CloudFlare’s Michelle Zatlyn: Why Small Mistakes Matter for Startups

No one really starts a business thinking they're going to be huge, right? You're out there solving a problem or something you really care about, and turns out that there's some smart things you should do up front because if you are huge things can happen. And so early on, we registered everything to my business partners, Matthew's house. We just used his home address. And that was a really big mistake because ultimately we used that to do all our filings because we didn't want to pay for a PO box, which really isn't very expensive. It's like $400 a year. But when startup with no money. $400 a year, it's like $400 a year. And that ended up haunting us because some hackers basically used his address and bought his Social Security number online in Russia. And I promise you, all of your Social Security numbers can be bought in Russia as well. And he actually ended up getting seriously hacked. The company ended up getting seriously hacked, and that was really a very bad day.