A Mission that Hires

Cloudflare’s co-founders still interview every new hire, even as the company has grown well past 3,000 employees. Those conversations long ago stopped being about screening résumés. Once an offer is decided, the chat serves a different purpose: it gives each newcomer a direct line to senior leadership before day one, a connection that might make it easier to raise a flag later if something looks wrong.

But the interviews have a second benefit for the interviewer. They surface, in candid terms, why people actually want to work there. The most common answer, heard nearly every day, is the mission itself. Candidates say they want to build features and products that change the Internet for the better, and that their decisions as engineers affect billions of users downstream.

That mission — “help build a better Internet” — wasn’t written down at the start. It grew out of the team assembled and the products shipped. Over time it became the company’s DNA, anchored to a belief that the Internet can do good if it respects security, privacy, interoperability, and wide availability. That belief made the recent push for privacy regulation straightforward. Cloudflare never sold customer data to marketers, so the new laws didn’t require cutting revenue lines. Instead, the company responded with Universal SSL to widen encryption across the web and launched 1.1.1.1, its first consumer product, as a privacy-first DNS resolver.

The Internet Under Pressure

The challenges facing the Internet today are significant. A number of governments are passing laws to assert control over the network for commercial advantage, censorship, or surveillance. Cloudflare has seen this firsthand around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the Russian government has combined cyberattacks and targeted Internet outages on Ukraine with efforts to restrict Russian citizens to state-controlled tools and information.

What followed was a lesson in resilience. A loose coalition of individuals and companies, including Cloudflare, worked to defend Ukraine and restore connectivity quickly. Nearly a year into the war, the Internet in Ukraine still functions as a positive force, a channel to broadcast the realities of the invasion and a tool for Russian dissidents to escape attempts at censorship. When Russia personally sanctioned Cloudflare’s CEO this year, he took it as a sign the company was on the right side.

The Internet’s promise is also expanding beyond conflict zones. In developing parts of the world, reliable and secure access is bringing advances in education, healthcare, and commerce. In Iran, the Internet has remained the leading liberation tool for oppressed voices, leading the US Treasury to relax sanctions so that companies like Cloudflare can ensure Iranians can reach the open Internet.

Stories of Impact

Conflict and censorship are old problems, but the Internet is novel in how it connects marginalized people across distance and repression. Project Galileo, now eight years old, supports that work. Through the project, Cloudflare provides its services for free to over 2,100 organizations in more than 100 countries, helping groups that support underprivileged girls in India, the LGBTQIA+ community in the Nile River Valley, and refugees needing private health care services.

This year’s Impact Week will focus on several threads:

  • Sustainability: Cloudflare’s own emissions, and the lessons being applied to products and operations to responsibly steward Earth’s resources.
  • Access: Ensuring the resources needed to benefit from the Internet — especially cybersecurity and reliability tools — aren’t limited to large companies with big budgets.
  • Protecting sensitive groups: New Zero Trust tools are increasingly necessary for all organizations, including critical infrastructure and local governments.

At the end of the week, Cloudflare will publish its annual Impact Report, covering the company’s approach to sustainability and to keeping the Internet widely available and principled.

The work of running a network is often reactive: scanning for the latest cyberattacks, relieving congestion, patching vulnerabilities. Impact Week is the time to step back and concentrate on why the company exists — to make life better for billions of people through a stronger, more open Internet.