Michelle Zatlyn & Ted Livingston: Building a Billion-Dollar Company

Thanks so much for being here, guys. So we're talking about what it takes to become a billion dollar company. And everybody is there for you at a billion. And then there's, there's fewer hangers on when you're, you know, kind of starting out in your basement and with this, with this crazy idea. So give us a sense perhaps. Ted, I'll start with you. How long did it take for you to get there?

It takes a long time. I started Kik. It's going to be our 10 year anniversary in January. When I started, I was like a kid. And now I feel like I can no longer say I'm a young entrepreneur. I'm like a middle aged entrepreneur now.

You still wear a hoodie?

I still wear a hoodie. That's what I hold on to, my youth. But it takes a long time. You get excited about where the future is going, what you can build, and you just sort of underestimate how hard it's going to be, how much time it's going to take. But when you look back, you say, if I known it was going to be this hard, would I have done it? Like, absolutely. Because I'm so excited about where we are today and all the things we have ahead of us. So it takes a long time, but I wouldn't be doing anything else.

Yeah, I think if you look at the data, it's basically 10 years is now the new average. It used to be like 7 and it's increased to 8, 9, 10 years before some sort of exit. So you got to ask. And so it's interesting, I have a different point of view. It's like if I had known how hard it was to build a company and that you have to do it over 10 years, I think a lot of people would decide not to do it.

Yeah. Let me rephrase. I'm glad I didn't know how hard it was.

Yes, okay. Yeah, I agree with that. It totally. It's like you almost, you kind of want to go. In a way. It's like we started Cloudflare and we fell in love with this idea of what we were working on. And we're. I remember early on, you know, I'd go talk to people and I'd say, hey, yeah, Clefo, we're going to help make the Internet better. And they literally would roll their eyes at me and they kind of laugh and be like, yeah, right, good luck with that. Because again, it's so much easier to find all the reasons why something won't work. But the whole Point of building companies is you find other people who believe in the vision, you start to make progress. And now we're 8 years old, so a little bit behind you. And it's, like, amazing to see how many champions we've amassed along the way. And what I love is, like, people are like, oh, clapfo, you guys are huge. And what I say is, like, most of the world has no idea we exist. And we have. We're just getting started. There's so many things left to do.

And was that meaningful to get that valuation? I mean, obviously it's meaningful because we're having a discussion on it. But did. Did it mean something to you, to the business, to the doors that were opened afterwards once you hit that mark?

Well, I mean, I don't know how you think about this, Ted, but if you're an entrepreneur sitting in the audience, you think about, like, how hard things are. I just remember really early on the highs and the lows that would happen, like, multiple times an hour per day. And so you kind of, like, you go home at the end of the day and you're exhausted. You feel like you've been on this, like, train wreck where you're, like, high, and then 20 minutes later, something bad happens, but then, like, something good happens again. You're high and low so many times over the day. And that's a lot to have to go through if you're not making progress. And so what I always say is, like, early on, momentum is an entrepreneur's best friend. You want to keep feeling like you're moving the ball forward down the field and whether for right or wrong. And raising money is not the only way to do this. It's absolutely not. But sometimes it feels like validation of, like, oh, we are on something. We. We convinced a third party to give us money to go, say, continue doing what we were saying. And you kind of have to hold on to these sorts of things. And it's not the only thing. It could be hiring. It could be doing a partnership, could be closing. Your first customer can be hiring somebody a little bit more senior. Like, I remember early on, like, we'd be trying to interview these seasoned engineers. And I remember the day someone signed. I literally. Matthew, my business partner, our co founder, literally turned to each other and we high fived each other because it was like, oh, my God, they could have gone somewhere else and they picked Cloudform. You kind of, kind of. You have to move on to. Again, momentum matters. You have to find these things where you're like, oh, someone else is Validating what we're doing. And so, you know, raising money. Valuation, that's just one way to do that.

What would be another metric that you think entrepreneurs should focus on other than valuation?

