YouSaid · the spoken record

Michelle Zatlyn

lines on the record: 51
first: 2020-12-10
most recent: 2020-12-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He's like, Why aren't you applied to Harvard? And I grew up in the middle of Saskatchewan, Canada. I lived in Toronto. I mean, I was applying to good schools. I guess I just didn't think that I should apply to Harvard, but I didn't say that to him. I said, oh, you know, it's really competitive. I'm not sure. I don't have any lineage there. I don't even know. He literally looked at me in the eye at this dinner party or this cocktail party. He said, Michelle. He's like, I don't know you very well. But if you don't put your name in the hat, you're certainly never going to get pulled. And I literally went home that night and I looked up the application process for Harvard Business School and I was like, all right. And I added it to my list of schools. And next thing I know, here we are 12 years later.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a good question. It makes me smile. I like that. I think about all, I mean, there's, I mean, I'm so lucky. Well, look, I guess my fairy tale of entrepreneurship story really started at the halls of HBS at Harvard Business School, where I met Matthew Prince and we got the band together to do this and it's created this. So the way I ended up there is probably maybe what I would describe because it's been such a big impact on my life is, and this is a good story because I think we can all do a little bit of it, is I was at My older sister lives in Boston. I was living in Canada at the time and I went to a party she was having. And one of her friends who I did not know, like I did not know this person very well. Actually, I think he was an investor. He's like, so what are you up to? What do you do? I was like, I leave me in Toronto working as a product manager at Tashiba. And I said, and I'm applying to do my MBA. He's like, oh, what schools are you applying to as atypical American? At the time, I was like a little bit like put back. So I like listed my schools I was applying to.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still come to work. And what I'm really most excited about is I feel a huge immense responsibility to make sure that we reach our full potential as a business opportunity. And there are a lot of opportunities that get created. Some are shinier than others, and they're not all the same size. And so I guess what I like to think about as an entrepreneur is how do you make sure the opportunity you picked becomes its full potential? And again, I think we're just really early innings and we're running as fast as we can to become an iconic company that a lot of people admire.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get to meet a lot of entrepreneurs. And what I'm most excited about is if we are on something big, there's this huge shift, again, from hardware and software that you own to services in the cloud you rent. Feels like we have this great global network that's super flexible, that can do a lot of things. When we went public last year, Matthew and I wrote a founder's letter because we were founder-led business. The very last sentence of the founder's letter said, and we're just getting started. And the reason why we say that is we really feel like we're just getting started. I think that some of it got teased out here where there's these huge shifts where can the network become the computer? Like, can you start to do compute in the network? Can you take all this hardware that's sitting in data centers around the world with all those and move it into the network through a service like Cloudflare? Holy smokes, if that works, like can you really front everything? Like it's, it feels like we're onto something very big. And so what I'm most excited about, sometimes people say, why do you?”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We always optimized for the investor and the person. And so I guess, I don't know, in the world more than ever, leadership matters. Again, we've made lots of mistakes too. So you got to own up the things you made mistakes on and have lots of scar tissue about that. But I do think we made some good decisions where we kind of always optimize for the person that whether it was the executive joining Cloudflare or the investor or the board member. And I think because of that, we've kind of had low drama in those cases and people try and do the right thing. So it's been a very positive experience. And so I feel very fortunate to live through that because you just, all of those stories about BCs and founders and boards and the executive team not getting along are true. We've been able to kind of create our own path until now. And so I think that's been really healthy for the business.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't feel right, and I think that it's going to cause more headaches in the long term and not align and distraction and risk to the business. And so we're walking away. Now to our board's credit, they said, okay, now we had enough cash on the balance sheet to fund the business. It wasn't like we needed the money. And I think we all got on our merry way. Six months later, which is an eternity in startup land, we finally closed our Series C from Union Square Ventures much better fit like vision. They totally got the internet. They loved what we were doing. They were great partners. And the valuation was like less than half. This was on a 10% difference. I mean, it was a huge difference. Now, you can't play things out, but I will say that I'm pretty sure that was a good decision that saved ourselves a lot of hassles after the fact. And it was not an easy decision. Like neither of those, like unwinding the first one and then taking another. And again, we in that round, we had more offers. There are people with higher valuations, but we really like US fee.