How To Make A Billion $ Unicorn: Michelle Zatlyn, Founder, Cloudflare

Hi, I'm Jeremy Fancy. I've just been to Cafe's office where I'm about to have an interview with Michelle Zapin. The coconut water caviar. I'm so excited. I can't believe it. So, So first, about your childhood. Just maybe tell me about it. So, like, where did you grow up?

Sure. I grew up in Canada in a small city that had about 35,000 people. So quite a small city. I think Singapore is about 5.5 million. Much smaller city in the middle of Canada, in Saskatchewan, which is in the province. And I have two sisters. And my parents were always doing fun things with us. We'd go trips and go see different cities. And when I went to university, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. So I thought that I was going to be a doctor. That's what I tried to do. And I kind of by chance, I started, I met a tech entrepreneur and I kind of fell into technology and. And I ended up loving it because I wanted to be a doctor to help people. And what I realized with technology is you can help people around the world too. And basically I ended up becoming an entrepreneur and starting my own tech company to help people around the world.

So where did you study?

I studied in Montreal, Canada, at a university called McGill. And I did a science degree in business. So I have chemistry and business background. And then I did graduate school from Harvard Business School.

So who was your favorite teacher?

My favorite teacher. Oh, I felt like I had so many great teachers. I remember one of my teachers, Mrs. Matheson, I had her three times in grade school and different grades. And she always was trying to encourage us to do our best and be friendly with all the kids, which I think is important when you're little. That was a good lesson. And then another one of my teachers in high school was my physics teacher. Physics is a very difficult subject, but he always encouraged me to apply to other programs and to learn how to put science into practice. And I loved that. He always introduced new things for me. And then finally a third teacher was Tom Eisenman, and he helped me start my company, Cloudflare. And I met him while I was doing my mba. So I've had lots of great teachers in my life.

So what's your favorite color?

Oh, my favorite color. Ah, I think blue. What's your favorite color?

Purple.

Black. See, I was gonna say a lot of them too. I didn't know it was a lot of too. But that's. I like all those colors too. I also like yellow and pink, but I think Blue is probably my favorite color.

Did you have any pets growing up?

I did. I had two cats, Russian blue cats, and a dog named Buffy. We named him her when we were eight, so that was a good name when we were eight years old. And yeah, I was really lucky. I had a dog and two cats.

Were the Russian blue cats blue?

I know you think they weren't blue. They were gray, but the gray almost had a blue tint to them. They were gray and they were really nice cats.

What are some of your hobbies?

Well, I love to do yoga and I think that feels good. I love swimming. I love to swim and water. It's very fun. I love to cook, so I like to go to farmers markets and see what the farmers are growing, fresh fruits and vegetables. And I love to cook at home and invite my friends over to come. I love baking, so I love to make cookies and cakes and pies. I love anything home cooked. And then the other thing that I really like to do is spend time with my family. So I have sisters and my parents and my husband and my kids, my nephew and niece. I love spending time with all of them.

So this is the thing we want to like when you're a bit older. When did you know that you wanted to become an entrepreneur?

When did I know? Well, I have two answers for you. So the first is when I was 14 years old in my little city. There was a program called Junior Achievement, and it's a little program that helps kids in school be more entrepreneur. And my mom signed me up for it after school. And at first I was very upset that she did that, but I ended up loving it. And I go and we basically started our first business and we had to come up with an idea of my little team. And then we had to go sell it to my neighbors and to our friends. And I loved it. We made a game called. It was a horse racing game. And so we built the games and we saw the games and it was really fun. And so that was my first taste of entrepreneurship. But then I thought I was going to be a doctor and did lots of different other things. And then I was at business school doing my mba and I really wanted to go work at a company that was growing to help make an impact in the world. I wanted to do something that I was really proud of. And I then met a friend, his name is Matthew, and another friend named Lee. And then the three of us ended up starting a company. So I kind of by accident became an entrepreneur. But all those things I liked when I was 14 years old about working with a small team and coming up with an idea and then selling it. They all came flooding back when I met Matthew and Lee and it was really very exciting.

Why did you want to become a cloud?

I love the idea of being part of something that changed the way something was working. I wanted to help make that change. And so, you know, I started Cloudflare because if you were a small business owner or you were a hobbyist or a blogger and you wanted to put start a company and put it online on the Internet, it was really hard to do that. And I thought we could help make sure that those small business owners can have a better experience. And I thought if we succeeded, I would be really proud to say that I helped make the tram faster and safer every day. That's why I wanted to become X. I thought if we do what we say we're going to do, we're going to make the world a lot better for a lot of people. I was excited about that.

Can I encourage you to start your company?

Oh, my parents and my sisters. I have an older sister and younger sister. My older sister was a huge champion. And my then boyfriend, and now he's my husband also said, you have to do this. So I was really lucky. My parents, my siblings, my boyfriend really wanted to were very supportive.