So I think for us, valuation was never the goal. You know, sort of like a checkbox, like, yeah, billion dollar valuation. That was cool. But we have a lot of work to do. Let's get back to work. I think for us, like, the metric that I look at is what is the size of impact that I think we can have over the next 10 years? And always looking ahead and to me, like, the most exciting things at Kik and now with Kim, this new cryptocurrency we launched, that's like the metric we look at. That's how happy am I? It really depends on, okay, how much better could the world be in 10 years because we existed. And at some points, you know, when you're struggling, you're like, I don't know, because we might not be around in six months, but then you have these highs where things start to come together and you're like, you know, who knows how far this could go? And so I think that's the metric we look at. It's sort of hard to quantify. It's a feeling you wake up with, is, you know, how much impact can we really have?

Here in Canada, we're starting to see a lot more billion dollar valuation companies, but generally, and I'll throw this statement out there and you guys can tell me whether you agree or disagree. In Canada, harder to become $1 billion valuation startup. Considered very impressive in the Valley. Easier to become $1 billion startup, but. But considered, you know, less impressive just because of the sheer amount of dollars that. That are thrown out and the kind of hype cycle that is there not to.

Okay, sorry, I just have to tell this funny story that you can answer the question, Ted, but I was literally at a dinner once, and it was a small group dinner, and the person at the dinner literally uttered the words they'd never worked at a startup in their life. They were an outside advisor. And he said, oh, we're not interested in companies that do 1 billion or get to a billion in revenue or 5 billion revenue. We're only interested in companies that get to 100 billion in revenue. And I'm just like. And I was like. I mean, on one side you're like, wow, that's bold. But on the other side, I'm like, you're gonna pass a lot of great opportunities. Cause it isn't that easy to build A company that has real meaningful revenue that you can attract, that you can convince people to come work, come work at and scale. I mean, I think there's more examples, but I don't know if I would describe it as easy anyhow, bottle at you.

I think it probably is easier to build a billion dollar company in the Valley, having one of the few consumer companies to have done it again, I think, like, listen, there's, there's advantages and disadvantages to every choice in life. And the advantages to being in Silicon Valley are, you know, you bump into top investors every day. You, you know, meet people who have been there, done that every day. Whereas in Canada, like, I literally had to live on a plane and hit Sandhill Road in, in Silicon Valley for nine months every 18 months to try to get the next check. And I was an outsider and they didn't know who I was. And I'm like, I'm here and I need money. And that was hard. That was hard. And you know, when we hired people in Canada to try to scale a company, like nobody had really done it before. You know, people had worked at big companies and they tried to sort of make that happen at a startup and it broke a lot of things. Whereas in the Valley people have been there, done that. So I think there are a ton of advantages to being in the Valley. The reason, you know, the question is, well then why don't you move to the Valley? Is I think in the long run, I'm very bullish in what is possible in Canada. And the reason I'm bullish is because of the culture of Canadians. You know, cultures are different. We have xKick, we have offices in Toronto, Waterloo, New York and Tel Aviv, Israel. And we see all these different cultures and cultures are real and every culture, like everything has advantages and disadvantages. And to me, the Canadian culture, the thing I love is there's this idea of let's put all the cards on the table and find the win win. And I thought that would be how most cultures would approach it. Just the most efficient way to negotiate. Let's just be open and honest and put everything on the table and try to find the best win win for everybody. And I remember seeing once this Business Insider article, how different cultures negotiate. And the Germans had one way and it was these complicated flowcharts and the Japanese and the Americans, I was like, really? That's how they do it. And Canadians, like, put all the cards on the table, find the win win, the end. And I, And so, you know, I think Canadians, they lack Confidence, they lack ambition, they undersell themselves. I think something we've realized along the way is like, nobody really has their shit together. Just some people will tell you they do and some people will be honest and tell you they don't. So I think Canadians have a lot of the right raw materials, but they haven't really gone for it yet. And I think we're starting to see it to your point, more and more unicorns, more and more momentum. You know, you sort of look around, you're like, wow, this is a pretty cool country and that's exciting.