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who's been in the game for a long time give you this big term sheet at these high valuation, it feels good. So we were like, wow. But every time we met with this particular investor, clearly great person, like great what he does, his vision for Cloudflare was always different than Matthew Lisa mine every single time. And we weren't even in business yet. There was a little bit like friction. Well, it almost like dancing around. Well, we could have seen it this way. Or he was like, why do you have any free service? Get rid of the free service. We're like, well, we need the traffic so we can get the network in Pakistan. And he's like, I don't get it. Like, get rid of the free. He didn't say quite like that. And so when you get a terrible, you take it to your boards. We take it to our board and we were worried that it was going to lead to disastrous outcomes. And so we actually ended up walking away from that turn sheet. And we didn't have a plan B. There was not another one to go to. So we instead of raising this money at this high valuation that we'd spun the board up with a famous investor, we kind of said.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An angel round, but back then that was a big deal. You can just see how fast the market has changed, the financing part of the market's changed in 10 years. Why Combinator existed, but it wasn't known. It wasn't a thing exactly. So anyhow, fast forward a couple years into Cloudflare, we're having good traction. We're scaling. We're raising our series C and NEA and Helen and Benrock were investors and they were super amazing partners to us. And we started to get interest from some like famous venture capitalists, like brand name famous, like the celebrity venture capitalist that you read about on the books. And that felt really good. Like it was great. And we actually ended up getting a term sheet from somebody who's very well known and a very big valuation. Like it was north of a billion dollars. And again, that's not the end game. But when you're working incredibly hard trying to overcome all these obstacles, building what you're so passionate about, trying to invent the future, and you kind of have.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrong co-founder. I mean, you're just the odds are already stacked against you. That just makes it even harder. And it's kind of the same thing with Life Partner. You pick the wrong life partner. It's hard to build. So picking your co-founder's matters a ton, but so do picking your investors and so does picking your board members. Like they all kind of go hand in hand. And there are definitely places along the way where we made really hard calls. And I'll just give you a couple of examples. We at some point was like a series C was our Series C, we were not known entities when we moved to the Valley to start Cloudflare. Like Matthew, Lee and I, we were not known quantities. We did not have a brand as builders here. We'd done interesting things before, but we showed up here kind of new kids on the block and we were very under the radar. We raised some money or quickly and it was this idea of like, well, if you can make this happen, this couldn't be big, which is why we were able to raise a little bit of money. It was $2 million, which back then seemed like a lot of money. Now a founder raising a $2 million round is like nothing. It's like a, that's.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's so interesting as I moved to the valley and I've been here for 10 years. We showed up here in the summer of 2009, so we kind of lived through a lot of drama the last 10 years with Twitter. Like there's just been lots of drama in the tech industry. And I didn't really understand how that ever happened. I mean, I was so busy building Cloudflare. I just didn't really understand. 10 years later, I now understand exactly how founders end up hating each other, how venture and founders get at odds with each other, and how boards can really mess up companies. It's all three. Like you hear terrible stories about all three. I see how all of those can happen now. And we are really lucky that never happened to us. And part of it was lucky, but part was also good decision making by a saying pick co-founders wisely. I actually think the same thing with life partners. Pick life partners and pick your co-founders wisely because it has a huge impact on if you want to build something. If you pick the”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another convertible debt offering just in May. So at this point, I've raised something like $1.4 billion. And the culture of Cloudford's going, well, and we reported Q3 earnings a couple weeks ago, and we did a good job. The results were very good. So I guess things are working just fine for a company like Cloudflare to be perfectly honest. I think that big idea, big market cap, and we've executed on it, the system has worked very well for us, like the existing system. I think that there are lots of companies that might not want to swing for the fences. They aren't trying to create a $20 billion market cap company. They're trying to solve something and they just need a little bit of money. And I think that might be harder or whatnot. But for us, the system, we are kind of the Hollywood fairy tale story of what entrepreneurs' dreams are made of.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've lived a fairy tale existence. I don't know how else to describe it. I mean, the founder started the company. We get along. Two of the three of us are still there and the third person's just not here because he's got a terrible health issue. There's a really sad wired article, very well written wired article, but keep your clean legs nearby. It's a very sad story of health issue. We took our company public on the New York Stock Exchange. Our stock is up a lot. It's the 14 months we took our company public. We took it public at just over a $5 billion mark and now we're at a $20 billion market cap. So we've delivered a ton of ROI to our shareholders, both our venture. We raised before we went public, we had raised just over $300 million in venture from amazing venture partners like NEA and Pellion and Benrock, Union Score Ventures out of New York, and then some of the public market investors were early like Fidelity and Franklin Templeton. And then we raised more money in the market and then we did.