 Why? On the ground from Galvanize, San Francisco. It's theCUBE covering Amplify Women's Pitch Night. Now, here's John Furrier. Okay, hello everyone. We are on the ground here in San Francisco at the Galvanize Incubator. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE Media. It's theCUBE on the ground and we're here with Michelle Zatlin, who's the co-founder of Cloudflare and also head of user experience, giving a fireside chat here at the Girls in Tech Amplify event about women in entrepreneurship. Co-founder, entrepreneur yourself. Welcome to our on the ground. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, John. So, honestly, we love the women in tech. We just spent an amazing time at Grace Hopper, which 16,000 people, I was one of 1,000 men. So, I felt, I loved it actually. So, I love any women in tech. But here, more importantly, in the Bay Area, we're in San Francisco, Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurship is in the blood. Yes, yeah, no, we're so lucky where we live. I feel like so many people, when you spend time in the valley, you realize everyone's talking about the next great idea. You go to a party, everyone's talking about what they're working on or an idea they have. So, we're like that everywhere. And so, we're really lucky where we get to live and have the resources to be able to execute on these different, sometimes crazy ideas. So, you're giving a fireside chat. You just came off the stage here with all those women entrepreneurs that pitched tonight tonight. So, it's all about getting the pitch out there. Talking about your experience. Obviously, Cloudflare, your company, you co-founded and head of user experience. You're doing a great job, great success. You guys are great customer base, great growth. What did you talk about? Well, what did I talk about? So, we launched at an event like that six years ago. And so, what I talked about with the audience was, I was in your seat six years ago. And now, six years later, we have a great business. We have real customers that are using Cloudflare. We help make the internet faster, safer, better, for more than four million internet properties. 15,000 new sites sign up every single day, whether you're a small business or a large business, a blog, an API, an app. You can use Cloudflare to be fast and safe. And what I shared was, I was in your seat six years ago, and here are some lessons or ah-has I've had along the way that I wish I had known. How did you guys get started? Take a minute to explain the story. You guys rubbin' nickels together. Did you have the master idea? Was it heavily funded in the front end? Take us through the journey at the beginning. So, we started to work on this idea of if you are a small business or somebody with content online, how can you be as fast and safe as somebody like at Google.com? Google.com is the fastest and most secure internet property on the internet. How can you make that available to anybody with an internet property? And there are over 350 million. And we said, feels like there's an opportunity. And that's how we started. And so we started with, could we execute on this? And we started to make progress. We were students when we started. And- So that helps in the overhead. It did help us in the overhead. And whether you're a student or whether you're doing it as part of Y Combinator or Moonlighting or Project. There's lots of different ways that people do, but we were students. It's a great time to start working on a business idea because you write your overheads very low. And when we graduated, we felt so much passion around the idea. We moved out to California to give it a go full time. And when I think back now, I think, what was I thinking? I mean, it was just- Was it blind faith? Just let's go out there. It wasn't blind faith. We had done some initial validation, but we didn't have a working product. And so it was early and we came out here to build it. But we believed so strongly in it that we wanted to give it a go. We kind of said, feels like we're onto something. You felt it. And I felt like that. And so I moved. We packed our things in a U-Haul. We were living in Boston, my co-founder and I. We packed our things in a U-Haul. Him and his mother drove the U-Haul from Boston to San Francisco. That's a good mom. A very good mom. She gets the mom award. Yes, mom award. And we showed up and for the next year and a half, working really hard. Did mom become a user? Because the mom test is always key for products, validation. Especially ahead of user experience. Right, exactly. She is not, but we have a lot of small businesses, bloggers, large businesses, a lot of different types of customers, nonprofits that now use Cloudflare to be fast, safe and available around the world. But it was really this conviction around, we felt like we could democratize the web. We felt like if you were a business with something to say, we wanted to give you the same resources as Google's technical operations team. You know, one of the things I'm observing, I've been out here now 18 years. I moved from Boston as well in 1999. And when I sold my company out here, it's like, okay, I have to be here. It's so much different, different culture and picked up and moved, right? So what's your advice now? Because now the world's different. There's so much more entrepreneurship because the democratization of, obviously mobile and cloud, have really created a low bar to get into the game. And so you're seeing a lot more diversity, certainly. Not enough, but a lot more. What's your advice to folks? Even my youngest daughter who's a sophomore in college, they're talking, Dad, I got an app. I'm going to do this app. I'm like, okay, hold down, settle down. What's your advice? Because this is now kind of breathing and people are trying to find out when do they know the gut is the gut feeling? Do you trust your