"Well, did you think we'd be here? This is uh No. Uh, so five years ago, Matthew and I were sitting in your seats. We started Cloudflare 5 years ago. And, um, I thought I'd just tell you a little bit o..."

"about 120 employees in San Francisco and London, two offices, and every day about 3,000 new people sign up for our service. It's been definitely a rocket ship. If you look at our growth numbers, it is..."

"very funny and neither of us has been fired. So, you know, Andrew definitely has he was okay. Uh, so when we started um, lots of people come to us, we talked to on Furs all the time. They're like, "Ho..."

"started Cloudflare and um Michelle's the person that makes the trains run on time. She she's essentially our COO, although we'll talk about why actually that's not we don't have titles really. Um Lee ..."

"I tend to worry about the sharks uh that are out there, but it turns out that if you look at it around the world, uh sharks only kill about six people a year or 10 10 people a year. Um mosquitoes kill..."

"the first year, we just built built the product behind the scenes and then opened up a private beta. Um, and so what does that mean? That means the first version of our product that we released, we we..."

"hard. When we got to 100 customers, we took the whole company to Vegas. There were six of us, so it wasn't that many people, but it was like a big celebration. And so for months, we tried to get to 10..."

"Definitely. Although, I also couldn't code, so I had nothing else to do, so that was a good use of time. Um, that's important. Again, it was uh like early on we had a conversation about um you know Mi..."

"because like we've I don't think we any of the three of us have ever it's been so clear that Lee builds the stuff. Michelle makes sure it gets done and I assemble IKEA furniture that that's um you kno..."

"are the sorts of things where you know again those decisions early on helped us attract other people um to fill in the gaps where we didn't already cover a lot of area and and make progress early on a..."

"it's interesting like the decisions that you make early on end up affecting much later. Um, we I remember our first our first board meeting. We raised money. We we went in our first board meeting and ..."

"and that has has made sure that we're selecting people who really want to be there but fundamentally it also meant that Michelle really had to trust trust me and trust the rest of the organization so ..."

"we've earned earned that title. And so that that early decision that really required a humility was and it was easy. It was easy for me because you know they were like someone needs to be CEO so you g..."

"them. [Applause] You know, the other thing that I like I think has been really key to our success is that there's that we have, you know, while I I think we have sort of assued the women in tech story..."

"diverse team and so diversity means lots of things. gender is one, but um where they used to work, where they grew up, um all those just sorts of things really matter. And so we're a web infrastructur..."

"you have to actually you have to deeply be like I'm I I'm fascinated by this problem I don't feel like I necessarily understand all the different corners of it but sometimes by not understanding all o..."

"And you know, today one out of every 20 web requests, 5% of web requests flow through our network. Um, you know, it's huge huge huge organizations rely on us uh to be available and online and it is in..."

"again the the when you think about the idea you're working on you want to make sure it's big and ma and matters because you know when we started someone back backstage asked did you really think that ..."

"I was like, "This is interesting. I'm signing up for this. I think if it's going to work, it's going to be amazing. If it doesn't, well, at least I can say I tried." And so, you know, don't get too hu..."

"again coming back to having other people around you who you really trust and you really value whether they're they're co-founders or they're investors. And I think actually that's one of the things we..."

"sense about someone who you're about to have as an investor that like, ah, I'm not sure I really want this person, but you know, they're going to give me a really high valuation. Run as fast as you po..."

"Yeah. So if people tell you oh maximize on valuation the person doesn't matter. That's not true. that all investors are not created equal. And you know, five years in, we've we've we've done three rou..."

"it can. And so those are examples of where people really do matter. So we're out of time. We're out of time. Um thank you for so much for tolerating our our sort of rambling discussion. Um and good lu..."