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pakistan, and not only will it make the internet faster for now all the citizens of Pakistan going to these websites behind Cloudflare. But now I don't have to pay the third-party transit provider to backhaul internet traffic back to Frankfurt. And so we basically send our gear to Pakistan. And all of a sudden we take costs out of how much it costs us to run this network around the world, which is why we can deliver at really good value. And if we had no traffic from Pakistan, the ISP there would never invite us into there. It's not like a skew you can call them up and pick. That's not business they're in. They're in a different business of selling internet service access to the citizens of Pakistan and they see this as a way to making it as symbiotic because in most of the world aside from the US, you pay for the more you consume the internet in region and the fastest way to get someone to consume more internet is to make it faster.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know if our secret sauce, but it kind of is. It is what makes Cloudflare like it is our foundational element to understand. It's not something that a lot of people are doing. Just put it that way. It's rare. And so to build a global network, you need internet traffic because it becomes a currency. You need internet traffic. So you can buy your way into things like Equinix and Teramark. You rent space. That's their business. They sell space for you to be able to put your servers or gear around the world. But they're only in so many locations. They're not in 200. If you want to get into 200, you have to go into the ISPs. You have to get invited into the internet service providers in each of the regions around the world. And Claver has three points presence in Pakistan. And the reason why you have three points presence in Pakistan is because the local ISP there said, hey, I see a lot of traffic that I have to pay for to get backhauled to Frankfurt. Can you please send your gear to us? I'll put it into my cages here.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is actually back to what we said. I didn't go deep into it, but there are different layers to the internet, like there's different layers of how the internet works and how technology environments work. So if you're an enterprise, there's kind of three tiers to your enterprise stack you need the store compute layer, so servers where the content actually sits or the workloads actually sit. Then there's an application tier on top of store compute.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exciting, and the question is if you can get storage distributed because right now you can't really, it's hard to run a large database distributed, but that's the limiting factor, one of the limiting factors right now. But if you can get that, then we'll all of a sudden the conversation becomes what's appropriate to write on the server, what's appropriate to write for a client. A client is either like your app on your phone or your browser, and what's appropriate to write in this now new third place to write code in the network closer to eyeballs. I think with where you can update it and have the control over it. So it's super exciting. It's early. I think it's going to take five, six, seven years for this to really come to fruition. But in the interim, I love that we're helping our enterprises solve problems like watermarking content. It sounds silly, but it literally went from a top five board level discussion to like they literally saw revenue generation from doing that. And so I love that we can invest in it.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be done at the network layer. So, can you take some of those workloads and put them in the 200 cities around the world? And so we see developers doing that. We see big companies doing that. There are some good when you run code in the network. You can fix some big business problems. So like I've had a lot of large organizations, they were a content company and they have a global audience and they're like the water marking on our content, like the licensing of our content is a big deal. to do that check on the server side to slowed everything down and they're like, man, we can't, the latency penalty, we can't do on the server side, doing it in someone's browser app is impossible. Do you think we could try and write a worker to solve that? And we did because we're in 200 cities. So if it said, yeah, you have access to this content in this region, that code can now run across Cloudflare and we can do it in the region versus it ever having to go to the server or on the client side. And so it's like a third place to write code, which is really.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Microsystems had a saying their tagline used to be the network is the computer. They were right. They were just 20 years, 25 years too early. When Oracle bought Sun, they forgot to re-register that trademark. So Claufer now owns it. And the network is becoming the computer. And the operating system for the internet, we're making things fast, safe, reliable. But can you also start to build applications into that? And again, we're not going to build them, but I sure hope the next builder does. And so there's a whole paradigm shift. It's called serverless. And the whole point is, well, you're not spinning up a server anymore. Before you used to buy an EMC or Dell or HP server, and then now you might be spinning up Azure or AWS or Google Cloud instance, but you still got to pick a region. You're spinning up Google Cloud. You got to pick a region. And again, those businesses are doing extremely well. Are there some of the things that you spin up a server for?”