In this interview, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and COO Michelle Zatlyn explain why the company chose to go public despite market volatility, emphasizing a long‑term mission to build an enduring, value‑creating business. They describe Cloudflare’s role as a neutral, network‑layer platform that works alongside major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google) and SaaS vendors, highlighting its first‑line‑defense security model that blocks 44 billion cyber attacks daily for millions of internet properties. The conversation covers strategic partnerships, the importance of independence, and how Cloudflare’s ecosystem benefits customers. Prince and Zatlyn also discuss the company’s hiring philosophy, noting a sub‑1 % acceptance rate, 90 % offer acceptance, and a commitment to gender parity and diversity, which they view as a competitive advantage. Finally, they address the decision to terminate the 8chan account after a mass‑shooting incident, outlining the broader content‑moderation policy and its impact on the company’s reputation.
Chapters
There's been a lot of volatility in the markets these days, but I mean, we are pretty much near all time highs as well. Was there any trepidation about coming public in this environment or.
No. You know, I think that we've built a company for the long term and we're really proud of the mission at Cloudflare and I think when, when a company gets to a certain scale and a certain size, my father, who's here somewhere was a stockbroker and I remember being with him talking about and watching, you know, the opening bell of so many companies over the. And when you get to that size and that scale, you owe it to, to your employees, to your investors and to the investing public as a whole to run the company as if it's a public company. And if you're going to do that, you might as well be a public company. And so I think that we markets go up and markets go down, but our goal is to build an enduring and lasting value for our customers and our shareholders.
Michelle, what's the difference being an enterprise company in this cloud driven environment where you've got awf, you got Azure, you've got Google all in the mix and they're fundamental part of the enterprise ecosystem. Now you're sort of playing in that. How is that different from what we've seen in the past?
You know, and that's when I started this company, we saw this big shift for hardware on premise, hardware boxes to the cloud and we took that idea. Every day we show up to execute on that. And along the way we have a lot of customers joining in and we have this vision of cloudflare as the service that customers are choosing to help make sure that their Internet applications are fast, that they're safe and that they're reliable around the world. And so having other players in the market is great, but we work alongside all of those and companies use us together and I think that we're just getting started.
So just to dig into that a little bit more than how would you assess the competitive landscape? Because when you talk about something like cybersecurity, I mean there are quite a number of names out there, including names that have been going public in addition to Cloudflare this year.
Yes, definitely. Well, cybersecurity is a big field. It turns out there's lots of ways to be secure. Cloudflare helps secure at the network layer. And so every day we stop 44 billion with a battery cyber attacks on behalf of our customers. And so we are the first line of defense that protects all the million Internet, 20 million Internet properties using Cloudflare around the world. And so we work with an additional to a lot of these other types of services. But it's a really broad field. And if, if a business is looking to be secure online, first line of defense platform is the choice for them.
Given how hot the space is. And John mentions the big players.
Can you talk about the calculus of whether to go public or say yes to what I'm assuming were several offers
to be absorbed by a larger. When did you have to make that call? You know, I think that we, we're building cloudflare to be an enduring company and we want to continue to build it. And I think a lot of the strength that we have is in the independence that we have. What we hear from CTOs and CIOs that are our customers is that they want to make sure that they have a choice between the different cloud providers. And cloudflare provides that neutral platform that lets you connect together your on premise infrastructure. Any of the SaaS vendors you're using from companies we really admire like Salesforce and Workday, in addition to the big cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft Azure, you know, Microsoft and Google have been longtime investors in Cloudflare. They've been great partners with us and we've been able to go to market with them. And I think that, that that ecosystem actually benefits any company that is using it to get the scale, efficiency and enhanced security that we're able to provide.
You've got gender parity in your founding team. You've also got what looks like gender parity with the employees that you've got here, which I'm not used to seeing with enterprise companies, not at ipo. How did you do it?
You know, I mean, the companies that have the most diverse set of, of, of people working for them are the ones that win over the long term. What we're really proud of is the mission at Cloudflare where we're helping build a better Internet. And everyone comes to work every day at Cloudflare doing that. And I think one of the things that probably will get ignored by some of the investors, but a statistic that we think is the important statistic for building an enduring company for the long term is we hire less than 1% of applicants who apply to work at Cloudflare and 90% of the people that we extend offers to actually accept those offers. And so that has given us the ability to get great men and women to work at the company, get great people from around the world. To work at the company. And I think over time, the people that are able to hire the best and the brightest are able to build the best products and are going to win over that long term.
And I'll just say that I've had the luckiest co founders in the world. Matthew Lee. They just always treated me like Michelle. Our initial investors always treated me just like Michelle. And the best part of my job are the people I get to work with. And I hope that other companies look at us and say, wow, they can build a diverse team and build a great company. So can we. And so I hope this is the start of many, the first of many.
I want to shift gears for a moment because Cloudflare came into media focus back in August when after the fatal shootings that happened and the company decided to terminate the account of 8chan. What has been the response to that? And I guess how does it speak to a broader policy that you've implemented if you have around the customers you work with?
You know, I think when we started we realized that what we were competing with was the on premise hardware of the world, the Cisco's and F5s and riverbeds. And the challenge is on any given day there's a whole bunch of really horrible content that flows through a Cisco router. And yet Cisco probably we would think is strange if they were making determinations on whether content was good and bad. And so we've always been reticent to make those content decisions. But every once in a while you do get platforms that are truly designed from the beginning to be terrible, terrible places. And when that happens, I think that the responsibility of tech companies is to step up. And so while we, I think, are in a different position than a Facebook or a YouTube, over time we want to make sure that the Internet is a better place. And that's, that's our mission.
