A Week Focused on the Internet We’re Building

Cloudflare didn’t begin with a grand mission. Back in 2009, the founding insight was more pragmatic: as computing shifted from on-premise hardware to the cloud, security, performance, and reliability would follow. The opportunity was to get ahead of that trend and build a solid business. But there was a classic startup dilemma—to win large enterprise customers with big IT budgets, we needed data on security threats. To get that data, we needed customers. A chicken-and-egg problem.

Our solution was a free tier. We reasoned that individual developers and small businesses would adopt it, giving us a stream of traffic data to learn from about real-world threats. That knowledge would let us build the premium service we could sell to large organizations. For the most part, the model held: smaller companies faced fewer attacks and paid less, while larger ones faced more and paid more. What we didn’t expect—and only saw because we had a free product—was a category of small, resource-constrained organizations that were magnets for large-scale attacks. Servicing them is what turned Cloudflare into a mission-driven company.

The moment that crystallized this was a meeting in early 2012. The director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)—the organization that negotiates for kidnapped journalists or recovers their bodies—asked if I would meet three of our customers who were in town. I wasn’t eager, but Michelle pushed me. On a rainy San Francisco afternoon, three African journalists came to our office. One was from Ethiopia, another from Angola. The third was unnamed and unlocated because he was “currently being hunted by death squads.”

For 90 minutes, they told us about covering corruption, living in constant danger, and fighting off relentless cyberattacks. And they said they depended on Cloudflare’s free service to keep their work online. That landed heavily. As they left with Cloudflare T-shirts and swag, I turned to Michelle and said, “Whoa. What have we gotten ourselves into?”

From a Business to a Better Internet

That meeting reframed what we were doing. The internet was a critical resource for those journalists and countless others like them. Forces seeking to silence them would use cyberattacks to knock them offline. We hadn’t set out to provide world-class cybersecurity to everyone regardless of ability to pay, but it now seemed essential.

So Cloudflare’s mission became helping build a better internet—one where you don’t need to be a giant company to be fast, reliable, and secure. This has guided our flagship giving programs: Project Galileo, which offers enterprise-grade services to politically or artistically important organizations; the Athenian Project, protecting elections from cyberattacks; and Project Fair Shot, ensuring organizations distributing the COVID-19 vaccine had the technical resources they needed.

The mission extends to technical decisions, even against clear economic self-interest. We don’t monetize user data because a better internet is a more private one. We enabled encryption for everyone—though at the time it was our biggest differentiator between free and paid plans and the top reason people upgraded. It seemed wrong to charge extra for a bit of math that made the internet safer.

Our First Impact Week

This week marks Cloudflare’s first Impact Week, conceived to spotlight our environmental, social, and governance efforts. Like other innovation weeks here, it quickly grew beyond reporting. The team proposed new products and features to push existing initiatives further.

Expect several threads over the coming days:

  • Environmental efficiency: Beyond how our network is built to consume less power, we’ll showcase our growing use of hyper power-efficient Arm-based servers, announce a new Workers option for environmentally conscious developers, and launch a partnership with other leading Internet companies. If broadly adopted, the initiative could cut up to 25% of global web traffic and the wasted energy serving it.
  • Expanding access: Rural and underserved urban communities still face slow speeds and limited ISP choice. While we can’t solve everything yet, we’ll announce an initiative addressing critical aspects of that problem.
  • Safeguarding the Internet’s core: As Cloudflare becomes a larger part of the infrastructure, we’ll announce programs to monitor network health, affirm commitments to human rights, and extend protections of critical functions like elections.

That rainy meeting in 2012 is why this all matters. When I first pitched Michelle on starting a company, most ideas involved cleverly extracting rents without much benefit to society. Sitting in an Ethiopian restaurant in Central Square, she told me, “Matthew, those are all great business ideas. But they're not for me. I want to do something where I can be proud of the work we're doing and the positive impact we've made.”

That sent me back to the drawing board. The next idea I pitched became Cloudflare. Today, our mission remains the same: helping build a better Internet. Impact Week is how we continue to live that out.