Building a Much Better Internet with Cloudflare COO Michelle Zatlyn | Leading from the Front Ep. 5

I'm Matthien Cullen. I'm the CEO of Front Today. I'm here with Michel, who is the CEO and co founder of Cloudflare. Michel, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Oh, thanks so much for having me. And I'm really looking forward to our conversation and I know I'll learn a ton as well.

Me too. I'm super looking forward to it. So maybe we can start with just who you are. I would love to know what your role is at Cloudflare and what your day to day looks like.

Sure, of course. So I'm, as you said, the co founder and CEO of Cloudflare. So Cloudflare, we are about 10 years old as a company. We're about to have our 10th birthday at the end of September. And you know, over the last 10 years it was me and my two co founders who started Cloudflare and now we have over 1500 people. You know, we went public recently, so now we're a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Our market cap is, it fluctuates, but about $10 billion plus in market cap. Last year we did $287 million in revenue. So we kind of took an idea startup and now it's turned it into a real business with lots of customers and employees. And Cloudflare, we help make the Internet faster, safer and more reliable for any Internet property, whether you're a small business developer or a large company. And we've really grown over the last 10 years, so it's been an amazing journey. And my job is I'm sold a co founder. If you're a co founder, you're always a co founder. And actually there are a lot of co founders list. It's an important distinction to remember. But then I'm also an executive of the company as the coo and I'm responsible for the go to market functions. So our sales, our marketing, our customer support teams as well as our people in places. So hiring great people into Cloudflare and then making sure everyone do their best.

Work at the company too. And given you've been doing this job for over 10 years now, is there anything that you wish you had known 10 years ago? It's always a hard question because I'm sure you learn so much. But is there something that's obvious that comes to mind that you wish you would share with people watching this?

Yeah, definitely. Well, I actually have two. So there's the whether you're a founder or not founder piece of advice which is life is A collection of experiences. I think collecting a lot of really interesting experiences. Experiences is what sets leaders apart. And that's something that I wish I had known. And then there's for founders, which I have learned along the way, but I think I would have made different decisions along the way if I had realized it 10 years ago. Is when we first started Cloudflare, it was all about the technology, and it still is. I mean, that's what our differentiation is. And it's amazing and I love the tech and it's awesome. But what, what I did not realize and I've learned along the way is, sure, it's about solving a problem and how you're going to do that and doing it in an elegant way, but at the end of the day, you have to build a great business around what you're doing too. And I did not appreciate that for many years building Cloudflare. And so therefore, I think some of our customer decisions, marketing decisions earlier on weren't good ones. And, you know, I since learned a lot along the way. And so now I try and talk to founders all the time. I'm like, great. It's great about the technology or what you're building and do, customers care. But as soon as you start to find product market fit, that's kind of a term that we use a lot as entrepreneurs. As soon as you start to find product market fit and you really start to see adoption, whether of use or revenue, then you got to start to think about, okay, how am I going to build a healthy business around it? And businesses are different than technology. And I think the really great success stories are companies or entrepreneurs who can do both.

I think one thing that I'm always amazed by is when we took or when I hear you talk, you always remind everyone who's listening what your mission is. And it's to build a better Internet. You said it better than I just said it. And I'm curious for all the founders and CEOs and CEOs that are going through this process of, you know, formulating their mission. What, what would be your advice to them?

Yeah, so as starting companies are hard and, you know, I'm, you know, Mathilde, you've been super successful front and Cloudflare has been by all accounts a huge success story. And it has been from the beginning. But when you're a success story, man, like, it is really hard for the first one to four or five years, like, very hard. And it's, it's very hard to get people to come work for you. It's very hard to get your first customers to use your service. And it's not even your first couple. I mean, it's hard to get employee number 50 to come work for you, because there's a lot of other great jobs. Why would people give up their great jobs to come work at a company that may go out of business? And when you have 50 people, you don't know whether you have something or not or how big it is. And I think even as a founder, you know, you're looking at your friends around you. And I live in Silicon Valley, where people have these amazing ideas that are taking off. And there are definitely moments of, do I have that, or are we going out of business tomorrow? Early on, like, right. And I think that that, that's, like, very common and messy, those early few years. And again, it's not a year, it's four years, which is a long time. That's a lot of days. That's 1200 days of your life. And so, you know, I say all this, that there's a lot of great companies in the world. There's a lot of great causes to put to dedicate your talents towards. And so for us at Cloudflare, early on, it was like, sure, we're helping make the Internet safer, but, like, why does that matter? And it was laddering up to a bigger mission, and it is to help build a better Internet. And we didn't start with that on day one. It's not like we had the mission on day one. And then we. We executed against suits. We uncovered it along the way, and it was a couple years in, and it just became really crystal clear where it kind of elevated everything. It made it easier to get people to come work for us. Cause all of a sudden they're like, I want to help make the Internet better too. Like, that really resonates with me. Some investors really were like, wow, I want to be a part of that. For your own psyche, you're just like, I'm really proud of the work we're doing. It becomes a North Star. Decisions we're making. Does this help make the Internet better or does it not? And it also becomes like a North Star for internal decision. And so we didn't start with mission. We started with a problem we were trying to solve for our customers. And through that, we discovered that there was a bigger mission to what we're doing. And I remember listening to talks like this. It was like Drew Houston at Dropbox and others that were talking about these things, and they were exactly right. It's like you're doing something bigger. It's not just a job. You're doing something much bigger than that. And so then you gotta think about what does your business stand for? What's your mission as a company? And it kind of elevates everything and provides some levity.

