Michelle Zatlyn: Scaling Cloudflare to a $70B giant and building a better Internet

**Sid Trivedi** (0:04)
Welcome to Inside the Network, I'm Sid Trivedi.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:09)
I am Ross Khalidud.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:10)
And I am Mahendra Ram Singhani. We have spent decades building, investing and researching cyber security companies.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:19)
On this podcast, we invite you to join us Inside the Network, where we bring the best founders, operators and investors, building the future of cyber.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:31)
We will talk about the hard parts of the founder journey. Launching companies, getting to product market fit, raising capital, and scaling to an exit.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:42)
And yes, we will also be talking about epic failures.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:46)
But Mahendra, we're here to make the founder journey easier.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:50)
That is correct, Sid. But we cannot make it too much easier, because startups are hard. And of course, you already knew that.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:57)
All right, you too. And now, let's get started with this week's episode.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (1:06)
Our guest today is Michelle Zatlyn, president and co-founder of Cloudflare, a global internet security powerhouse boasting a market cap of $60 billion.
While getting an MBA from Harvard, Michelle teamed up with Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway to launch Cloudflare. The three of them had an audacious vision. How can we build a better internet? One that would keep the bad guys out. Today, as the company enters its 16th year of operations, it serves over 5 million customers globally and generates $1.7 billion in annual revenues. Building Cloudflare and leading its go-to-market is not the only thing that keeps Michelle busy. She's a board member at Atlassian, a fierce advocate for women in tech. She's been named a young global leader by the World Economic Forum, and Forbes recognized her as one of the 50 self-made women. In our conversation today, Michelle talks about the importance of grit and how it has helped her to build such an iconic company. More importantly, she talks about the art of accruing trust with her co-founders. Despite many differences across 16 years, they are still together, working hard, having fun, and their vision is still the same. How can we build a better Internet? Now, as we tackle AI's opportunities and challenges, Michelle shares some novel ways about how Cloudflare is on the forefront of innovations. After all, Michelle has not just read Clayton Christensen's all-time great book. She actually took a class with the professor himself during her days at Harvard. This is a company that will never suffer from the innovators' dilemma. And Michelle will tell you why. Let's get started.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:14)
Michelle, welcome to Inside the Network.

**Michelle Zatlyn** (3:16)
Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:19)
Well, we want to talk about a whole bunch of things, and Cloudflare will absolutely be in that conversation. But before we get into Cloudflare and the amazing journey you've had, we want to start by talking about your early influences and how you even got into becoming a founder. You grew up in a very small town, Saskatchewan in Canada, and hopefully I pronounced that correctly. How did that early environment and upbringing in a rural town really shape who you are as a leader today? And did any of those early years influence your drive to eventually start a tech company?

**Michelle Zatlyn** (3:53)
Yes, yeah, no, thank you. Yes, I grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada. It's a province, and it's a pretty small province, but a million people across the entire province. And the city I grew up in was about 30,000 people. And so you don't find that many tech entrepreneurs coming out of out of where I grew up. But that's OK. That's OK. And I think where you grow up definitely shapes who you are as a person. And so as I reflect back as my journey as a founder and kind of the connections to my upbringing, I definitely see strong connections to the power of community and the power of hard work. Saskatchewan is a farming community and our agricultural community. It's very cold in the winters. And so this idea of really had to work hard there, both in the physical sense of having farmland and just doing a lot of things for yourself, but also the power of community. And I think that's actually been amazing lessons as a founder, where today founders have to be able to work hard. Sometimes that's maybe the only thing that differentiates you. And so this idea of hard work never scared me of that grit, which I love that word.
But then how important people are and relationships are. And so I actually think it wasn't obvious in the moment, but looking back, I actually think Saskatchewan was a great test bed for being an entrepreneur.