Short transcript excerpt from a YouTube video (Michelle Zatlyn) discussing Cloudflare’s technical identity and the limits of focusing only on engineering. Speakers emphasize Cloudflare moves very large volumes of Internet traffic and is highly technical, but argue that founders must also deliberately build the business (operations, team, and financial metrics like revenue, gross margin, and growth) to create lasting impact. The piece urges technical founders to value business-building alongside technology.
Chapters
We are a very technical company. Cloudflare builds infrastructure for the Internet. We move a lot of bytes around the Internet for a lot of like over 25 million million Internet properties. It's a lot. We have a huge responsibility. We are super technical and super geeky.
Like we're optimizing very low level code.
Everyone at Cloudflare is very technical, just inherently of what we do.
And what I would say is early on, like we just, we were, we loved the tech, we love that we had came up with this differentiated techno.
Technology and we were celebrated for that.
And I think I see that a lot in Silicon Valley where technical founders.
Where you're celebrated for the tech. And we loved that and it was amazing.
We still love that today. What I think that we discounted early.
On, and you described it as operations, I would even make it broader than that.
What is really cool, and I don't.
Think it's spoken enough about, is when.
You have built the amazing tech, is how do you build a great business.
To partner with it.
That doesn't just happen by accident. It's just like good tech. Technology doesn't just happen by accident. You need to like be thoughtful and the architecture and decisions matter and you.
Got to, you have to grind out.
Bottlenecks and capacity constraints, like all those sorts of things. The same thing is on the business side where I think some technical folks.
That I've seen early on, or even technical founders, they almost outsource the business.
Building to other people and they are.
Almost bored by that.
And I think that one of the things that I've realized along the way.
And now we realize it, but I wish we'd realized it even earlier is.
What is really magical is if you.
Have amazing technology with a great business.
And an awesome team, and then what.
I think is icing on the cake is a great impact in the world. That is how you build something truly magical. And I don't think that gets spoken about enough of the, the business building. I think people kind of see that as almost beneath them.
And actually that's what makes magic.
You need, it's an important piece of.
The magic because that's how. And just maybe why I would say is eventually you get measured on your.
Financial metrics compared to others.
It's very hard to measure technical differentiation. You know, you know it.
You can't see it in numbers, but.
You can very much compare how is.
Your revenue compared to somebody else, what's your gross margin, how fast you're growing.
These are the sorts of things that.
Early on no one's thinking about.
But, you know, 10 years later, that's what the expectation is. And you want metrics that look even.
Better than somebody else because your technology is so good. And so I think more appreciation for the business building would go a long way for some of those technical founders.
