Falling in Love with an Idea

I was a student and it was actually really easy to pursue this idea as a student because it became something we did for school credit. It became a side like it was instead of taking a class, I signed up to do this special study with Matthew and the deliverable was to write a business plan and enter the business plan competition. So instead of taking a class for credit, so we got the luxury, it was a real privilege to explore this idea for school credit which I needed to graduate. And so I think that's why some really good ideas come from students on campus because you have the luxury to do these sorts of things, especially if you can sign it up as a special project that you can do for school credit. It gave us a cover. I didn't have to quit a job, I didn't have a job, I was a student. And I think that that is different. That's why a lot of people who have full time jobs maybe do things on the side because those are much harder decisions. And so we had that cover to say, let's just go explore this. And what really happened the next three months was the following. The first month, I just remember kind of this again, back to curiosity. World kept getting bigger. The first was this huge we are a good business school student. So I mean I wouldn't just go do something because you want to do it. You want to do something that makes an impact in my opinion. And so the first aha. I had was, wow, there is a huge problem here. And the way that I saw that was we did a survey to these 80,000 customers that they had trying to understand I didn't know a lot about the space. And I remember I went and did this survey and the survey asked questions like a typical business school student asked, but saying how much do you care about this problem and what are the solutions you're using today to solve about this problem? And we sent it to 150 small businesses and or 500 small businesses. We got 150 people replying, which is a high response rate. So that was proof point one. So clearly a lot of people responded. This was an engaged community. And the comments from there, you know, there was the quantitative where people mark things, but it was the qualitative answers that gave me this huge aha. And the qualitative answers were things like web spammers are the scourge of the Internet, they're criminals and they belong to be in jail. Now you don't need to be a cloud infrastructure expert to realize holy smokes, there is a huge visceral Pain point here. So like that was the first aha. Okay, so there was clearly a problem. The next was part of the survey was like, what do you use to solve it? And all of these small businesses had no good solution. They were all using band aids, like Band Aid Homegrown Solutions. So the first haha was clearly there's a problem. The next aha for us was well, could we come up with a solution to the problem? And this is where the technical solution and being a differentiation like really shone through. And we were really inspired about what David Ulavich was doing at Open DNS, how he was helping deliver a better experience on the consumer side, the user side. We said, could we use DNS? We don't have to get into the technical details to do this, deliver security for the business side. And that was a huge aha. And it was kind of a shift of where businesses were buying hardware to do this and small businesses couldn't afford the hardware. Could we create a cloud based solution? And we were again right at the perfect time of the in, in. In history and retrospect to start a company like Cloudflare. There was just a huge shift happening and we happened to kind of stumble upon what, wow, there's a problem here. There is a way to deliver this as a service that not only makes it accessible to entrepreneurs and small businesses, but if we do a really good job over time, big companies too. So that was the second aha that we came up with a technical solution. So that was month two and then month three is as a business school student, you gotta be like, is there a business here? I think it's one thing to have a problem, another way to have a solution. Can you build a business around it? Which is something hopefully we'll talk more about. And again, you don't know. We could have proved that out, but we assumed yes. And it was those three things that by the time I graduated, I had another great job lined up. It was hard to walk away from that, actually. I remember it was at LinkedIn. I went to LinkedIn's campus and I remember I was sitting in the cafeteria talking to this person who's supposed to be my boss. And I said, you know, thank you so much for the offer. And this was. LinkedIn was small, it was way before it was going public. They were growing like a weed. I was excited to go there and I said, I have this idea. We want to see where it goes. I'm going to go pursue my idea instead of come here. He looked me straight in the eye. And he said, you were making the biggest mistake of your life. Because they were. We're a rocket ship. And you know when you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask which seat you get on. And I kind of said, and most companies fail. And I said, I get it, but I got to go see. I have to see where this leads. And so it was not super clear, it was not easy, but those were my steps along the way. And if you ask Matthew, his were different, his calculus was different. And so I guess I like to tell this story because it wasn't super clear. I kind of fell more and more in love with the idea. And even when I decided to do it, I still wasn't sure. It still took a few more months after that before I was really sure. Okay. I was like, oh, wow, we're really this. But. And so I think, I think that people go through different processes and that's okay. Sometimes I think you read these stories and you think, oh, wow. People wake up one day with the best idea ever, and then the next day they built a hundred billion dollar company. That's amazing when that happens. But not all stories happen like that.