I get kind of irritated when people say that, that Canadians don't go far enough and you know, they don't dream big enough. Like, I think between the three of us, we know a lot of Canadians that do and do want to change the world and, but end up getting limited by something else. And often that's capital. And both of you guys are kind of examples of that. I mean, you're a US based company, but you look at where your funders are, where your investors are. You didn't have Canadian boosters to get you to a billion dollars. I mean, that's not for a lack of your own personal ambition and vision and where you want to go.

I, you know, raising money often comes up with entrepreneurs early on and you know, and again, it's different. What I say now is different. But early on I think that a lot of, and maybe it's not a Canadian thing, but just entrepreneurs in general. People really obsess over the financing piece. And I think they, because they see they need financing to be able to go do what they want to do. I think a lot of that time and energy would be better focus on solving a meaningful problem. Ask yourself, am I actually solving a meaningful problem that lots of people have? And in the consumer space, it used to be a big deal if you had like 10 million users. Well, now you have to ask yourself, can you get 100 million plus users to use this consumer service to be relevant? And in the B2B space, which is more my space, it's like, can you get to 100 million in revenue in the next five years? Those are the questions you have to be asking yourself and trying to prove those things out. And it's kind of like, am I solving a real problem that a lot of people have? So that's the first thing that again, I think instead of not raising money, it's that if you focus on that. And then the second piece is, can I track the people I need to be able to do that. And again, I think entrepreneurs earlier in their history should obsess over those two things, because if you have good answers to those two things, both the media coverage, which actually matters a lot, and the fundraising becomes a lot easier if you have really good answers to those. Those sorts of things, those two first things are tractions on the first two questions. And so I think focusing on those first two questions matter a lot, especially if you're early in your history. It's different once you have traction because then you have a lot more metrics to look at, and it becomes a little bit different. But early on, those are the two things that I think get lost in the conversation that ultimately matter. If you do those two things, the capital will come. I promise it. If you can do those first two things.

Ted, did that happen with you?

I'm sitting there sort of reflecting on what you're saying, and yes, I think you're right in a lot of ways, but I don't think it's quite the whole picture.

Fair enough.

For example, in Kik and Consumer, we were solving a real problem. I looked around and I didn't like where social media was going. I felt it was more of a game. And everybody's like, hey, can you post this for me? Doing this so that I look good like this? And I'm like, why are we doing this? It's so stupid. And I just want to build a place where none of that matters. And that's what we did. And millions of people love that, use that. But there was no way to make money. And we were competing consumer against Facebook. They had a monopoly on advertising. We were sort of philosophically against advertising, practically. Facebook had a monopoly, so we couldn't do it anyways. Anything we tried to sell, Facebook would clone it and offer it for free. And so we're like, okay, well, we can't sell stuff and we can't do advertising. So we need money. We need to raise money. It's our only option. So I think it's, you know, especially in consumer, like, raising money is really important. You look at Snapchat like, those guys raised billions of dollars pre ipo, and yet they're still getting copied and crushed. And I think this is really where we step back, actually, about eight years ago, and we said, you know, I loved your line in the backstage. Don't hate the player. Change the game is like, we need to change the game. Like, this game is unwinnable. Facebook is not. It's too big to lose, and we're never going to Beat them by playing their game. And we need a new way to play. And that's when we said, hey, there might just be this new business model around this new emerging thing called bitcoin. Went to bitcoin conferences when there's only 10 people in the room back in 2011 and said, actually, you know what, launching a new economy around a new currency of which we own a piece that will never make revenue from might just work. And it took some time.

You had some investors that believed you.

