The Dinner Where She Was Called a Liar
Walking into the restaurant, Michelle Zatlyn had no idea what to expect. Goldman Sachs had invited her to a Silicon Valley technology event at a packed local restaurant. Cloudflare was still young, still building momentum, and Zatlyn was still relatively new to Northern California — a Canadian who had arrived without a network, without connections, without the ambient social credibility that comes from having grown up in the orbit of Sand Hill Road. She knew the invite was a favor. She didn't care. The opportunity to rub shoulders with industry giants could be momentous for the company she was building.
One of those giants happened to be seated right next to her.
After exchanging pleasantries, she gave him the rundown. Cloudflare was a global cloud security network for all business sizes that took five minutes to use rather than the typical cybersecurity implementation that took weeks. The famous founder stared back while she walked through the pitch. Then he responded.
"He was grilling me, and that's fine. Grill me. But he didn't believe anything I said. Not one thing," Zatlyn later recalled. For each doubting question, she responded with an honest answer. Then he began responding with a single word: Impossible. Again and again, she walked him through the vision. Again and again, the same verdict. Eventually, her patience waned. "I said, 'Are you calling me a liar?'" she recounted. "And you can imagine this person did not take that very well. I'm like, 'You've got to check your assumptions.'"
She walked away frustrated. The big-shot founder controlled the power dynamics at the table — Zatlyn being relatively unknown in comparison — and the business she believed in had been disregarded. She took it personally. But something hardened in the aftermath. Not bitterness, exactly. Something more useful. "One of the things that I've said to myself a lot along the way, especially on the dark days," she would later reflect, "is you've got to keep yourself on the field. You've got to keep yourself in the game."
One awkward dinner did not define her. Because she stayed on the field, Cloudflare today runs one of the largest networks in the world, has surpassed five million customers, employs thousands, and carries a market capitalization north of $70 billion. Michelle Zatlyn is the only female co-founder running a publicly traded infrastructure company. Impossibility wasn't a reason to stop. For Zatlyn, it has never been a factor.
By the Numbers
The Cloudflare Empire
$70B+Market capitalization (2025)
5M+Customer internet properties
~20%Share of global web traffic routed through Cloudflare
247BCyber attacks blocked in a single day (2025)
330+Data center locations across 120+ countries
$1.9BMichelle Zatlyn's estimated net worth (Forbes, 2025)
~2%Zatlyn's ownership stake in Cloudflare
The Prairie and the Periodic Table
Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, is a city of roughly 35,000 people in central Canada, the kind of place where the phrase "tight-knit farming community" isn't euphemism but simple description. Winters are fierce and long. The economy runs on forestry, agriculture, and a certain stubborn resilience baked into the people who choose to stay. Michelle Zatlyn was born there in 1979, the daughter of a lawyer father and a teacher mother, raised alongside her sisters in a household that emphasized hard work, education, and the quiet expectation that ambition was not something to be embarrassed about.
She attended École Holy Cross and then Carlton Comprehensive High School, where she captained the basketball team. As a teenager she worked in her father's law office. She spent a summer as a camp counselor at a special needs camp. These are the kinds of formative details that read, in retrospect, as almost too on-the-nose — the small-town Canadian girl who learned community, service, and scrappy resourcefulness before she ever heard the words "venture capital." But Zatlyn doesn't romanticize it so much as acknowledge its structural influence. "Growing up in Saskatchewan really shaped my values," she has said. "I come from a really tight-knit farming community where there is an emphasis on hard work and community, like you're in it together."
Her family had one rule: she had to at least temporarily leave Saskatchewan. The implicit understanding was that the world was bigger than the prairie, and seeing it wasn't optional — it was a form of duty to oneself. She set her sights on medical school. Science felt practical, tractable, important. She enrolled at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 2001 with a B.S. in chemistry — with distinction — and a minor in management.
"When I arrived in Montreal, my world got a lot bigger and I was aware of so many more opportunities," she later recalled. "The stakes were higher, a lot more was expected of me, and I loved it. I was like a sponge, constantly taking it all in, staying curious, and wondering, 'what can I learn, and what else is there?' I started to see my life, and my career, as a collection of experiences."
The phrase is worth pausing on — a collection of experiences — because it reveals the governing logic of what would follow. Not a career plan. Not a five-year trajectory. A collection. The word implies curation rather than linearity, the assembling of something whose final shape cannot yet be seen.
The medical school ambition faded as business pulled her in. She worked as a research analyst at Investor Analytics, took a role at I Love Rewards (later renamed Achievers), a global employee rewards platform, and held product management positions at Toshiba. None of these were stepping stones in any narrative sense. They were, in her own framework, experiences to be collected — each one teaching her something about how organizations work, how products get built, how decisions get made when the stakes are real and the information is incomplete.
The Visa, the Rejection, and the Second Attempt
There is a quiet subplot in Zatlyn's biography that speaks to something larger than one person's career arc. After college, her older sister had moved to the United States and found success. Zatlyn decided she wanted to follow. She had a potential job lined up. But the work visa didn't come through, and she was forced to return to Canada.
It would be tempting to narrate this as a minor setback, a brief delay before the inevitable triumph. But the moment deserves more weight than that. A 2016 study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that 44 of America's 87 privately held startups valued at $1 billion or more had at least one immigrant founder. Zatlyn would become one of them — but only on the second attempt. The first time America's immigration system encountered Michelle Zatlyn, it turned her away.