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point of presence, and if I'm in South Africa, I'd hit somewhere in South Africa. So we're in 200 cities around the world. And at each of those cities, that's how if you're legitimate, we're making your experience better. And if you're not legitimate, we're increasing the friction to protect our customers. So the foundational element of Cloudflare is our global network. We've built this network. There aren't that many companies who are building global networks. Like we are one of very few. And it sets us apart all of our software, all the code we write, all of the firewall, like all of the VPN. It runs at these 200 cities around the world. So we're running code in a lot of places. That's where our technology sits. It's really neat. So it really does act like the immune system for the internet. And so now what workers is, what if you can write code at each of those 200 cities around the world? What if you can put code into the network? The network's already doing performance and security and encryption and identity management. Well, can I also do compute there? And that's the whole so sun.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've talked a little bit about what Cluffer does. I haven't talked a lot about how we do it. And again, the geek in me is like how we do it is so cool. And it's relevant to this question. And so maybe just like one quick word on how we do it, and then it'll explain how workers fits in. So I've talked about the personal trainer and the bouncer for your website, your apps. I've talked about people, your employees, or third-party contractors accessing information. The how we do it is we run a global network. So Cloudflare's in 200 cities around the world. So we have hardware there. We have a real CapEx cost on our balance sheet. And we run all this hardware there. And if I am in San Francisco trying to go to cloudflow.com, I will get routed to the closest kind of Cloudflare point of presence, which for me is in San Francisco, San Jose. Versus if I get on a plane, which I'm not doing right now, but if I was on a plane, I went to London and I went to the same, tried to access my same sort of thing. I had hit our London Cloudflare London.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time, which is now the emerging tech team, which is they just build the future. And we still have that team today. And it's pretty cool that we have been able to do that. I don't know if that model with every company, but it lets us prioritize the core products, the core business while still investing in our what we call our next act.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's great for now, but you're kind of mortgaging your future if you keep doing that. And so we did something that we think is interesting where we said, okay, we absolutely have to invest in the core. Even within that, you got to prioritize what's most important. And we have a whole process to do that. And that generally works really well. But we also set up a second R&D team where their job is to just think about the future of what's over the horizon. And they don't get measured on how much revenue it generates the next quarter, much more over the horizon. It's like, hey, help us throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and figure out what's next. And we put them in a different location. We were still at this point of very San Francisco-centric company. We're no longer that. And we took someone senior in our team who was really good at getting ideas out. And we gave them some resources and he moved to Austin and he set up what we called at the time the project strategy team.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What and what are we going to do, and did we do it and holding ourselves accountable? So, when I look at companies I admire like Salesforce and you talk to Parker Harris there, when I had a call with him a few months ago and I said, Parker, teach me everything. And he said, like, we still to this day are just the pace at which we execute things is really high. And we were just obsessed about it. So I think that's an important one. The second thing is, and it's so interesting that organizations, I think, struggle with, and we did something different, is we have a core business. We absolutely have a core business is where we make a lot of our revenue. Great, but we also think there's a huge opportunity, so we want to invest into the future. And what we found, and we've always had a lot of vision and we think that we're very early innings of what's”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Art and a science capital allocation matters law because there is a finite amount of money and people and time within an organization so you have to figure out how to spend that and where you can get the most where are the best places to invest so i think it's really important we've done two things that are interesting like from early on we are so ruthlessly focused on getting things done starting a project there's a middle and then you ship it and you go to the next thing we were really set up to what are we doing who's doing it did it get done okay and that pace of shipping i think is different company to company to company and i actually think it can become a huge superpower if you like i think it makes this a little bit easier because you're like okay we have what time how much people how much time do we have left what are we going to do with it and so we are always very focused and we still are to this day of prioritizing and who's