It took time. It took time for. It literally took us seven years to convince ourselves and our investors that this would actually be viable. And even if it wasn't viable, there were no other options. And so that's what we're focused on now. And to me, that's what I'm excited about, is there's a fundamentally new way to make money now, which is about growing demand for a guaranteed scarce asset backed by the blockchain. Making millions, billions from that, but doing it in a way that's aligned with your users. You know, your users don't have to become the product. That's why we never wanted to do ads, even if we could, we didn't want to addict and manipulate our users. Whereas now it's saying, hey, we just need to get you to use this thing as a currency. And if we do, that will create more demand for the currency, that will make the currency more valuable, that will make our piece more valuable. And so we built that for ourselves, but we're also offering it to all the other developers out there in the world that need a new game as well.

So Cloudflare does not have a cryptocurrency I'm aware of.

No, you build a company that's not a cryptocurrency still.

That's right, yeah. So, I mean, talk to us about that, how they did it in the olden days.

Oh my goodness. Wow. Back when I was a kid, I walked uphill to school both directions. I'm just kidding. So we've raised over $180 million in venture, which on one side is a lot, but then it's also a little compared. Depends on kind of what point of view it is. I also say, oh, Cloudflare has 750 people that work at Cloudflare. And some people, like, that's huge. I'm like, it's both big and small, depending on which, which point of view you look at. So we've, we've done very traditional venture backed fundraising. Very traditional. Kind of like if there is a fundraising Playbook. We were straight down the playing field because it worked well for our business, my business, our business. We had to, we had a lot of capex costs up front because we basically build this global network. We're in 154 cities around the world, we buy a lot of hardware every year, router switches, servers on behalf of our customers so they don't have to. And that costs money. And Matthew and I and Lee who started the company, we weren't putting that on our credit cards. We were just out of school, we didn't have the money to do that. And so we needed someone to give us the capital to go do these sorts of things. And by the way, we couldn't make the Internet faster and safer, more reliable without it. And so we were a very traditional venture backed company. And over time, again, VC money works really well if you fit into a certain mold. And we fit into the mold of we had a hypothesis, someone said, hey, I'll give you a couple million dollars to go prove you can do it, but then you have to prove you can do it. And so we did and we kept making progress, we did what we said we were going to do. We had customers using it was making their apps and websites and APIs faster and safer and more reliable. And so, so we kept raising money round after round and next thing I knew people were writing us $100 million checks because they're like, wow, you're onto something. We want to back it because we want to own a piece of this because you are going to be a big company. And so I think if you fit into that model it can work very well. If you don't fit into that model then it can be hard and whatnot. And so for us it was very, we kind of fit very much into the VC backed mold and it worked well for us.

So what is the lesson then for Canadian startups? The experience that you have, you have an interesting perspective as a Canadian who is living and working in the Valley.

Yeah, it's. Well, so I think that there's so many, there's so many blogs and talks you can watch about raising money. I mean, I feel like this is a topic that lots people have written about and you should just go find it online. I mean there's just so much good content you don't. And that's what I love about the tech industry. People write what works, just go find it and then just be inspired and do it your way. It's just, it's like there's so many things out There you're. And you kind of make it up as you go along, but there's just lots of roadmaps out there to be inspired from. But I will say a couple things, and it's kind of back to what you said earlier. Ted. I remember I went to school. I grew up in Canada. I'm from Saskatchewan. I went to McGill. I was working in Toronto for a long time, and I went to business school down in the US that was my first time down there. And then I started Cloudflare right after business school. And it was when you raise money, you do have to exude quite a common confidence, and you have to have a really good story arc. And it's a little bit of. I really believe this. But saying it out loud is a little bit different in a way. It's kind of un Canadian, like, to kind of hype up what you're saying because you're like, well, it's not quite true yet. And so you have to kind of. You have to practice. But I will say, you know, for my founders, who were both American, was hard for them too. So, you know, you have to get good at telling the story early on. Storytelling matters a lot. I remember an investor said to me really early on, she's like, look, Michelle, there's two ways to raise money early. You either raise on metrics or you raise on a story. So if you don't have a product with metrics, then you have to raise on a story, or you have to go find an alternative way. And so we were good at telling the story, and then you have to get good at asking for things. And that helped. And we practiced a lot. Like, we literally would look in the mirror and practice. And I know that sounds silly, but you never hear about that. And I think it's. And then the second thing I'll say early on is just like, you go to a doctor, not all doctors are created equal. Or dentist. Take whatever physical therapist. Like, there's some that you really like, some that you don't. Whatever is your profession of choice. It's the same with a venture capital. Like, they're not all the same. You got to. It's a people, it's a relationship. So you want to find people you like. And I remember early on, we're an infrastructure company. We're really technical. And we would go talk to some people and, like, the whole conversation was spent about the problem. They. It was us trying to convince them there was a problem. And as a founder, there's nothing more frustrating than trying to Convince somebody that you're working on something that matters. Having said that, then we talked to an investor who had done a ton of cybersecurity investing, and they're like, oh, I get the problem. The first 30 seconds I go, I don't want to spend any time on the problem. I get the problem. I've done 15 investments in this space. Let's talk about what you're doing to solve it. And they wanted to hear about how what we were doing that was different. And they were trying to understand, like, do we have something here that's different, different than what's in the marketplace? And they basically wanted to write a check basically immediately. And so I think it's finding the right person kind of, if you can, makes the conversation go much easier.

