In this episode of Inside the Network, we sit down with Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder and President of Cloudflare, one of the most iconic Internet infrastructure companies in the world. From its launch during the depths of the 2009 financial crisis to today’s $70 billion market cap and 5 million+ customers, Cloudflare has become a cornerstone of global Internet security and performance.
Michelle’s journey is remarkable. Raised in a small farming town in Saskatchewan, Canada, she left behind plans to become a doctor and instead teamed up with Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway to tackle an audacious question: “How can we build a better Internet?” Fifteen years later, Cloudflare is the third most valuable cybersecurity company in the world, protecting millions of businesses and powering the modern web.
In our conversation, Michelle shares what it really took to build Cloudflare, why grit mattered more than expertise in the early days, how deep trust among co-founders carried them through the hardest moments, and why “just ship it” became a guiding principle that fueled rapid growth. She also reflects on how Cloudflare has avoided the innovator’s dilemma, continuing to reinvent itself even as a public company, and how AI is reshaping the web, including why she believes we need a new business model to create the right incentives for content creators in the age of large-scale AI crawlers.