How do you make sure that with many employees that you have, everyone knows about this mission? And I think my second question would be, how do you make sure that everyone knows how their job contributes to that mission?

Yes. Well, then how do you know whether you're doing a good job of that is a whole other. When you're early, it's kind of gut level year round all the time. So you kind of know. And then now all of a sudden we have 1500 people and it's harder to know. So we, I mean, some things that we've done and I think lots of other companies have done, you know, there's books written about this. But, you know, we, we do, our mission is to help build a better Internet. We talk about it a lot and, and it does come up. And I think it's because we really believe it. And so whether it's, I'm talking about it, or Matthew, who's my business partner or CEO or an executive platform, like it just comes up frequently, which is good. So it's. And again, we all believe it, but then we've also done some other things. And there's actually Adam Grant, who's a professor who's written a lot about, you know, organizations. He's an organizational professor who looks about how people work together. And the idea was we found situations where we feel like Cloudflare made a different decision than other companies. And we created something called Cloudflare Stories. And anytime you join Cloudflare, it's like part of our guidebook. You go through it and it's. Here are situations where we made a different decision than we think other companies would have because it comes back to, it reinforces what we believe as a business, how we do it, what our values are, and ultimately to serve this bigger mission. And so we've captured those along the way. And again, what gets qualified as a story is where we feel like we made a decision differently than another company because that's how these things get carried on through stories. Right. It's easier to reinforce these sorts of things. So we talk a lot about it when we're shipping things. How does it tie back to that? When we launch things, we tie it back to that. But it was also tied up into actual decisions Being made and capturing those and then making sure everyone who joins Cloudflare reads those. And again, that situation will never happen again. But we hope that people will learn. Wow. I think back to that story. Here's how I'm going to make my decision, because of that story that I read about three years ago. And so that's kind of how we've helped carry it on.

So I'm sure that having this clear mission, people understanding it contributes to having a great culture and something. From what I've heard, Cloudflare has a good culture. One thing I was curious about is you expanded internationally. You can tell me, from what I understand that you have offices, you know, in Beijing, you have in Lisbon, in sf. I'm curious how you made sure that, you know, across the different offices and across the different languages and traditions and values, you had a really great culture and you had some consistency, if ever that was something that you were looking for.

Yes. The best part of my job are the people I get to work with, which is, you know, I think companies are combinations of people who show up every day, building things. Right. And so the best part of my job are the people I get to work with. And the second best part of my job are our customers. And that's held true from very early. And so, you know, we've always placed a really high emphasis on people. And again, we don't always get it right. So I don't, you know, this is always a tough conversation because it's not. We're not perfect. There's lots of things that we get wrong and we learn and we're trying to adapt. So I. Let me just start with there. But. But we do care. We really do care. I do think Cloudflare has a soul, and we always have. It's always started with great people. And so we spend a lot of time recruiting. A lot. And we've always spent a lot of time recruiting. And by we, I mean, like me and Matthew, like the founders did a lot of it early on. And then now, by we, I mean all of our hiring managers. I mean, today, if you're a hiring manager at Cloudflare, you're expected to spend between 20 and 30% of your time hiring for your team, which is a lot. That's two hours a day or one day a week. And sometimes seasoned managers come in and say, well, I'm just going to partner with the recruiting team. They do that. And we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, people come work for you, they like the company, but they come work for you, you're involved. And so, again, for a lot of people, they love it. And then, like, a lot of managers love it because they really get to know the people and who they end up hiring, stay for a long time, and that's great. But we do spend a lot of time recruiting and a lot of time on the process.

One thing I was curious about, I mean, so we've talked about mission and culture and putting people first, and I think all of that contributes to people being engaged in a company. One of my beliefs, and obviously it's also because I'm in a business that deals with customer communication is one of the things that contributes to people being happy and engaged, is understanding what your customers say about your product. Good and bad. It's good to know what they say is good because that gives you energy. Good to know what they think is bad because that gives you a purpose when you're working on something. Now, I think when you're very small, it's pretty easy for everyone in a company to know what customers are saying. And you're not super small anymore. I'm curious how you've been able to communicate within your entire company still today, what customers think of Cloudflare.