So this seems like, you know, you said fitting the mold, a more of a textbook approach. And Ted, you seem like not a textbook case at all. You know, we've talked about the fact that you're a consumer app in Canada, which is very rare to see. And then you've made a lot of decisions to see stay in Canada, even though, as you acknowledge, it would be easier to potentially leave. And sometimes I say you're like an honorary mayor of Waterloo because you're such, like a hype man for the city. And what it can talk about that. Can we talk about that? Well, yeah, I mean, let's. Let's talk about that and the approach that you've taken. If it was easier, your investors, you know, Tencent in China, Union Square, out of New York. Out of New York. What was the reception like? Did you knock on any Canadian doors for money, for help, for boost?

So the question is, like, about Canadian money. I think it's going to be very hard. It's been very hard historically for Canadian funds to make great returns. And I think that will continue to be true because there's a bit of a network effect to it. It, you know, the top firms in the Valley and in New York have the best names, so they get the best companies, right? Like Twitter is looking at who they could get a term sheet from, and they can get a term sheet from anyone. So they're going to pick the best one. And then because they pick the best one, that's going to get the great return, that's going to build that firm, that's going to build their brand even more. And so I think it's, like, tough for Canadian funds to compete because it's like, go to the Valley. And if you can't get a term sheet From a valley, come talk to us. So, you know, we raised all of our money from New York and Silicon Valley and then China. And I just think the way that's the way it is now. Why do we stay in Canada? You know, we have an office in New York, we have employees in California and LA and San Francisco, we have an office in Tel Aviv, Israel. Like we're a global company. But why do we continue to keep, build, grow an office in Toronto and Waterloo and especially in Waterloo is for me, I just think there's one of the greatest secret weapons in the world in Waterloo, literally, which is the co op programs at the University of Waterloo, Laurier and Conestoga College. And you know, I, And I'm just like extremely bullish on those programs. And I think they have hit their own network effect where the best kids go to Waterloo. So the best companies come to Waterloo. So you have these kids who are like, I'm like, I'm meeting somebody and I'm like, oh, where have you worked? They're like, oh, I worked at Facebook for a while, then Google and then I went to Tesla for a bit but didn't quite like it. And now I started my own company. I'm like, how old are you? Well, I'm going to graduate in two years. And I'm like, where else in the world do you get that? And I think University of Waterloo, Laurier, Conestog College now have this network effect to their co op programs. You know, like, maybe we should rebrand Waterloo, not Silicon Valley, but like co op Valley because that is our secret weapon. And for us, some of our best employees started at co ops, just stayed and stayed and stayed. Got a few of them to drop out, had to talk to a few parents. But that's okay, it was a good choice. But I think that is the thing contrasted with Silicon Valley where the Average tenure is 18, 24 months. Less than two years, less than two years. Like, you know, they're like, everybody knows how to play the game. You want as many chips on the roulette table as possible.

