really frustrating. We do that in the digital space.”
By that, Zatlyn is referring to Cloudflare’s raison d’être: cyber security, performance, and reliability to “make anything connected to the internet faster, safer, and more reliable.”
When Zatlyn and her co-founders, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway, started Cloudflare in 2010, the tech landscape was a different place, one where many did not understand internet security threats in the way we do today. In that context, says Zatlyn, “I’ve learned that there are two ways to raise money early on. You either raise on traction, or you raise on a story. Cloudflare was very much in the latter camp. Revenue took a long time.”
In addition, the Cloudflare co-founders took an unconventional approach to recruitment and to public-facing transparency — both of which appear, now, to be at the bedrock of their success.
For starters, they saw only a 16-percent attrition rate during the so-called Great Resignation, half that of their tech peers. “We spend so much time recruiting upfront, aligning expectations. I have no secret sauce, except we’re deliberate in the recruiting process” says Zatlyn. Even at this point, with 2,500 people, Zatlyn and Prince spend 20-percent of their time recruiting.
“We want people to feel like they belong at Cloudflare,” she says. “We care about that. We want people to feel like: I can do great work here and my work matters.”
That care informs how they’ve always engaged with the public, too. “To build trust, you need to be transparent. We had to accrue trust on a daily basis. It seems like we’ve always had it, but it’s been 10 years of being really thoughtful about it — and it’s a fragile thing,” says Zatlyn. “We take it really seriously.”
You can watch the interview on our YouTube channel here, or listen at the link below. You can also find the episode wherever else you get your podcasts.
Episode Transcript
Holly Rose Faith:
Hi everyone, and welcome to Greylock’s Iconversations. I’m Holly Rose Faith, and I lead executive talent for Greylock.
Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Cloudflare Co-Founder, President, and COO Michelle Zatlyn. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Michelle at my prior firm, as they were an early investor in the company.
As many of you know, Cloudflare was founded on a mission to provide a safer, faster, and more secure internet. The company — which actually began as a class project with Michelle’s fellow Harvard classmates, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway — has more than delivered on that goal. Cloudflare has mitigated some of the largest distributed denial of service of the past decade, and today blocks some 70 million cyber attacks per day. Michelle is also on the board of Atlassian, and is on the cyber security team at Aspen Institute.
Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today.
Michelle Zatlyn:
Thanks so much for having me. I’m so honored to be here. I used to come to conversations like this. I still do, and I learn so much from them every single time. And so I hope I can be helpful to some of your portfolio companies today.
It’s great to see you. Thanks so much for having me, and for all those warm, kind, and gracious words.
HRF:
Aww. Well, let’s dive in. You have a very interesting background as a tech-startup founder. Beginning with the fact that you didn’t even initially plan to go into technology as a career, and now you are running a company that is, essentially, the backbone of the internet.
Before we get into your personal history, let’s talk about the significance of Cloudflare for a few more moments. In this era of rapid advancement in internet technology, where does Cloudflare fit into everything?
MZ:
Yeah, that’s a big question. We could spend a lot of time talking about that, but I’ve gotten better at answering this question over the years. I make a joke about that, because there are a lot of founders who might be working on big ideas, and sometimes it’s hard to concisely consolidate, or articulate, what you’re doing. And so, I guess I make a joke, because I’ve come a long way.
So like, what is Cloudflare? At the end of the day, we make anything connected to the internet — and when I say anything, I really mean anything connected to the internet — faster, safer, and more reliable. We do cyber security, performance, reliability for anything connected online.
It’s interesting, when I first started Cloudflare — we’re about 11 years old as a company — it didn’t quite start with that sort of pitch. It was a little bit of: Hey, we’re helping democratize tools previously resolved for the internet giants, we’re going to supercharge your website. Hey, I’m building a cybersecurity, performance, reliability company.
I’d sometimes go to dinner parties, which we haven’t been doing very much recently, but when we used to get together, people would look the other way. They were like, “That’s so boring.” Eleven years in, we have over 27 million internet properties using our service, which is a lot. It’s about 20-percent of the web that connects to the internet through Cloudflare.
HRF:
Wow.
MZ:
That’s a huge responsibility, a huge privilege. Every day, we stop, as you said, over 70 billion, with a B, cyber attacks coming to our customers’ applications, workloads, websites. That’s just an astonishing number, and it gets stopped because of [our] technology, our teams of amazing engineers and product managers, and what they’ve built. We help make everything faster around the world, all the legitimate users trying to go to our customers’ sites, faster, safer, and more reliable, and we add reliability in.
It turns out, now that we’ve gained this scale and people understand better what some of these things mean, all of a sudden, people don’t run away from me at dinner parties anymore. They’re like: That’s cool. Tell me more. How do you do it? I didn’t realize there were so many cyber attacks online. Why are people doing it? Why is it so hard? Why, sometimes, when I go to some places online, it’s so fast, and others it’s really slow? Why, sometimes, can’t I get to where I’m going?
And so it’s been really amazing to help build this backbone of the internet — the infrastructure, the roads, the bridges that make everything work. You take bridges and roads for granted in cities, but when they don’t work, it’s really frustrating. We do that in the digital space.