Yeah, well, and this is really important, and I think we've ebbed and flowed over the years, but we try and talk a lot about what our customers are saying, and as you said, both the good and the bad, because at the end of the day, we're solving their problems. And so we are a very transparent company internally. Like, we share a lot of information and we always have. It's a big part of who we are. And so, you know, every week, our. Our customer support leader sends out a recap of, here's what customers are saying, and those are people who are writing into us, the good and the bad. How many times have they had to write in? Why are they writing in for which product? And then when we answered their question, did we do a good job? Did they think we do a good job? Or did they say, you know, you did a terrible job? And, like, we don't censor it. There's both good and bad. And you read through some of the bads and you think, wow, we really fell short here. But it's an opportunity to get better. So that's how we constantly building that in. And, you know, every quarter when we're planning the product roadmap, one of the lenses is input from the customers. Right. Whether it's through support tickets, where we know there's an issue or through customers asking for things like that becomes one input. What we build on the roadmap, next quarter, the quarter after, it's not the only input, but they're really important ones. And, you know, we have a lot of customers. We have, you know, over two and a half million customers, so we can't call all of them on the phone. And so you need to look for these sorts of signals to help drive input, to prioritize what's the most important to build or where are we prioritizing time. And so it's really, really important. We had our Q3 kickoff yesterday. I mentioned that earlier and, you know, we, we told many customer stories during that because it's. Everyone's listening and it's. You can never. Why are customers choosing Cloudflare? Who are they? Who. If it's us, who else is in the consideration set? Why did they pick us or those others or if we. Or. And then over time, if they're doing more business with us, why, like. And that's a testament to our teams working hard and them liking the service that and other problems we can solve for them. And so we try and tell those stories often. And again, there's kind of both through data on a weekly basis of hearing it, social media, and then as well as in these more formal weekly or all hands meetings where we have customer stories that we're telling. And that works pretty well. Right, like that you can get a really, a long way there. The last thing we did that has been terrific. That might be helpful to a lot of founders on the call is someone on our team was like, we should really create a Cloudflare community.

And I was like, do we really.

Need another community online? I feel like there was a lot of places to connect. Turns out he was right and I was wrong. So we have a Cloudflare community. It's run by kind of one person running our company and it's people in the Cloudflare community, users, customers who volunteer and they help run this online community. And people love has a huge engagement, big audience, and we basically built a place for people to come and ask questions about Cloudflare Engage. And so now it's another place for our product managers to go talk to the community when they're batting things like battling, when they're batting ideas around or if they build something and they want some initial users, they go ask there. And it's like our own community of people who want to talk about Cloudflare all day long. And so that's been an Innovation that came up internally. And again, I was like, that's silly. No one's going to do that. And again, I was wrong.

Yeah, well, it seems like a great idea specifically to scale, because when you start having millions of customers, then there is just so much you can do on a one on one basis. I think for me, the two things I've learned along the way on creating empathy throughout your organization that might be counterintuitive is one, share constructive feedback and stories of customers who've not been successful, who've not been happy, because that will, I think, lead to a lot of empathy and more purpose to people that are trying to improve your product. And the second thing is always try to dig super deep into, like, really, what's the impact of how people use your products? Instead of saying, well, this is the customer story and they use this product and, you know, they like this feature and this is this setup, which is a good first step. But I think a really important next step is, well, just as a human being who's using the product, how is my life different? Like, how am I doing a better job because I'm using this product?

That's a good. You're right, actually. And what you said just made me think of one other thing. I 100% agree. You said it very eloquently. The other thing that was totally counterintuitive is there are times where what you do sucks. Like, you're like, actually, our product really isn't. Whatever. This teacher really does suck compared to others. And I've noticed that a lot of leaders sometimes try to sugarcoat it, oh, it's not so bad, or they downplay their competitor. You know, at the best moments at Cloud4, where it's been me or it's been, Matthew said, guys, let's just accept it's not as good as it should be and let's go make it better. We are really good at fixing problems when we acknowledge there's a problem. And, you know, as a leader, sometimes just giving your team permission to be like, actually, you're right, we could do way better. And then you say, there's a problem, let's go fix it, we can do better. And then you end up taking something that was a weakness and turning it into a huge strength. And it's not human nature to do that, it's human nature to kind of sugarcoat it and hedge sometimes you gotta say, this is not as good as it needs to be.

Yeah, a lot of what I share is the problems we have versus, like, the things that are working, because when something is working great, let's scale it. But, you know, I think I trust our team in when they're aware of a problem, finding a solution. I think the biggest mistake we can do is not acknowledge these problems because we think that it's not motivating or it's scary or whatever. I think it actually builds trust and actually bring people along in the journey to highlight this problem. Exactly right.