So we talked about obviously the war for dollars to get to $1 billion. But you've opened up the door to the war for talent. And I was talking earlier today and I mentioned this to the CEO of Ritual, who has a, you know, kind of classic Canadian tech style story, worked at Google and then decided to come here to set up Ritual, I don't know for any flag waving purposes, but it was mainly just practical. It's like the war for talent in San Francisco is brutal and I get a better deal retention, all that stuff that you just said here. So a lot of people have talked about that. What's to say that that remains the competitive advantage with more and more tech hubs, firms starting here? I mean couldn't that same thing happen here where people start writing bigger and bigger checks for the talent and you start to see sort shorter and shorter retention and what's to say that that can't happen here and is that a problem that needs to be addressed before it occurs?

This is exactly why I'm so long. Waterloo. I think Waterloo is one of the best sources of tech, tech talent in the world. I go to Silicon Valley, I'm amazed by the number of people who are graduates of Waterloo. It's like some secret club. And so for me it's like, what's the commitment advantage of Waterloo is I'm further upstream than you. Like I can walk to the campus and you cannot if you're in Silicon Valley. And I think that's going to be a thing. It's like, hey, if this, you know, if it's all about talent and you want the best talent and get to see it before anybody else gets to see it, what do you do? You sit right outside the factory. And so that's, that's our approach.

So I, I don't, I don't have a crystal ball and if I did, I, that would be good. But I don't, but, but I'll offer a. Again, this is for the founders or the people scaling the companies. I do think I lived in Toronto for a long time and I come back often and like the last two years things have really changed here and put Waterloo. I know it's, I know they're separate cities, but I feel like there's real traction. The density has gone up really high. I think that there's really good momentum and there's companies like Shopify that are doing great and that's amazing. And I Hope there are 20 more Shopify because that's what, that's what not only just Canada, the tech, the tech industry needs like you want lots of success stories and that is a huge success story. What happens. And I think again, if Toronto really continues and Waterloo continues down this path is you're gonna have the same thing in the Bay Area. Bay Area is a great place to have a job because you have so much optionality. You have a lot of the big companies that are great to work with. You get paid well, you get equity, you get to work on interesting things. That touch billions of people a month. It's not just hundreds of millions, it's billions. That's what people want to come work there. You know, if you're into tech, it's part of Mecca. But again, if Toronto continues to have that momentum or Waterloo, you're gonna have the same thing where it's all of a sudden people are gonna want to go workplace places where they feel like they can have ownership, they can, they, they can extract value. Like they make a good living doing it and they like the people they're doing it with. And so I think Toronto hasn't had that yet. But the found the best founders of the tech of Canada are going to be able to attract talent because I think it's going to get a lot more competitive going forward for the folks who have scaled it and done it. Because you, it does matter. And you, if you're now competing for talent with another company that's scaling, you need them to come to kin, not Shopify. And you have to convince them like, don't go to Shopify, come work for us and we're gonna be the next, you know, next Shopify plus whatnot. And I think that's gonna intensify over the coming years. And the founders that can tell the story, that can assemble the team back to like, you gotta solve the problem. You have to convince people to come work on the problem with you so you can solve it for your users or your customers. That's hard. And that's not a given. And I think the companies that can do that will the ones that'll do really well here. And one thing I will say that I never hear ever discussed, which again I think is the most important thing is the tech industry is going in Canada. That's great. People have to make money off of it. And it's not just the venture capitalists. The employees have to make money off of it. And that's why people come to the Bay Area, because you can make a lot of money working in tech in the Bay Area and you need success stories like that in Toronto. Otherwise people will stop going to tech companies and that'll be a problem.

Is that, is that happening? Do you find that people are making money and sharing, sharing in the wealth of, you know, bigger and bigger valuations that Toronto Waterloo companies are able to, to garner these days.

