Michelle Zatlyn – Protecting the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.11]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses.
I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:45)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:09)
My guest today is Michelle Zatlyn. Michelle is the co-founder and COO of Cloudflare, a now $25 billion business which she helped take public last year.
Cloudflare helps businesses make their websites faster and more secure, and over 25 million websites are running Cloudflare today. In our conversation, we discussed the catalyst for starting Cloudflare, explore the layers of the internet and the future of distributed storage and computing power, and discuss how and why Cloudflare operates its network across 200 cities globally.
We close with the importance of finding and working with great co-founders as partners as you build a business. I hope you enjoy our conversation. So Michelle, I would love to begin by setting some context around Cloudflare and its history. And I thought a neat place to begin would be with you describing Project Honeypot. What was Project Honeypot and how did it start?

**Michelle Zatlyn** (3:01)
Project Honeypot was co-created by two of my co-founders, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway.
And Project Honeypot is a community-based project where any website owner can go to projecthoneypot.org and get a piece of code and it basically stolen on their site and it becomes a virtual honeypot. And what that honeypot does, it looks for bots or people trying to do malicious things online and catch them in the act and sends all that data back to Project Honeypot to kind of become a petri dish of information around who's doing bad things online and why.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:36)
When you first started it, what question were you trying to answer?

**Michelle Zatlyn** (3:39)
It's actually a cool story was where does spam come from? And the whole point actually, I'll just tell a little, I know that was not the question, but I want to give a little bit more context. This is the story. So before Paul Graham did Y Combinator, he ran an anti-spam conference out of MIT. This is back in 2003 and 2004 There's probably some listeners who maybe have been there before.
And Matthew was invited to come give a talk and he gave a talk and he won the best speech of the conference award. And he had this can of spam. He actually for a long time had the can of spam. And so he was invited back to come back and give a second talk this next year. And of course, the stakes are high. He has to compete for best speaker award again. And he was like, well, I can't give the same talk.