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    CloudFlare Makes The Web Faster, Safer

    By Peter Cohan | Forbes – Mon, Jul 18, 2011

    If you have a web site two of your biggest problems are that it's too slow and it's too vulnerable to attacks from computer geeks with ill intent. Attacks against web sites including PBS, CIA, Sony and Nintendo, have made web site owners cringe at the thought of knowing they’re never safe. Wouldn't it be nice if there was an inexpensive way to solve those twin problems?

    If you use CloudFlare then you know that the answer is yes. CloudFlare "makes sites twice as fast, protects them from attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click," according to my July 11 interview with its co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince and its co-founder & user experience, Michelle Zatlyn. And CloudFlare is big -- Prince claims that 10% of the Internet passes through its network.

    CloudFlare offers a big benefit to customers compared to competitive products -- it requires no hardware or downloaded software to do its job. Not only that, but most users pay nothing for the service. However, CloudFlare does offer tiers of service that involve extra features for which it charges monthly subscription fees starting at $20 per month. 

    CloudFlare's founding team consists of three impressive individuals:

    • Prince has a degree in English from Trinity College, a JD from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Harvard Business School (HBS) from which he graduated in the top 5% of his class as a Baker Scholar. HBS also awarded him the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship

    • Lee Holloway, Co-founder & lead engineer. Holloway is CloudFlare's lead software engineer. Hs has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Santa Cruz and specializes in building big databases that need to be available all the time including RegistryCompliance.com, Michigan’s Children’s Protection Registry and Walmart.com.

    • Zatlyn is in charge of assuring that customers enjoy using CloudFlare's products.  She earned a Chemistry degree from McGill; worked at Google (GOOG)  and Toshiba, launched two successful startups and got her MBA from HBS where she was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. 

    Each of the co-founders had different reasons for starting CloudFlare. Prince was passionate about making the web faster and safer; Zatlyn saw a big market opportunity; and Holloway thought the technical challenge was intellectually interesting.

    The concept of CloudFlare started in January 2009 as an entrant to the HBS Business Plan competition as Project Webwall. After making it into the second round, Prince and Zatlyn decided to build a prototype in a week -- and approached Holloway for help. The team won the competition.

    CloudFlare launched publicly in September 2009 and two months later raised $2 million in Series A funding from Ray Rothrock at Venrock Capital. In November 2010, CloudFlare raised another $20 million from New Enterprise Associates, Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.

    Early in CloudFlare's development, they interviewed web site owners to understand their unmet needs. Specifically, they sent out 500 surveys and got responses from 25% of them. They learned that the challenge of securing their site was "a huge pain point," according  to my Zatlyn. As one customer told her, "Web spamming make me believe in the death penalty."

    Originally CloudFlare offered "a firewall in the sky" but the technology it created to implement that concept also ended up making websites "twice as fast." And Prince referred to these two features as "a killer combination."

    CloudFlare just hired its 22nd employee and is "growing like crazy." The site is "20 times" as big as it was nine months ago and now gets "eight billion monthly page views." It hires engineers with personality, according to Zatlyn, and wants them to share its mission of "powering a faster, safer Internet."

    To hire, CloudFlare evaluates their answers to questions that demonstrate their ability to think creatively and get things done. Those questions include:

    • What have you done in open source software?

    • What are two things you've started and finished in the last month?

    • If you were asked to develop a Content Delivery Network from scratch, how would you do it?

    If CloudFlare can hire enough good people to keep up with demand, the Internet will be faster and safer. And CloudFlare's investors will be amply rewarded for their capital.

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