Not like Silicon Valley companies. You know, I think the problem in consumer like enterprise is different, right? Lots of enterprise companies, great things happening. But in consumer, consumer is being monopolized by a few large tech monopolies like that's the truth. You know, Google, Amazon, Facebook, those guys are eating the world. And so for us, like Apple, yeah, Apple, Trillion dollar company. But we'll see what happens there. But anyways, they're a good company. We like that. But you know, it's easy to. For us, I totally agree with you. The more people that make money, the more that gets reinvested. That's a great thing. That's the best. But why that happens to such an amazing degree in Silicon Valley is because they have monopolies. And monopolies can pay out a bunch of money to their employees. They give it RSUs, they have unlimited money. They literally have cash machines that sit in the basement. And so they can get paid that out directly to their employees or they buy companies that pay it out indirectly to those companies in place. And so I think like what we have really come to the conclusion and playing this game for the last 10 years, getting a billion dollar valuation from Tencent, arguably one of the most, if not the most sophisticated technology companies in China, is this game is over. The consumer game. And technology as it exists today is over. Facebook has won. Even I would say Facebook and Amazon are basically competing for first and second. That's of where we're at in technology. And everybody else is sort of like you're an acquisition along the way, if you're lucky, or you go work there. And so I think this is what gets me excited about crypto broadly and crypto in Canada specifically is there is a new game coming. There is a new game coming. A game that is going to start from scratch, going to have totally different rules, totally different ways that you can have strengths and weaknesses, totally different ways to play. And so far Canada is showing that it has a knack for this. Ethereum was created in Canada. And so to me, that's the exciting thing is consumer is over. It's being, you know, we're down to like the final rounds, Amazon versus Facebook, and we're going to see who wins. I know Eric Schmidt is going to speak later, but we'll see what he says about Google. I would say it's Amazon versus Facebook, but there is a new game coming. And my advice to entrepreneurs in the room is if you want to do enterprise, go do that. It's great. But if you want to do consumer, the game is over. The game is over. Do not try to do consumer.

It's coming from the consumer guy.

It's very painful. Call me, I'll be there in the middle of the night. But the Game is over. And my advice to you, if you are an entrepreneur in Canada, is learn as much as you can about creating crypto today. And I think it's easy to look at crypto today, the big run up and the crash and look at that and say, all those idiots. I knew it. I knew that would be bad and just sit on the sidelines. But I feel like that's the early days of the Internet. Looking at this directory of links and being like, well, this is stupid. I could just look in the phone book.

So.

My advice would be a new game is coming and I would do everything I could to learn as much as I possibly learned.

I love Ted has his crystal ball that he's clearly reading from. I will just, can I just say two things? So the, the, the first I will say is in volatility. Obviously with volatile, volatile new things, there's more volatility. So it can be easier to find the angles, which, which is interesting. But there's also deep lows. So it's not easy. But I'll just say I was watching an interview last night with Ricky Martin, the artist, and he was, it's relevant, I promise. And he was doing a fireside chat and he said, hey, when I was thinking about coming out that I'm gay, he said I had so many people around me tell me not to do it because it was going to kill my career. He's like, guess what, I'm still here. So maybe, so maybe you're so confident.

So listen, I'm going to be un Canadian for a second. We were the first mobile app to go viral in 2010. Zero to a million users in 15 days. The first chat app to go on the platform, the first chat app to launch bots, and the first venture backed company to launch a cryptocurrency. So we do see the future first now and then. And I'm not sitting here. This is the Canadian. The Canadians got all the disclosures. I may be wrong.

I may be wrong.

I may be wrong. This could be wrong. That could be wrong. I'm sorry if I'm wrong. Like, listen, I can sit here and beat the Canadian, but it's coming like. And we have a track record of seeing, you know, Fred Wilson, the first guy to invest in Twitter and Foursquare and Tumblr and seeing that all these big companies, Cloudflare maybe almost early, early as well is like, you know, the best Internet.

