In 2010, Cloudflare was one of over a thousand startups competing for a slot on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage. It was not an obvious pick: the company sold infrastructure — making sites faster and defending them from attack — a category the broader market understood poorly at the time. Infrastructure tends to stay invisible right up until it matters.
On September 27, 2010, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn presented on the Startup Battlefield stage and launched Cloudflare publicly. Signups began during the talk and accelerated as it went on; by the end of the judges' questions, hundreds of websites had joined, stress-testing the company's five data centers live. Over the following seven days, traffic across the network grew nearly 10x and Cloudflare moved from roughly the 1,000th largest site online into the top 50.
Cloudflare did not take the main trophy. TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington compared the product to "muffler repair for the Internet" at the awards ceremony — a fair characterization — before naming Cloudflare Most Innovative Company. As Prince later put it: "You may not win the trophy, but you'll receive something else far more important."
Occasionally a company gets a room, a microphone and a few minutes to explain what it has spent months or years obsessing over. Usually nothing comes of it. Sometimes the right audience hears it at the right moment, and an idea that lived among a handful of people starts moving through the world.
This October, as Cloudflare turns 16, the company is handing five early-stage startups that same kind of stage.
The competition
The Cold Start is a live startup competition at next month's Cloudflare Connect in San Francisco. Five early-stage companies will each get five minutes on stage to explain what they are building, why it needs to exist, and why they are the right people to build it.
Cloudflare says it cares far less about polished decks than about clear explanations of interesting ideas — no thirty-slide deck, no suspiciously precise TAM figure, no rehearsed childhood-origin story. What it wants is the vision: what changed in the world to make this possible, what the founders see that others missed, and why the idea is impossible to stop thinking about.
The finalists pitch to the Connect audience and to three judges:
- Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare
- Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and President of Cloudflare
- Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare
The judges pick one winner, who receives $500,000 in Cloudflare credits, a San Francisco billboard, and an invitation to the VIP speakers dinner that evening.
Eligibility and applications
Entry is open to ambitious early-stage startups that have raised less than $10 million, a deliberately broad bar since, as Cloudflare puts it, the most interesting companies rarely arrive neatly categorized.
The company is looking for ideas that seem obvious once someone finally builds them, and ideas that at first sound slightly unreasonable: infrastructure that looks boring until everyone needs it; products that could not have existed a few years ago; strange new interfaces; new ways of building software; efforts aimed at enormous existing markets and at markets nobody has named yet.
Applicants are asked for who they are, a one-line pitch, what they are building and why, their funding and revenue stage, how Cloudflare fits into their stack, and anything else that helps explain them and their work.
Apply for The Cold Start. Applications are open now and close Friday, October 2, 2026.
Details and setting
The Cold Start runs Monday, October 19, 4:00–5:00 p.m. PDT at Moscone West in San Francisco, as part of Cloudflare Connect. Cloudflare covers travel to San Francisco for the five finalists. Each startup gets 5 minutes to pitch, followed by 3–5 minutes of questions from the judges.
Connect's wider lineup includes AI pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li; Idealab founder Bill Gross; organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant; AMD CTO Mark Papermaster; Vue.js and Vite creator Evan You; Lovable co-founder and CTO Fabian Hedin; and OpenAI member of technical staff and creator of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger.
Why Cloudflare runs this
Cloudflare's stated reason for working with startups is practical: very small groups of people have an uncanny ability to attempt very large things.
The obstacle is that ambitious software increasingly leans on infrastructure that until recently only the largest technology companies could afford to build for themselves — global compute, storage, networking, security, real-time systems, AI inference, and the capacity to survive sudden popularity. None of that should require becoming an enormous company first, and Cloudflare argues those capabilities should be reachable on day one.
That premise underpins Cloudflare for Startups, through which eligible early-stage companies can receive up to $350,000 in Cloudflare credits for one year, and the continued expansion of Cloudflare's developer platform — so a tiny team can build something on Tuesday, have the Internet embrace it on Wednesday, and spend Thursday on the product instead of scrambling to master global infrastructure.
Cloudflare itself started from a slightly unreasonable premise: that the performance, security and global compute available to the largest companies online should be available to everyone from day one. In 2010 it got a stage to argue that case. Sixteen years on, it has a much larger network, a somewhat larger team, and significantly better circuit breakers — and it wants to hear what you are building.