doing”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaningful problem? How do you get people to come and work with you on that problem? Because you can only go so far with one person. You need a team and you need to convince a team. And it's one thing to find co-founders. It's another thing to get the first couple people. But recruiting employee number 25 to come join your company is so hard unless you have something. Like why would they do that? There are a lot of good jobs in the world. It's very hard. Makes it easier you get a higher quality person if you're solving a meaningful problem that is there. You can demonstrate it and you create a bigger value proposition around it, then you're more likely to be able to go get the people you need, whether it's the engineers or the product managers that you really need to make it all come to life. And that's, I think that sometimes gets missed in the, I want to be written up in TechCrunch because I raised some money and you're focusing on the wrong thing.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just don't pay. I'm focused on running the business, so I guess that's a good thing. It's a huge success story. So I meet a lot of founders who are like, wow, I want that. And again, we obsessed over this problem and then getting the group of people to come help us solve the problem versus sometimes this mosquito and shark analogy is what people really focus obsess over early on is how do I raise money and raising money can be important for certain types of business, but really it becomes a lot easier if you focus on funding a problem that needs solving because then the money will come easier. And so I think that the mosquito and shark analogy was actually Bill Gates put out this research six years ago now that basically said, you know, most people are worried about sharks in the world as the greatest risk, but really what you should really be focused on are the mosquitoes because they kill a lot more people every year. Don't focus on the sharks. Like, how do you raise money? You should really focus on the mosquitoes. Are you solving them?”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is for the builders in the audience. They've been building Cloudflow for 10 years. It's been an amazing adventure, amazing experience. And I get to meet a lot of entrepreneurs along the way. And we're really lucky. We are a huge success story. We went from an idea. We've taken a public. We're over, I don't know what our market cap is, but it's over $15 billion market cap.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help amplify that with media and speaking, doing these things like podcasts. I hope some of you will go check out and sign up for our service. It matters. I bet you most of your listeners have never heard of Cloudflare and they're like, oh, wow, I'll go look into it. And hopefully if you have a cybersecurity or performance or reliability issue, you say, I'm going to go try Cloudflare. That's one of the reasons why I do this, not only to meet you, Patrick, is to help raise our awareness with a new audience to say everyone wants to be faster, safer, more reliable. If you have an app or an internet property. do things that are clever. If you're doing just the exact same thing as everyone else, then you got to be a better at execution, otherwise you're going to be paying more.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earn media is very powerful, like where you can have others helping amplify your story versus having to pay for everything that goes a long way. Every dollar goes further in that regard. And so whether you're doing it through your community or social or media or speaking, especially if you're not a known brand, either you as the founder or you as the company aren't a known brand, that's a good way to help amplify and seem a lot bigger than you are without having to spend as much bidding on a word that a big established brand might pay or the Super Bowl ads or the billboard those cost a lot of money. So you have to make every dollar go further. And so we're always trying to think about what can we do that's clever. And so early on we had a big community. These people talking about us on forums and community boards. And that just got the word of mouth and people signed up. So our customer acquisition was really easy because we had people talking about us around the world. And then we did a lot.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No earthly idea why we made this decision 18 months ago. And it's a huge learning curve for that person. Is and this is a high class problem, but it's true we had great product market fit. We found a problem. We had a great technical solution and we grew like bananas, which was great, but we never really did any marketing. We were just growing. Like people were telling their, it was like word of mouth, which is an investor's like dream. You're like, wow, that's really inexpensive. It's true. The other lesson is going from founder to now business owner is if you have good product market fit and you have real scale and you're onto something, likely it's going to become something really big. And Cloudflare today is something really, really big. And when you have something really, really big, marketing is a discipline and an investment. And I wish we had started earlier. We basically grew to $80 million in revenue with three people on our marketing team, which is good, but then to stand that up after the fact was hard.