How Cloudflare is Revolutionizing the Internet

At the end of the day, we make anything connected to the Internet. And when I mean anything, I really mean anything connecting the Internet, people kind of look the other way. They're like, that's so boring. Every day we stop, as you said, over 70 billion with a B cyber attacks.

Well, let's dive in. So you have a very interesting background as a tech startup founder, beginning with the fact that you didn't even initially plan to go in technology as a career. Now you are running a company that is essentially the backbone of the.

The Internet.

Before we get into your personal history, let's talk about the significance of Cloudflare for a few moments. In this era of rapid advancement in Internet technology, where does Cloudflare fit into everything?

Yeah, that's a big question. We could spend a lot of time talking about that, but. But I've gotten better answering this question over the years, so I make a joke about that because there's a lot of founders who might be working on big ideas and sometimes it's hard, hard to concisely consolidate, articulate what you're doing. And, and so I guess I make a joke because I've got. I've come a long way. So, like, what does Cloud do? I mean, we really, at the end of the day, we make anything connected to the Internet. And when I mean anything, I really mean anything connecting the Internet faster, safer and more reliable. So we do cyber security performance reliability for anything connected online. And it's interesting, when I first started cloudflare, we're about 11 years old as a company. It didn't quite start with that sort of pitch. It was a little bit of, hey, we're helping democratize tools previously resolved for the giants. We're going to supercharge your website. Oh, hey. I'm building a cyber security performance reliability company and I'd sometimes go to dinner parties, which we haven't been doing very much recently. But when, when we used to get together and people would kind of look the other way, they're like, that's so boring. Like, What? But, but 11 years in, we have over 20, 27 million Internet properties using our service, which is a lot. It's about 20% of the web connects to the Internet through Cloudflare. That's a huge responsibility, a huge privilege. Big responsibility. Every day we stop, as you said, over 70 billion with a B cyber attacks coming to our customers. Applications, workloads, websites. I mean, that's just a astonishing number. And it gets stopped because of technology. Our teams of amazing engineers and product managers and what They've built. We help make everything faster around the world. Everyone, all the, all the legitimate users trying to go to our customer sites faster, safer and more reliable. And we add reliability in and it turns out now that we've kind of gained the scale and people understand better what some of these things mean, all of a sudden people don't run away from me at dinner parties anymore. They're like, that's cool, tell me more. How do you do it? And I didn't realize there were so many cyber attacks online. Why are people doing it who throw them? Why is it so hard? Why? Sometimes I go to some places online it's so fast and others it's really slow. And you know why? Sometimes I can't get to where I'm going. The reliability side. And so it's been really amazing to help build this backbone of the Internet, the infrastructure of the roads, the bridges that kind of make everything work. And you kind of take bridges and roads for granted in cities, but when they don't work, it's really frustrating. I feel like we do that in the, in the digital space and just, you know, the last thing I'll say here, and I'm happy to go in any direction you want, is just 11 years ago when we started to build Cloudflare, this, it wasn't obvious exactly what we saw. We saw it, we, we saw the rise of cloud computing. So we were business school students when we started to work on Cloudflare and aws. At the time the dialogue there was a lot of headlines in, in media saying is AWS a fad or not? Like a lot of people said real organizations will never use AWS's for their workloads. Well, you turned out how wrong that used to that like that ended up being that, that. And so when we started, but we saw Store Compute going to the cloud, we saw applications, we saw companies like Salesforce, even Workday growing really quickly ahead of us. We kind of said, well, if storage and compute are going to the cloud and applications going to the cloud, the networking side again, all the things that make the roads and the bridges also have to go to the cloud. And that's what Cloudflare has built. We built a globally distributed network that's a cloud based service that makes anything faster, safer and more reliable. That used to be done by hardware boxes and software. So there you go.