Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince at Startup School SV 2014

TL;DR

Cloudflare founders Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince recount five years of building the company: from embarrassing early product launches that took all ten initial sites offline, to growing to 2M customers and 120 employees.

Key insights

• The founders focus on “mosquitoes” (small daily problems like hiring and customer feedback) rather than “sharks” (big dramatic threats), because mosquitoes kill far more people in practice.
• The first version of Cloudflare’s product was so poor that it took all ten test websites offline; they fixed it, re-onboarded them, and took them offline again. 90% of those original customers are sti
• To get initial servers, the team emailed ~200 people from an open-source community (Project Honeycomb) within 50 miles of Palo Alto, got a 70% response rate, and Michelle physically drove around in he