Connect, protect, and build anytime, anywhere | Cloudflare

At Cloudflare, we have an ambitious goal - to help build a better Internet. We believe that with our excellent team, advanced technology and loyal users, we can solve some of the most important problems on the Internet. How significant are these issues?

In 2004, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway began to address a fundamental question: "Where does spam come from?" They established a system that allowed any website owner to track how spam creators collect email addresses. Project Honey Pot was born from this.

Project Honey Pot has quietly developed over the years. Lee's flexible architecture has evolved to be able to track more threats faced by web administrators. Thousands of websites from over 185 countries/regions have signed up for the project. Although users appreciate the ability of Project Honey Pot to track malicious online behavior, they repeatedly demand the same: stop just tracking and stop it!

In 2009, Mattew took advantage of his paid vacation to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. There he met Michelle Zatlyn, the current Chief Operating Officer of Cloudflare. One day, while chatting, Mattew mentioned Project Honey Pot and its amazing user community. Michelle immediately recognized the opportunity to create a service to raise the Project Honey Pot to a new level: not only to track Internet threats, but also to stop them. These two students began to develop a business plan.

The first thing is to come up with a name. The first business plan was called 'Project Web Wall', but it did not resonate. A friend of Matthew suggested that since we are building a 'firewall on the cloud', we should use the name Cloudflare. As soon as they heard the name, they immediately felt it was right and made a decision immediately. Matthew and Michelle collaborated with faculty from Harvard Business School to refine the business plan. Meanwhile, Lee built his first working prototype in his spare time. In April 2009, Cloudflare won the championship in the prestigious Harvard Business School Business Plan Competition.

Lee was living in California at the time, while Michelle and Matthew also moved to California after graduating from Harvard Business School. These three co founders spent the entire summer perfecting the Cloudflare prototype. They believe that Cloudflare has solved the real needs and are working to elevate Cloudflare to a new level. In November 2009, Cloudflare completed its Series A funding round with Ray Rothrock from Venrock and Carl Ledbetter from Pelion Venture Partners.

Matthew, Lee, and Michelle started forming the Cloudflare team. It is not easy to recruit people without products, but one thing has moved everyone: Cloudflare's core mission is to help build a better Internet. This is a project that fills excellent engineers with passion. Soon after, Cloudflare began to have an excellent team stationed in its office in Palo Alto, California, consisting of people who had jumped from top companies such as Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Mint.com.

The biggest concern for investors and advisors is that Cloudflare's solution, which is designed to protect website security, is likely to cause delays. So the entire team began to exert all their efforts to eliminate every possible delay point in the system. In June 2010, Cloudflare quietly launched a private beta version for a small group of members in the Project Honey Pot community. The entire team held their breath in anticipation of the results. Then, something surprising happened. Users have started writing that Cloudflare not only protects them from online threats, but also increases the average loading speed of their website by 30%. The efficiency of the Cloudflare system, the caching layer for static resources, and the fact that Cloudflare helps its user websites resolve large amounts of junk traffic mean that Cloudflare not only provides security, but also incredible performance.

Since Cloudflare was first discussed on the Harvard Business School campus in 2009, this program has been aimed at officially announcing its launch at the TechCrunch conference. On September 27, 2010, Cloudflare really did this. The entire Cloudflare team gathered at the TechCrunch Disrupt Auditorium in downtown San Francisco. The first batch of beta users are very happy because they can finally share with everyone how great the service they have been using for several months is. Matthew and Michelle stepped onto the stage to announce the official launch of Cloudflare to the world. Since then, over the course of 6 years, Cloudflare has launched dozens of products and hundreds of features, opened 6 offices in 3 countries/regions, and put 320 data centers online. All of these efforts have brought Cloudflare's advantages to millions of customers worldwide: security, performance, reliability, and insight.