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We went into the office every single day. We sat next to each other every single day. We could read each other's minds. And we, up until 20 people, we were all in the same room. We never wrote anything down because of that ever because it slowed everything down if you have to write first, right? No, just do. You're building, ship the code, do this. And so we never took the time to write down why we were doing something or the thought process. Again, we were all in the same room. So we were sharing it verbally. We went really quickly for those first 20 people, which was wonderful. But fast forward to when we had 65 people and we might not all be in the same room or even if we were all in the same room, we can't listen to 65 people at once. That became hard to not have written things down. And we got better at it, but we still weren't great at it. But it really took to when we were north of 100 people to start to get much more disciplined about, we got to write things down because now we don't have people in the same office and they have.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't see me because this is audio, but I have a lot of gray hair from that for yes, and I have a lot of scar tissue. So just for the founders listening, especially if you're an early stage founder, I mean, things break and that happens. I think what's important is how fast you react and learn from it and make sure it doesn't happen again. That would be my biggest lesson learned. I think if you beat yourself up for a breaking, like you could really get into a depressed states. You got to keep going. You got to learn. You got to, we eventually said, okay, we're just not going to ever make the same mistake twice. Like that was our bar and how fast can we learn? And of course, you want to get ahead of these things, but just doing things for the first time, you miss things. And so I think that's the silver lining and maybe a good lesson. But some examples, I mean, we started kind of the exact opposite of how companies are starting today. So you have an advantage. But we started with 10 of us sitting in the same room in Palo Alto, California. And then the 10 of us relocated up to San Francisco.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be pretty cool, and that's what we've done. And so just to give you a sense of how we've done that, today we have over 25 million internet properties, small businesses, 16% of the Fortune 1000 developers, IT administrators that are using our service, and we stop $72 billion cyber attacks daily.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time of the season where they want to be able to take orders from their customers. And you think, oh, that never happens. It happens all the time. It happens between in some industries where there's like really strong competition, sometimes competitors do these sorts of things because it gives them an edge. All of a sudden they're online and their competitors aren't. And so it's a wide range. It can be the kids throwing a bunch of eggs just for i don't want to take the test. So I'm going to knock the online test taking site offline so none of the students have to take the test. It's like pulling the fire alarm bell. All of the analog, like the fire alarm going off at school, which is kind of funny to really serious, I think they're kind of a virtual analogies to all of that. And anyway, I service like Clever can help. And part of our mission is to help build a better internet. And so when I go back to that idea maze that you described, that whole reason why we did this was like, wow, if we could help make the internet safer, if we can help make this less of a headache for everyone.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many people overwhelmingly coming to it, it'll fall over, kind of like the ATM. You get stuck. So then the real viewers who want to come listen can't get access to it. This happens all the time. That's what a DDoS attack is. It's like it's trying to put more through the water hose. So none of the legitimate visitors can actually get to what they want to do. And it happens all the time. And it's a very violating thing if you're a brand. Like if you're a company trying to run your business, all of a sudden your customers can't come to your website. You're knocked offline because somebody decided to throw some more traffic at you than you were used to waiting. Like that's not a good day. Like that's an emergency. That's all hands on deck. And just to give you examples of where this happens, flower stores before Valentine's Day. Busiest time to take orders. People are looking at what bouquet options and they will say pay us X number of dollars. Otherwise, we're going to knock off your site offline before Valentine's Day. And they often pay the ransoms because they don't want to get knocked offline before they're busy.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a good way to think about it is let's go saying you're going to an ATM to get money out. And you show up to the ATM and Patrick is standing in front of you. Okay, well, he's going through his transaction, no big deal. You wait in line, you get your turn in line to get the ATM or the bank cashier, I mean, whatever you want. Now let's say that there are 1,500 people in front of you at the line and you can't actually get access to it, the ATM or the cashier. And you're not sure of the 1,500 who are the Patricks and who are the people who are there just to cause a headache so that you can't get it. And that's the analog example to what happens in digital world. So you want to go to your favorite website, the founders field guide, you know, landing page. And Patrick has a certain amount of resources to stand that up. You need a server. You write code. Like it sits it up there. And that server can handle a certain number of people at any single time coming to it. But if you have so”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be up to nation states as well when it's money involved, but the point is there are things where brute force attacks where it's like, I'm just going to overwhelm whatever you've put online so nobody can get to it. So that's called like a denial service attack. I'm going to try and get somebody's credentials so that I can log in and edit the content on your website or I can log in and get secrets