The last thing I’ll say here, and I’m happy to go in any direction you want, is: Just 11 years ago, when we started to build Cloudflare, it wasn’t obvious exactly what we saw. We saw it, we saw the rise of cloud computing. So we were business-school students when we started to work on Cloudflare. AWS, at the time, the dialogue… there were a lot of headlines in media saying: Is AWS a fad or not? Like, a lot of people said: Real organizations will never use AWS for their workloads. Well, how wrong that ended up being.
HRF:
Wow.
MZ:
And so, when we started, we saw store compute going to the cloud, we saw applications, we saw companies like Salesforce, even Workday, growing really quickly ahead of us. We said, well, if storage and compute are going to the cloud, and applications are going to the cloud, the networking side — again, all the things that make the roads and the bridges — also have to go to the cloud.
And that’s what Cloudflare has built. We’ve built a globally distributed network that’s a cloud-based service that makes anything faster, safer, and more reliable that used to be done by hardware boxes and software.
HRF:
Well, I’d love to learn a little bit more about your background. So you and your co-founders, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway, you started Cloudflare in 2010. Since then, it’s been instrumental in ushering us through what is arguably one of the most transformative periods of internet history. Let’s back up a little bit and hear how you decided to get technology in the first place.
MZ:
Yeah. It’s so interesting. I was doing my MBA at Harvard Business School. I’m Canadian. I grew up in a province called Saskatchewan, which is kind of the prairie province of Canada, so, maybe some of the middle-of-America equivalent, and there were not a lot of technology influences in my life where I grew up.
I come from a really close family, and in my family, my parents were very much: You have to study hard, you have to get good grades, and you can do anything you want in your life, but you can’t go to university in the province. You have to leave the province. You have to go see more of the world. You can always come back, but you have to go see more of the world. And so I was lucky.
My parents weren’t tech entrepreneurs. I was talking to a woman this morning, where both her parents were computer scientists. My family has a farming background. My dad’s a lawyer, my mom was a teacher.
Long story short, I ended up going to college outside of the province, I went to McGill in Montreal. I tell this story, because basically my eyes got opened to lot more of how big the world was. All of a sudden, I went from a small city in a very underpopulated province, to a much bigger platform within Canada. All of a sudden, there’s all these kids from Toronto and Montreal there, and they were really smart, by the way. And I was like: Whoa. All of a sudden, my good enough wasn’t good enough. So I had to stand up straighter.
I was competitive. I was used to being top of my class, I wanted to keep that. I just realized: Wow, the world’s a lot bigger, it’s a lot more competitive. And I got a taste of what else is there. So I got really hungry wanting to learn, [wondering] how else can I make an impact? Where else can I? You just go on this learning journey.
I ended up doing my MBA at Harvard Business School, and that was a whole other eye-opening. I thought I had seen the top in Canada, and then I came to the U.S., a much bigger country, to a much more competitive, very global program, and I just realized: My god, the world is a much bigger place than I realized, and I really want to make a dent in it.
And so, I was at business school, really looking [for]: What do I want to do after? I want to do something impactful. Harvard Business School is in Boston, and it was the first year the professors led a trip to Silicon Valley, and I signed up for it.
And so we came to the Valley in January of 2009 with a professor, a couple of professors, and they introduced us. We met venture capitalists, like you, Holly, and your partners, and we met early-stage entrepreneurs, we met late-stage entrepreneurs back in January ’09. I remember Mark Pincus was the big deal, he was a Harvard grad. Meeting him, it was a big deal.
So I was out here, and it really opened my eyes. You’d read about Silicon Valley, but here I was, spending a week here. It was Wednesday; we are down in Plug and Play in Sunnyvale. Some folks listening might know that, maybe you started your company there. It was three early-stage founders who’d been going through their ideas.
Here I was, a student doing my MBA, and I saw these entrepreneurs up close and personal. I walked out of the room, and I said to another classmate on the trip: If that person could start a company, so could I. I don’t mean it in a mean way. It kind of demystified it, like: That person’s not smarter than me or better than me. I could do this. It was really empowering.
It happened to be Matthew Prince [I said this to, who had] the best answer ever: “Of course you could, Michelle.” We, literally, in the hallway there, started to exchange an idea. This is how the conversation went. Matthew and I knew each other from class for a year and a half, and he’s like, “Of course you could, Michelle. Of course, you could start a company.” And he’s like, “And I know there is something there with Project Honey Pot.”
I said, “Matthew, you always talk about Project Honey Pot. What is it?” He’s like, “It’s a community-based project I started, it’s been around for six years, and we help track web spammers online. Small-business owners sign up, they put honeypots on their website, and we track bad behavior.” And I said, “OK, what do the website owners get?” He’s like, “Karma points.” I’m like, “Karma points?” “Yeah. We’re tracking the bad guys.” I was like, “OK. So, karma points, OK. What do you do with the data?” “Well, the data comes back to Project Honey Pot, and we go work with law enforcement agencies to take the bad offenders down.”
I said, “Doesn’t that take a long time?” He’s like, “Yes, years.” By the way, 80,000 small businesses had signed up for this thing. And I said, “Why does anyone sign up for Project Honey Pot?” I just couldn’t understand. I did not have a big background in this; I didn’t really understand the problem set. At this point, he got annoyed at me.