Three Questions Cloudflare Keeps Asking Itself
Cloudflare launched 11 years ago on September 27, 2010. Since its first birthday, the company has marked the occasion by shipping new products it considers a gift back to the Internet. In its Annual Founders' Letter, the company reflects on what it has learned over the past year and where it is heading next, touching on three central themes: team, the Internet, and innovation.
The Remote Work Experiment, So Far
Cloudflare's founders have long credited the company's success to the quality of its team. Over the past year, more than 250,000 people applied for a job there, and the company extended offers to fewer than 0.5% of them. Notably, more than half of the current team joined after March 13, 2020, when Cloudflare closed its physical offices because of the pandemic.
Before COVID-19, Cloudflare was firmly a work-from-office culture. The forced shift to fully remote work was a source of anxiety internally. Eighteen months into that experiment, the company reports that it is working well. The takeaway: culture is not about offices, snacks, or adjustable desks. It starts with hiring people who are curious and empathetic. Curious people want to learn; empathetic people love to teach. Put them together, in person or on Zoom, and good things happen.
As the pandemic winds down, Cloudflare does not intend to simply return to the old ways. The company says its team has been more productive and generally happier than at any other point in its history. Still, it acknowledges the value of gathering in person to solve hard problems and build relationships. The company has begun experimenting with a future of work model that blends in-person collaboration with flexible, remote-friendly arrangements.
The Internet Is Still a Miracle
Cloudflare's stated mission is to help build a better Internet, and it deliberately capitalizes the "I" in Internet, treating it as a proper noun. The company believes there is — and should only be — one Internet, and it holds enduring respect for the fact that it exists at all.
Around 2016, public perception shifted from seeing the Internet as an unqualified good to viewing it as a source of danger. Cloudflare has observed the same trend: cyberattacks, toxic social media, threats to democracy, and increasing polarization have dominated the discourse. The company acknowledges that technologies riding on top of the Internet have broken down traditional gatekeepers without adequately addressing the harms those gatekeepers previously guarded against.
At the same time, the Internet itself remains a miracle. A mere 11 years before Cloudflare's founding, long-distance phone calls were expensive, sharing a photo across countries took weeks, and instant access to the sum of human knowledge was the stuff of science fiction. The past 18 months of the pandemic have reinforced that view. Without the Internet, the pandemic would have been far worse, even if it had happened just 11 years ago. It allowed many to keep working, connect with loved ones, and stay engaged with the world.
Cloudflare says it will continue working with policymakers to address the harms of an interconnected world while preserving the miracle of the Internet itself.
Innovation as a Roadmap
The Internet may appear static, but it is not. Eleven years ago, streaming video online was frustrating. Today, nearly any movie is available on demand. That progress comes from continuous innovation, not from the status quo.
Cloudflare's product roadmap is straightforward: examine every step required to load a web page, send an email, stream a video, or log in to a workstation, and ask whether that step can be made more secure, more reliable, or faster. The company believes the pace at which the Internet is improving is accelerating, and that its own ability to launch new products is accelerating along with it. An investment in Cloudflare, the founders argue, is fundamentally an investment in the Internet itself.
This week's announcements are designed to close one of the last network security risks Cloudflare has not historically protected against, reduce the cost of core cloud services, push the network closer to customers, and invest in new technologies that might someday disrupt the web as it exists today.