gut? What is that feeling? It's like falling in love for the first time. You don't, you really know it, so you do it. What's your stance, one of those things? Well, one thing I've learned is don't keep relationship advice. So, you know, I, you know the, so I guess the same kind of goes up to the entrepreneurs. But there are a couple of things that I've learned. You know, again, we started CloudFlash six years ago and things are going very well. We're really proud. I get up every day and I think, wow, I'm so proud of the work we're doing. And so, you know, I think it's, I love the idea that people are dabbling and that it is much easier to pursue these ideas. And I think that's amazing. And we should, we should, you know, hold on to that dearly. But doing things as a side project versus full time are two different things, right? And so the questions that entrepreneurs or some founding teams, good questions, litman tests that they can ask themselves are, do I believe so passionately about this idea that I want to commit the next eight to 10 years to it? Cause that's how long it is. It's eight to 10 years. This is not, it doesn't take a one, it doesn't take two years. It is average time to exit. If you take all the startups, it's eight to 10 years. And so it's like, do I want to work on this for the next eight to 10 years? And when we started Cloudflare six years ago, you know, we would go around and say, hey, we want to help make there's another better place. And people would laugh at us. They said, that's an undacious goal. Why you never. But we just felt- I love that. That means you're out of something. Exactly. Your contrarians are the ones who do it. I mean, I remember Newtonix, D-Rosh, I remember he just went public. He was laughed at, Lightspeed funded him. And look at it. No one got that until four years in. Like, whoa, he thought differently. So trust your gut and you got to have a belief. Well, it's just this idea of like, do I want to do this? Like, is there something big here that I want to work? Is this like a media enough problem and idea that I want to work on it for the next eight to 10 years? And if the answer is yes, then it's a great, then yes, you should keep doing it. And then the second thing is, can I attract all the right people to make it happen? Talk about the team dynamic. Cause I know, you know, I've done a bunch of adventures myself and I was, again, I agree with you. I do give relationship advisors, but that's me. I always say, be careful in the team. You can't dial a team. You can't like, just dial up and say, I need a co-founder or I need this person. It really is a unique selection process. Your thoughts on that, because it also depends in the dynamic funding cycle, if you're self-funding, or you're bootstrapping to revenue, certainly if you're a contrarian, no one's going to get funding. Maybe some seed will come your way, but that won't last long. So the team really is going to be the maker break. Your thoughts on team selection, team process. The most important thing I do every day is the team we work with. Can you attract the right people to come work at Cloudflare? Can you set them up for success so they can do their best work? And I spend 99% of my time thinking about that and it's never enough. In the early days, when you guys were moving out here, did you have funding? When we moved out here, we didn't. We didn't. So we didn't have funding when we moved out here. There's three co-founders working on it, making progress, and then it became fair. Did you make revenue first or get funding seed funding? So we worked on it. We kind of felt like we had a lot of conviction. There's a small team, the three of us. We ended up raising money and then we hired folks and then we built the product. So we definitely had funding before revenue, but the founders worked on it before anyone else because we just couldn't. And who were the investors? Venroc, Peleon, NEA, Union Square Ventures out of New York, and then some stuff was to be done. They had a good sizeable and tier one VC to NEA. Certainly great VC. Yeah, we have great investors. Great history. Yes, we have excellent. I'm very biased, but yes, we have great investors. Fred's contrarian, which is good. The contrarians usually get the big heads. Well, the Union Square Ventures out of New York, they really understand how the internet works. I mean, that's our whole thesis. And I mean, they're a very technical venture capitalist one. I mean, Fred, Brad, Albert, I mean, Andy, they all really understand how the internet works. And when you're building a company like Clawfler where we're helping make the internet a better place, that's very useful that they understand how the internet works. So I got to ask you, we've got a minute left. I want to get the women perspective because I was just talking at World of Watson, certainly in a cube con with some of the red hat folks and talking about diversity. And I said, look at 50% of the population is women. Those are the users now. So like, why are male going to be developing the product? We need to have a perspective. So we're on this whole mansplaining thing. And I'm like, well, mansplaining is also software too. If men are developing the software. So there is an aspect of user experience that has to take into account the target audience. I mean, the easy answer is get more women to design product. But how do you think about that? And what's your thoughts on the current state of the... So there are more men than women in technology. Absolutely. There are a lot of women and it's not like I know every single one of them. There are a lot of us and they're working on so many interesting, there are so many amazing women working on interesting problems in tech and I think that's great. And so showing more of those stories to inspire the next generation of women is awesome. I think that there are a