They're great Internet investors.

At Kik, you guys have the ability to see the future before anyone. And I Think this is why Tencent invested $50 million at a billion dollar valuation. I sit here as a Canadian, I'm so uncomfortable saying all this. Yeah. But I only say it because I believe it. And I think there is an opportunity for everybody in the crowd.

That's why I said, yes, you, you have. And you. You've shown a history of being able to do things, especially in consumer before Facebook does or other social media apps. But then they do it as well and they monetize and. And they have a higher valuation than you do.

Let's talk about that.

What happened there?

You cue that up for me. I was hoping you would Asset. Listen, every time we do something, we have been copied by Facebook. Every time, you know, we launched chat app that copy everything. We launched the first chat app in the world to be on the platform in 2011. They copied it pixel for pixel. I should show you all the screens. You'd be like, yeah, I don't know who's who, except one's blue. So that must be basic. We were the first one to launch a bot platform. This is why Tencent invested. And now we're the first one to launch a cryptocurrency. We have been copied and crushed over, over and over again by Facebook. They don't even pretend anymore that they're not doing it. In fact, when they copied Snapchat stories like, so what'd you do here? They're like, we copied it. They're like, you can't say that. Like, yeah, of course we can say that. We just copied it. So they copied us over and over and over again. And it is impossible to defend against an attack from Facebook. We are seeing this experiment play out at the highest level with billions of dollars involved with Snapchat. And Snapchat, with billions of dollars raised and thousands of employees is losing. They lost users last quarter. So why am I especially excited about crypto? Because once again, they will copy us. They will copy us. They will. David Marcus, head of Facebook messenger, is now on the blockchain team. What's he doing? He's copying. Get that copy machine going. This seems like a good idea, But there is something, something interesting this time around, which I think they're going to be surprised by, which is this time developers will be able to come together and compete as one.

Oh, you're banding people together. That's powerful.

There's a reason we picked the name Kin, right? Of course. Kin, family. Why? Why did we pick it? Why is it so exciting to us? Because every time in the past with family, Facebook has copied us. We defend alone. They copy us. With messenger, we defend alone. They copy Snapchat stories, they defend alone. I go, evan, I'd love to be able to help you, but I'll just give you a hug. You want to cry, my shoulder, give me a call, but I can't do anything else. Whereas with a cryptocurrency, the cryptocurrency that win is going to be the one that's used by the most number of people. And the path to get a cryptocurrency adopted is not through the physical world that runs on dollars already, but it's to focus on the digital world where you effectively have all these quasi countries where millions of people show up every day.

So part of our success is use the same thing. We basically band together all Internet properties to have more resources than the bad attacker, bad actors online. So part of our value proposition is performance security. And it's by banding everyone together, you have more resources than the bad actors. And for the first time, you don't have to act by yourself. It's very powerful.

So for you, it's Russia, and for us, it's Facebook, but both bad actors.

I'm trying to remember what we were talking about. I think we've deviated, but a real fascinating conversation. So let's see if I can just walk us back to our original point of being building a billion dollar company. So that was a pivot. That was a pivot. You had taken the money from Tencent and then you made this pivot. I'm trying to weave cryptocurrencies back here. It's so hard. I can't do it. So we'll just end with you have these VCs that have backed you, that have taken you to a billion dollars, and you make some change, you make. Make some pivot. Have you had to do that on your path? And do the stakes get higher when. When you're at this valuation point?

I wish I had this big story right. Why we pivoted because we had someone copying us every turn. No, if you go back to original business plan, cloudflare is a service that makes Internet property speeds up Internet properties, protects them from online like cyber attacks and malicious bots, and makes. Makes the Internet more reliable, which is exactly what we do today. And so there you go. There's lots of ways to be successful, lots of different ways to be successful. Pick your own path. There's lots of different ways.

All right, I'll give the last word there to Michelle. Thank you. So much everyone for your attention.