When Michelle Zatlyn launched her new infrastructure company, CloudFlare, at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, she and her partner were confident they'd win the startup competition. But they didn't win. The problem: judges had a hard time understanding what the startup did.
But in hindsight, Zatlyn has no regrets about that experience – or about her early inability to tell CloudFlare's story. In fact, she wears it like a merit badge.
"When you start a company it should be really hard to explain what you do," she says today. "If it's not, you probably don't have a big enough idea."
Today there's no question about the grandeur of the idea. CloudFlare helps more than 10,000 websites load faster, stay online and stay secure by routing their traffic through its own servers, housed in more than 100 data centers around the world. It has raised over $180 million and is valued at over $3 billion.
Six years to the day after CloudFlare's debut, Zatlyn, now its Head of User Experience, appeared at the 2016 DLA Piper Global Technology Summit to share what she's learned in building something to which every Silicon Valley entrepreneur aspires: a startup that hit a billion-dollar valuation in under five years.
Onstage with Pando Daily Editor-in-Chief Sarah Lacy during the Summit's Garage2Global program, Zatlyn said CloudFlare has refined its story over the years, bringing it more in line with the founders' core beliefs. Their mission, she said, is to make the internet a better place.
"We democratize services that have only been available to the giants of technology," she said. That means providing those same services to sites of every size, from small businesses to individual bloggers. "If you have a domain name, we'll help you load faster."
Sticking to her guns
That democratic approach has attracted controversy to CloudFlare. The company offers its services to any website with a legal right to operate, which can include some unsavory characters. Most famously, CloudFlare came under fire in Turkey for helping escort services stay online. At Garage2Global, Zatlyn not only reiterated CloudFlare's refusal to act as an arbiter of what should be on the internet – "Nobody wants a technology company deciding who should or shouldn't be online," she said – but also told a story about the value of working for even the most controversial customers.
The Turkish escort sites had been the targets of multiple aggressive hacker attacks. Because CloudFlare's technology detects patterns and uses that learning to improve its systems, it was able to defend against those attacks. Later, the website of Eurovision, the massively popular televised singing contest, came under attack because one of the show's finalists was gay. CloudFlare came to the rescue, keeping the site from crashing based on what it had learned from the Turkish hackers – who, it turned out, were the same group attacking Eurovision.
"If she can do it, so can I"
As CloudFlare's profile grew along with its size and valuation, Zatlyn inevitably began to hear questions about her experiences as a rare female founder of a startup worth north of $1 billion. Initially her instinct was to demure, choosing to steer clear of conversations around how Silicon Valley treats women. She didn't like the idea of a label where the word woman qualified the word entrepreneur. But then something changed. A visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View opened Zatlyn's eyes to the importance of preserving history – and of providing a model for future women technologists.
"I want the next generation to say ‘if she can do it, so can I,'" she said. "I realized that being part of a conversation is very different from being labeled."
Zatlyn sees a bright future for women in technology. As more doors open, she hopes more women will gravitate toward the field. "The salaries are high and there are generally really good benefits for women," she said. "And it's just fun."
For those seeking to follow in her footsteps, Zatlyn drew on her experience to offer a bit of unconventional advice. She knew nothing about internet infrastructure when her partner, Matthew Prince, recruited her to CloudFlare, Zatlyn recalled. But the two of them complemented each other's skill sets and she saw a big opportunity. So she lept.
"I see it differently than ‘do what you love,'" she said. "I think it should be ‘do something you can grow to love.'"