within your businesses. So those are very different sort of security issues, but a really real one, whether you're a blogger who has a blog with content on it, it's like you don't want someone else without permission going into that. Or if you're a large organization, you want to make sure that employees are accessing the workloads and the applications that they should have access to, but it shouldn't be someone who is unauthorized. There's also just a lot of automated bots trying to find any technology is just a bunch of”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consumers, your customers, employees expect it to be fast and responsive. It's not fast and responsive, you leave. You go somewhere else. And the problem is like some of the biggest sites are really fast. They're like lightning fast. And so the first is global performance. It just has to be, it just has to load very quickly. And especially if you're an e-commerce retail store, I mean, for every hundred milliseconds, you lose revenue. So I think it's just we are all used to speed. So performance is a big one. The other big one is there's a lot of creators, builders who put things online because they love to build and create. They have a passion. They want to see it. And that's what they're doing. And then all of a sudden, there's a kid who isn't at school because they're in COVID lockdown who instead of throwing eggs at houses is trying to say, can I knock that project offline for fun? Because they're curious, right? And that happens. And all of a sudden this amazing idea and passion project you have is now offline. And it's not always kids.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A product that our team was pretty, oh man, this is not ready yet, already seeing a lot of benefit. I think just was almost a flywheel to what we had seen the year before with the survey results of there's a real problem here and there was just no good solution. So even though our solution was maybe the first tiny centimeter in a very long roadmap, it was already delivering a lot of value for some segment of customers, which is the best feeling as a builder. I mean, the most rewarding feeling”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of what it was doing for it. And I thought that was a big deal, but it was interesting early on these initial customers would send emails saying, oh my God, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I was like, how are we getting thank yous when we can't even prove to them that we're doing? It turned out they could measure because they were IT administrators or developers and they really knew a lot about monitoring their server load. And all of a sudden they put Cloudflare in front and they're like, wow, my server load decreased by 50%. And all these resources are freed up. And now I can serve all the legitimate traffic much better. And so not only have you taken off all of this scourge of the internet, all these automated robots roaming for something to latch onto, to do something bad. You've stopped that completely. In the process, you've speed up my website. And at this point, we weren't very distributed. It was really early. We kind of had two points of presence. So we were not expecting performance to be part of the value proposition so early. And so it was one of these, some of the initial customers.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down something. And so then when you build something, you need to get some initial users. So we were running a private beta, so we were getting initial customers onboarded and feedback. And that was the good old days where I used to call every single customer after they onboarded to find out like, how did you like, why did you? What are you seeing? How do you think about it, like trying to understand? Because it's one thing to build it. It's another thing to describe what you're doing and hearing it from the words of customers is helpful. And I just remember we thought we were cybersecurity and we were really focused on that. And I remember we launched this first part of our product, which we were embarrassed by. And you often hear this from builders saying, man, I was really embarrassed by the product. And I was definitely embarrassed by the product that the first version of the product thinking, oh, it doesn't have all these things that we had left on our list to do. But we had to ship it. We had to get in the hands. There was no analytics. You couldn't see what it was doing. So you like customers signed up and they had no feedback.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been many ahas. I call those like the ahas along the way or the light bulb goes off. So the one was the survey result before we had the company, which is clearly there was, again, this aha.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they're going to adopt. And when they're thinking about they're adopting all these sorts of services to track their visitors, well, are those secure? Could they do something malicious to hurt your brand? And so I do think it's something that the best leaders today understand a little bit and it's not that complicated. And so that's my pitch for why everyone needs to understand a little bit about it. It's from the marketers to the engineering to the CEO to the boards. And I think that unfortunately it's taken some really high profile bad incidences or breaches to raise the awareness, but it's really one of these things where we should all be raising the tides and security. We all need to play a role. And if you understand the ABCs, you're better positioned.