Be honest about the problems.

Exactly. Well, I know we're almost at the end of our time. I think I can hear kids in the background.

I'm sorry.

Not at all. But, you know, I'm just curious how you. So obviously, you have this huge role, like, professionally, and then personally, you have a husband, you have two kids. I think, how have you managed to have some balance?

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah, exactly. I'm. I just really wanted it, like. And I guess you just make decisions to design my life like that. And so I've always been really ambitious, and I'm really proud of my career, and I love my job, and I do have a big job, and I think that's great. And I'm married, and I always wanted a relationship, and I prioritized that. And then we wanted to have kids, and I wanted to know my kids and have a. Like, for them to be a happy family. And again, so far, so good. And not that it hasn't been without, you know, I've made decisions along the way, way to tilt the possibility of this in my direction, and it's worked out really, really well. And so I like talking about it because I want other people to know it's possible. I cannot tell you how many times over the last five years, especially as Cloudflare became bigger and my role became more front and center and I started to have kids that people said, how do you do it? And it's not just women asking me that. It's men, too. They don't. They. And I mean, lots of people do it, but people don't talk about it. And so I think, again, if you don't want this, no big deal. But if you do want to have a career, a relationship and a family, there's lots of people who do it. It's definitely possible. And you just have to decide, do you want it? Great. Then let's go make it happen. And again, I have a great life partner who's always supported my career ambitions, and he's an entrepreneur himself. And so I found a great life partner who's kind of been my biggest champion. I have Lots of friends who didn't find that. So it's hard to be happy at work and at home if your life partner is not cheering for your success. So I think, again, I was always upfront that I was ambitious in my career, and he was like, awesome. And so that's worked out great. And then we both all want. We both wanted to have kids, which was helpful. You know, being in a relationship with someone you love and a job you love but doesn't want kids, that's a hard situation. Again, we wanted that, so that was better. And then the last thing I would say is, it takes a village. And I mean that. Really. I think that we should start going back to talking about villages in lives. It's not. It's at work. Just like at work as your job progresses. There's a lot of things that I used to do as a founder that I don't do anymore because someone else in the company does it. And same thing in my home life. There's a lot of things where it's not just like, Jamie, me and my kids, it's the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, it's the neighbors, it's. It's the nannies, it's the babysitters, it's the teachers. I mean, I have a very wide village, and I like that. Like, they're kind of part of our extended family. And I grew up in a small city in Canada, and my. My grandparents were farmers, and it was really about the community. Community back then. And so it's kind of. I tried to recreate that in the city.

Actually.

There's a business idea there. I think there's a business idea for an entrepreneur to help create villages. It's almost like next door meets care meets something where it's connecting people together to make it so you don't feel so alone anyhow. But, yeah, that's how I've done it.

So it's possible they may just have to wait a few months before it becomes a reality and people can actually meet.

I know. Actually go into. I know, right? That's true. Right now, it feels like.

But at least that gives them time to think about this idea. So, I mean, I have one last question. I could have asked you a million other questions, but I always like to ask, you know, if you reflect back on the past few years, what do you think is a piece of advice that you've heard that helped you the most?

Well, as a founder, the best piece of advice I've gotten is the rate at which you learn, is what sets great founders apart from good founders. And it was George Lee at Goldman Sachs who said it. And, you know, he ran investment banking at Goldman Sachs for many years, and he's met everybody. His job is to know everybody. And he said the truly extraordinary founders are the ones who just have really high rates of learning. And if you think it. That to me, was really actually kind of democratized the process, I was like, oh, okay, meaning you don't need to know everything, but if you're willing to learn and take input and make decisions and do it better next time, then you have the shot at being the best versus coming in being the best. And to me, that was motivating. And so the rate at which you learn, and I think it's true. And that's why, you know, conversations with others surrounding your hiring great people into your company who do it better than you, like, that's. All of a sudden you're like, wow, that is so much better than how we were doing it. And that's not a threatening thing. That's a good thing. That's an empowering thing. And now everyone learned like, all tides rise. And I think that, that the rate at which you learn really is a founder's greatest asset. So I don't even think it's founders, I just think it's people in general. But I actually do think it's specifically unique to founders because your job changes so fast. Like, if I think about where I've come the last 10 years, my job is just like the. It's been a very high face rate of acceleration of pace. So being able to keep up and learn and adapt is really important. So that's the best piece of advice.

I learned a lot today. And, you know, thank you so much. I'm sure a lot of you who will listen to it will also learn a lot. So thank you, Michelle, so much for having spent the time, and I'm sure we'll talk very soon.