Cloudflare Co-founder gives advice on how to run a successful business

Our mission at cloudflare is to build a better Internet. So our customers are anybody with a web property and we make sure that it loads quickly around the world. We protect them from a range of online attackers. There's this real pain point in the market where if you were a small business, if you were a blogger, it was really hard to make sure your web property was as good as the Internet giants. And so we set off to say, hey, we can fix this. And so let's build a service that we can make resources that were previously reserved for just the Internet giants. For anybody on the Internet, I'm absolutely a leading expert in what we do. But on day one I wasn't. And it was something that I kept falling more and more in love with and learned more and more about day by day. Even today when we hire people on, of course we hire people who have deep expertise in specific business areas of our business, but we also hire a lot of people who just have a huge thirst for curiosity, who are very smart, who fall in love, love with the mission and say, I will work very hard to make it happen. And you need both kind of that t approach, breadth and depth to build really successful businesses. And so as an entrepreneur, you learn things all the time and you know, there's mistakes made all the time. You know, for us, we've lived a very, we've grown very quickly over the last five years and what we say is we've lived a charmed existence, we've built a very big business in a relatively short amount of time and we've been lucky to have few stumbling blocks along the way. Having said that, of course there's things that always go wrong. And as an entrepreneur or as anybody working at an early stage company, you have to have the tenacity to get past it. Yeah, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and I love that so many people want to be part of growing something really meaningful. I think that's awesome. And so I always say two things. I say, first, it is amazing to be part of a team that is going on to build again the next Apple or the next Google. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to start it. Like everyone on our team, we have 150 people I describe is entrepreneurial because again, it takes all of us, it takes a team of committed people to make the idea come true. And so if you, or if you're passionate about something and there's a company doing it, go and find out a way to be on that team to make it happen. Because that's really magical. Building companies are a lot of hard work. They take a lot of tenacity and time and energy. And you want to make sure that you're doing something that when you look back, you'll be really proud of. And what someone said to me six years ago, which I didn't appreciate, so I'm going to pass along the advice got was building a small company takes the exact same amount of energy as building a big company. So why not go for something big that actually makes an impact? And now, six years in, I can see how that's the case.