Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare: Protect the Steady State, Disrupt What’s Next

Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions

Cloudflare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn discusses her journey of leading a massive tech company despite having no initial engineering backgrou

Key takeaways

• Non-technical founders can succeed by adopting a 'beginner's mindset' and leveraging a high rate of learning to bridge expertise gaps.
• Cloudflare's early success was driven by identifying visceral, qualitative customer pain points regarding cybersecurity threats.

Main topics

• Non-technical leadership
• Scaling hypergrowth companies

Notable quotes

No founder has all the skills necessary to start and build a company.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a masterclass in resilient leadership, proving t

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) On Founders Mentality, the CEO sessions, we get to speak with some incredible leaders, and now we'd love to hear from you. We've created a short listener survey at podpolls.com slash founder. It only takes a few minutes to fill out, and what you share will directly shape where we go next. Now back to the show. Speaker 2 (0:20) I remember people saying many times in our San Francisco office, wow, it's so refreshing that you and Matthew still show up for work. Speaker 4 (0:27) When did showing up become optional? Speaker 4 (0:35) I'm Jimmy Allen, and this is Founders Mentality, the CEO Session. Speaker 4 (0:42) Michelle Zatlin co-founded CloudFare in 2009 with her business school classmates, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway. Today, CloudFare operates in 125 countries and protects 20 % of the world's internet traffic. Of the three founders, Michelle was the one without an engineering background, which is what I thought this conversation was going to be about. Speaker 4 (1:08) I would love to start with just the very simple decision to be a co-founder of CloudFlare and what that was like as a non-tech person to be part of the starting of a tech company. I Speaker 2 (1:22) had two great co-founders, Matthew and Lee, and we were really excited about what we were working on. And while I wasn't an expert and it wasn't like a clear slam dunk, sometimes people start companies in something that they worked in before or knew a ton about. And that's great. Like those are assets. And actually, a lot of people who start companies also do it as an outsider. And that's actually also a great offset because as long as you have a high rate of learning, you get to question everything. Almost kind of like from a beginner's mindset of saying, hey, I'm not already an expert. I don't have a point of view on this. Let me go and run this down. Of course, I was like, do I even have the skill set to do this? And all these different things. But I think as I look back... Thank God I didn't listen to any of those doubts because the reality is like, no, of course I didn't have all the perfect skill set. But you know what? No founder does. And it's putting yourself in the situation, having to make decisions, having to learn from those decisions and how fast you can learn and then make another good decision actually is what makes you a great leader or founder. It's not what you go to the table with. Speaker 4 (2:28) You started with an insight that very few single founders start, which is no founder has all the skills necessary to start and build a company. It's always a founding team. And most discover that only after a couple of crashes and burns. It feels like that's the one insight you guys did have, that we have complementary skills and we'll somehow figure it out. Speaker 2 (2:50) I think starting a company is hard. And actually, like the stats are most companies fail. And it's hard to actually solve a problem that's meaningful. It sounds so easy and trite, but actually it's hard to solve. Go find a problem that a customer needs solving that actually you need to do more than once to build a business around it. And so early on, before Cloudflare... When I was born, Matthew and Lee had another initiative called Project Honeypot. This was a community that cared a lot about cybersecurity, and so we were surveying them to understand more about the problem set. When I got some survey results back, market research back from this group, and it was kind of like, tell me... your pain point around cyber threats online. And again, this was back in 2009. It was a very different world than it is today. Some of the qualitative answers were the best part, Jimmy. It was things like cyber threats are the scourge of the internet. They're criminals and they steal resources. Like it was a very visceral response from this potential customer, kind of our ideal customer. There was other ones like cyber criminals make me Speaker 1 (3:49) believe in the death penalty. Speaker 2 (3:51) These were not casual answers. They were written in a way that when you read them, they kind of jumped off the page. And so it was clear there was a real problem here. Speaker 2 (4:03) And when we were starting, like any eager founder would, I was reading a ton. I read, just like anything, you're going to start something in an area you're not an expert. You're trying to read a ton. And I was reading books about founding and it was interesting. I remember this one book I was reading it at night. And I remember the sentence, 95 % of startups fail. And I like took the book and I threw it off my bed and I was like. Why am I doing this? So I was like, okay, we can't be one of those 95%. Like, I'm not going to like, I don't want to like throw away this opportunity. And so then we became like so obsessed of, are we actually solving a problem that people care about, that our customer cares about? Speaker 4 (4:38) What was that like as a non-tech person starting a tech company? The phrase keeps coming up to me, which is kind of customer-led tech, which is that it's just not true you're a tech company. You're a customer company that serves tech and that you feel like you have a good feel for customer. Is Speaker 2 (4:57) that fair? Is that a focus? It was interesting that early on, it wasn't data that actually was important to us. It was actually some of the qualitative feedback we got from our early customers that we, you know, were doing Skype calls with every time someone signed up. And after the fact of saying, because of Cloudflare, this is the first time in five years I've slept through the night. Honestly, it was like those were the things is what we recruited on, we raised money on because they were so emotional. And I think that if you can solve a real problem, a pain point for a company or a customer, there is like no bigger responsibility. And it just feels incredibly empowering. You're like, we built something that actually solves a problem and delivers real value to somebody. Then you're on to something. And that seems so obvious, but some people start companies that actually don't solve real problems. Or they solve something that 10 other companies already solve. And you're like, okay, but do we need an 11th solution in the market? And maybe we do. Maybe it's better. But like, are you sure? And how do you know when you have to hold yourself to a high test? Even to this day, I love spending time with our customers. Our whole executive team loves spending time with our customers. Because when you talk to the customers... all of a sudden it's very clear what the priorities should be. And in every single growth company, there is more to do than time and people to do it. And so getting the order of priorities right is really important. And one way to do that is by talking to customers. Speaker 4 (6:22) And the issue of listening to customers, I mean, is that been, you know, something that you've been able to provide is kind of get into the tech conversations and say, look, I can at least put the priorities down as our customers see them. Speaker 2 (6:35) Well, you know, it's interesting. I'm just listening to your reflection. I started a company in an area that I was not an expert in. I was technical in a different sort of way, but I wasn't technical in this space. And so there was a lot of learning. I was drinking from a fire hose when we started Cloudflare. And the reality is today I am an expert. And it's because I've showed up every single day and I've learned a ton. Speaker 4 (7:01) Guys, I need to make a myocopa here. I walked into this conversation with