Grit

#117 Co-founder & COO Cloudflare, Michelle Zatlyn: A Better Internet

Dec 19, 2022

01:16:39

“Think about the pandemic without the internet,” says Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn. The world’s sudden shift to doing almost everything online only worked because network engineers, IT administrators, and internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare had done the work. Michelle says that, both personally and professionally, she’s fine being under the radar because she doesn’t need to be publicly reminded of the importance of her job: “It's like all the roads, the tunnels, the bridges ... when it works, it's magic. Really, you don't even know we exist.”

In this episode, Michelle and Joubin discuss the pressure of success, advice for founders, low-drama startups, the power of the Cloudflare blog, internet security, the cross-country U-Haul trip, sweating the details, San Francisco as a “power center,” helping the next generation of founders, “the airplane effect,” injecting tension, why learning is a superpower, and choosing to feel the bumps in the road.

In this episode, we cover:

Carrying the torch for women in infrastructure and “just getting started” (01:15)
Being under the radar and the over-glamorization of founders (07:19)
Why it’s so hard to hire & empower a great team (15:35)
How Cloudflare is building a better internet (22:08)
How Michelle, Matthew Prince, and Lee Holloway met and why they started Cloudflare (28:23)
“Losing” at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield — and turning it into a win (34:10)
Building remote vs. choosing to be in the SF Bay Area (40:54)
“I don’t understand why anyone starts companies” (46:28)
How to run the best board meeting ever (55:31)
Why Michelle brought her kids to the New York Stock Exchange for “Mom’s Special Day” (01:00:51)
The skill that sets good founders apart from great ones (01:02:34)
How a back injury took away a year of Michelle’s life (01:10:16)

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