lot of women who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their career or might making a career switch. If you're at all interest in technology, it's a great industry. You get to work on very hard problems at scale. People are very smart and talented. It's a growing industry, which means financially, there's often like a good outcome. And so I hope that more women will get into the industry. And the surface area of opportunities are expanding too. Big data has attracted a whole other realm of visualization, where are the geeky data geek artists? Where are, not just software anymore, it's an increased surface area. Health tech, how do you do, I mean, there's so many different, I mean, technology touches so many different facets of our lives. So for folks who are like, well, I don't know anything about it, but I'm kind of interested and encourage, again, women and men to say, this is a great industry that you should really take seriously and we need more and more smart, passionate people who are really willing to roll up their sleeves and work hard to come and execute because there's so much opportunity ahead that there's more opportunity ahead of us than behind us. And so it's a great industry to pursue. Michelle, final question. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? The coolest thing I'm working on right now. Well, they're part of my job as people, so I get to hire lots of great folks all the time. So that's what I love the most. And so it's hiring, recruiting, building out the different teams, both here in San Francisco as well as around the world. We have a London office, a Singapore office. That's what I love the best. So that's the coolest thing, always people, people, people. The second coolest is we're thinking about our 2017 plan. We're at the end of 2016. It's what's the product roadmap look like for next year? What is that? How does the budget stack up against that? And I think that's pretty opportunity because I think we've done a very good job as a business executing to date. But as you go through that exercise of saying, hey, what does 2017 look like? And having to write it down, you realize we have so many things left to do ahead of us. And I think that's a good place to be in. Final, final question, since I always get these questions, after my final question, which is becoming part of the course with great guests like yourself. What is your advice for folks out there, whether it's small, medium-sized business or enterprise, to a large-scale enterprise customer who says, you know what, we are on this digital transformation. We are going to be cloud-native. We're implementing more DevOps. Our developers now on the front lines of the business value, how should they be thinking about how to craft their apps, their experiences and their teams? So we work with a lot of large organizations who are saying, hey, how do we make sure we have all our security aligned? Or how do we make sure we have a global audience? How do we make sure it's fast around the world? And these are hard problems that they have to deal with. And I would say that large organizations respond in two ways. And I think some of them that are very, very good. This is a lesson that I think other large organizations don't necessarily, no one's telling them is, we have the days of setting up RFPs or kind of, don't do that. Don't set up an RFP, what is it? We're not agile. Right, well, in RFPs they serve a purpose, it's fine, but what's better? We have a lot of large organizations that say, here are the problems we need to solve. We think that your team is smarter, technical or we'd like to get to know your team. Could you help us solve these problems and how? And it becomes a much more collaborative process. And you basically, large organizations get the power of our engineering team to help solve their problems, to help educate their engineering team of a ways to approach it. And the really smart, large organizations are doing that. And so it's not an RFP, it's saying, hey, these are the problems. They come to companies like Clawfler or others saying, hey, you guys seem like you're gonna be around for a while. How, could you help us solve these problems? And the good companies will say, well, we can help you with these, we can't help you with those. Go talk to these people for those. The lock in one year licenses are like, eh, you need to be budgeting differently. Right, and it might not even be, you know, necessarily Caleb's on the contrary, it's more like, have a conversation and you start to develop a relationship. Okay, now we're ready to buy and you know each other. And again, it's a partnership. It's a partnership. And some large organizations approach kind of the digital transformation that way. And I feel like that's a very smart way, versus oh, this is our problem, here's the list of companies we're gonna ask solutions to and get you to bid on it, which is fine once you know what the problem is. But there's a whole step before during these digital transformations if you're a large business of, I don't even know how to characterize the exact problems I'm solving. And the great organizations are saying, let's go get some of this tech talent from these small organizations to help us think through how to solve it. And do work a lot and you work together. Hold hands across the bridge to the future. And so that's something where I think that that can be a great leverage point. Michelle Zadlin, co-founder of Cloudflare, congratulations on your success. Go get Cloudflare, great product. We're going to do that, I've been convinced to do. We should be using it at siliconagle.com and theCUBE. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you John. I'm John Furrier, here on the ground at Galvanize in San Francisco for the girls in tech startup pitch competition. We'll be right back with more. Thanks for watching.