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really think the cybersecurity industry did itself a disservice for its first 15 years that it was created, where it was really the cybersecurity experts that were the ones who spoke about it. And it wasn't a business issue. It wasn't a leadership issue. It was just, it wasn't about running a business issue. It was really, oh, I don't go talk to information security. Go talk to Tom, who's on the Infosec team. He'll deal with it. And I think that's why we find ourselves in some of these issues. And so when it comes to cybersecurity, actually think people think it's harder than it should be. It's really than it is. It's not that hard. If you understand the ABCs, you're in the top quartile. And I really do think it's something that every leader across the business should have awareness around. It's not just the chief security officer or the chief information security officer that should be thinking about this. I really think it's responsibility across all leaders, like marketing leaders, for example, have a responsibility to think about cybersecurity when they're picking tools.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we first launched our service in September of 2010, we had been running a private beta, we were really good at web level spam or web level cyber attacks, things like bots trying to come to your website to get to see if there were any open doors like the probing. So we were really good at removing the bots. We were really good at known malicious actors online. We just increased the friction to them to be able to get to your website or your blog. What we launched was really focused on websites, blogs, and really stopping bad actors from being able to steal resources or do malicious things.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Developers, what they were doing to solve the problem, the answer was basically nothing band-aid, like duct tape on their servers. And there was no good common technical solution. And this was one of those places where there's a problem. Could we build a technical solution to the problem? And often a lot of really great businesses, that's where you find them. It's when you can use technology to solve a known problem.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About this. And then the second part of the survey was what do you do to solve the problem if you care about it? And there's some things in your career, obviously. There's lots of things you forget, but there's some things that are forever imprinted. And I just remember getting some really survey results back from the survey we sent out. And the answers were just unbelievable. It was web spammers are the scourge of the internet. They're criminals. They steal resources. Web spammers make me believe in the death penalty. And so they're just very strong reaction to this survey. So very quickly, it was like, wow, there's a problem here. And that was the, in your idea maze, I was like, wow, there's clearly a problem here. We still didn't know all the sides of it, but there was something. There was a string to go pull on and see where else it would go. And that's where it started. And then after that, it's, well, could we come up with a technical solution to actually solve the problem? The second part of the survey where I said, what were they using? So there was clearly a problem. And then when you were asking everybody, these small businesses, IT administrators, entrepreneurs.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a student. I was doing my MBA at Harvard Business School. I say this because it's very relevant. And so I was a good student would do when you're examining a problem is I said to survey out. And so we sent the survey out to actually all of these website owners who happen to be part of Honeypot community and surveyed them on the problem. We said we had a hypothesis. We had a thesis of that if you were a big company, they were good cybersecurity solutions, but if you were anybody else, they were bad. And that was bad for the internet was our general thesis. And so we started by going to figure out whether there was a real problem here. And so we went to talk to the potential customer set and that potential customer set where small business owners, IT administrators, developers who all had been to be part of this project Honeypot community. And we sent them a survey and it was the first half of the survey was tell us how much you care about this problem. So it was like, how often do you think about web spammers like one through 10, like a lot, very little? How much time? How much do you care?”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to answer that question, him and Lee Holloway created this project Project Honeypot. And the whole point they launched at the conference during that speech. And the whole point was to say, where does WebSpam come from? And to start to provide insights and data that we can go use to create products and services over time to help solve the problem. That ended up becoming the impetus for Cloudflare almost a decade later.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, a cool story where does spam come from? And the whole point, actually I'll just tell a little, I know that was not the question, but I want to give a little bit more context. This is the story. So before Paul Graham did Y combinator, he ran an anti-spam conference out of MIT. This is back in 2003 and 2004. There's probably some listeners who maybe have been there before. And Matthew was invited to come give a talk and he gave a talk and he won the best speech of the conference award. And he had this can of spam. He actually for a long time had the can of spam. And so he was invited back to come back and give a second talk this next year. And of course, the stakes are high. He has to compete for best speaker award again. And he was like, well, I can't give the same talk. So he had to get a new talk. And so the first time was around the laws around spam and whatnot. And so the second year he's like, what would be really cool is that we could have an initiative to say where does spam come from online. Again, this was back in 2004.”
2020-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source