So how did Cloudflare start? What gave you the idea of naming Cloudflare? Cloudflare.

I know. Do you think it's a good name? Yeah. You do? Oh, good. That's nice. Originally, the name of the company was when we started, we started as students, I was a student at school and the original name that we used for during school was Project webwall. And that was not a very good name. And we had this idea where we wanted a new name. Where it was, we were building security for website owners or Internet properties, and we wanted this idea of a firewall, which is a security term in the sky. That was kind of what we were envisioning. And so we kept playing off that. And one of our friends, her name is Emily, we were telling her this and she was not into tech, but she was an English major, she loved English, and so she came up with the name Cloudflare. Like a flare in the sky, a flare in the cloud. And then we looked online and we said, oh, cloudflare.com was available. And so we decided to go with Cloudflare. And now that's how we came up with Cloudflare. We made up the word from our friend Emily.

Where did you live?

When you started Popular, I originally lived in Boston, and then we moved to San Francisco when we decided to spend more time doing Bachelor. But it started in Boston and you've been to Boston.

How did living in San Francisco help you?

Oh, San Francisco. San Francisco is a very special city. There's a lot of entrepreneurs there and there's a lot of people in San Francisco who say, you can have an idea of saying, I have this idea, I want to pursue it. And they say, oh, you should meet this person or talk to this person. And so it's a good place to try and start a company. And so San Francisco helped us a lot. It introduced us to people who ended up helping us raise money. We were able to hire people who left their jobs to say, oh, this is interesting. And there are very few cities in the world where people will do that, so take a chance. Early on, it wasn't clear cloudflare would be a big company. And so San Francisco was a city where both people and financiers, investors, gave us money and time to say, I want to see where this goes. I think there's only a few cities in the world.

So what challenges did you face while starting craftware?

Oh, so many. It's very hard building companies. It takes a lot of sacrifice. I think that early on you think you have an idea, you have to try and describe it. That's hard. That's a challenge. And then you have to get people to come work with you to work on it. That's hard because there are a lot of other more safe. And then you have to try and build a solution to actually solve a problem for customers. That's difficult. So there was lots of challenges early on. I think that it's, you know, people and money and time and you have a lot of self, self doubt. You kind of say, am I crazy to do this or am I onto something? And I think your mind can change 10, 10 times throughout the day. So it's very difficult. It's never, you know, at school, if you do a good job, you get a grade or a gold star. But when you're an entrepreneur, nobody's giving you a gold star or grade every day. It's very difficult. So you don't know whether what you're doing is good or if you're crazy. It's a very fine line.

Do you think Singapore is a good place to start a business?

Well, it's, you know, I've met a lot of entrepreneurs this week and they're very. It's such a growing region. You know, there's a lot of exciting, exciting things going on in Asia. And I think Singapore is a great place to be based because you have access to the whole region and it's beautiful places to live and more and more people want to move here. And so I do think that there's some really exciting traction to be an entrepreneur. And there's been some recent really successful companies like Graph Taxi and some others, and I think that that's really good for Singapore in the region. So, yes, I do think it's a good place to start a company. I met some really cool entrepreneurs this week.

So who helped you grow Cloudflare to the sizes?

Well, the two people I started with, Matthew and Ali, helped a lot. And all the people who came to work at Cloudflare, all those employees, the engineers, people in sales and marketing, and our customer support team all made a huge difference. That's been great. But outside of work, we had investors who believed in the company and believed in us. We had journalists, reporters who interviewed us and helped write, who would write about our early customers, who gave us feedback and tried the service and then told all their friends. And then finally at home, my parents and my. My sisters and my husband, they all help me too. So it takes a village to make a company successful, and lots of people helped us along the way. We're very lucky and I'm very grateful to all of them.

So, about Cloudflare. What's Cloudflare's goal?

Our goal is to help build a better intranet. Our goal is to help, if you have an Internet problem, to help make sure they're fast, safe, reliable, no matter who's coming to it.

How many people work at Cloudflare?

About a thousand. That's a lot of people, right? It is.

Who, like, mainly uses Cloudflare?

Well, we have. Okay, who uses Cloudflare? We have small business owners that use Cloudflare. We have bloggers that use Cloudflare. We have governments, so the government of Singapore is a customer. We have large companies that use Cloudflare, gaming companies, we have clothing companies, we have banks that use Cloudflare. Turns out that if you have a website or an app on your phone, all of those things be fast, safe and reliable around the world. So we have a lot of types of customers who live all over the world using Cloudflare.

Okay, so what advice do you have for future young entrepreneurs that you can do it?

That it's a great. That you come up with a great idea to do the hard work to make it happen. It's a pretty enemy experience. If you have the right idea. Keep going. Great. Excellent.

I hope you enjoyed the interview. That's all for me today. Thank you.

Thank you, Sa.