When she tried again, she came not with a job offer but with an acceptance letter to Harvard Business School, class of 2009. The distinction matters. The visa that had been denied to a young Canadian professional was granted to a future MBA student at one of the world's most prestigious institutions. The system, in its peculiar way, demanded that she prove herself at a higher altitude before it would let her in.
At Harvard, Zatlyn discovered that the MBA program's deepest value wasn't any particular framework or case study. "The program taught me how to have a point of view and make a decision — something you need to do many times a day as a founder," she later explained. "It also taught me how to listen to a diverse group of viewpoints." This sounds almost banal until you consider what it means in practice: the capacity to synthesize conflicting signals under time pressure, to hold uncertainty without paralysis, to decide and move. Not analysis. Judgment.
The Hallway, the Honeypot, and the Light Bulb
The founding mythology of Cloudflare begins not in a garage or a boardroom but in a hallway conversation between two MBA students in their thirties — which is to say, people old enough to know better and reckless enough to try anyway.
Matthew Prince — the man who would become Cloudflare's CEO — was, and remains, an unlikely internet infrastructure magnate. He grew up in Utah, studied at Trinity College in Hartford where he majored in English and only minored in computer science, wrote his college thesis in 1996 on the potential for political biases in search engines (two years before Google was founded), turned down offers from Netscape and Yahoo because programming sounded boring, went to law school at the University of Chicago, started a legal magazine, and eventually taught cybersecurity law at the University of Illinois. He was, in short, a Renaissance man in geek clothing — the kind of person who would later buy his hometown newspaper in Park City because he loved "the smell of printer ink and a big wet press."
Before business school, Prince and a friend named Lee Holloway had built an open-source system called Project Honey Pot, which allowed anyone with a website to track how spammers harvested email addresses. The project had grown quietly over several years, accumulating thousands of participants across 185 countries. Users loved its ability to track online malicious behavior, but they had one repeated request: don't just track the bad guys — stop them.
It was this idea that Prince mentioned to Zatlyn in a hallway at Harvard. She wasn't immediately sold on the mass appeal of a spam-tracking tool. But she had the instinct — the product-manager instinct, honed through years at Toshiba and Google and I Love Rewards — to test the question empirically. She put together a survey of approximately 500 website owners and discovered something unexpected. The quantitative data confirmed a market need. But it was the qualitative responses that lit the fuse: a deep, visceral frustration among small business owners who felt helpless against hackers and cyber threats. They weren't just inconvenienced. They were seeking justice.
"I just remember the moment sitting there as a light bulb went off," Zatlyn later recalled. "It was my litmus test of, 'Huh, if we could make the internet safer for all of these small business owners, and therefore entrepreneurs and developers — wow, I would be proud to be a part of that.'"
The third co-founder, Lee Holloway, was the technical genius — the one who had actually built Project Honey Pot's flexible architecture in his spare time, the one whose engineering vision would become foundational to everything Cloudflare would eventually do. Holloway's story carries its own heartbreaking weight. When Prince first proposed that Zatlyn join their effort, Holloway was skeptical. "I know why we need each other," he told Prince. "But why do we need Michelle?" Prince asked him to wait a month. After a month, Holloway understood. But he couldn't resist the rejoinder: "Now I see why we need Michelle. But I am not sure we need you."
In April 2009, the trio's business plan won the prestigious Harvard Business School Business Plan competition — the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. The classmates-turned-co-founders had their validation. Now they needed to build the thing.
When we came up with Cloudflare, I knew nothing about internet security, but I care a lot about liking what I'm doing. I knew if I could help create internet security, that's something I could work hard for and be proud of.
Above the Nail Salon
In the summer of 2009, Zatlyn and Prince graduated from Harvard and headed west to join Holloway in California. None of them had existing connections in Silicon Valley. None had deep expertise in internet security. They had a business plan, a prototype Holloway had built in his spare time, and the kind of conviction that, depending on your perspective, looks like either courage or delusion.
Their first office was above a nail salon in Palo Alto, not far from where
Steve Jobs had lived. The detail is too perfect to have been planned — the next generation of tech founders literally perched above someone else's small business, building the infrastructure that would protect millions of small businesses like it.
This was 2009, the trough of the Great Recession. Banks were collapsing. Prince's Apple stock — the shares his father had helped him buy back in 1997, the ones that had essentially funded his education — had cratered, and he'd been margin-called. "So many of my classmates couldn't get jobs," Zatlyn recalled of the post-MBA landscape. She herself had interned at Google the previous summer and expected an offer, but the recession intervened. Google didn't extend one. In a strange inversion, the recession that closed one door — a safe, prestigious job at one of the world's most admired companies — opened another. Instead of joining Google, she co-founded something that would eventually protect Google's traffic.
Fundraising in a downturn, with no product, no revenue, and no network, sounds like a recipe for failure. Zatlyn has been characteristically blunt about the experience: "You can say what you want about Silicon Valley, but I do think it's the only place in the world where you can show up with a good idea and people will take a bet on you even if they don't know you." In November 2009, Cloudflare closed its Series A financing with Ray Rothrock of Venrock and Carl Ledbetter of Pelion Venture Partners. They raised approximately $2 million — for a company that had, at that point, no launched product and no customers.
The team set about building. Recruiting before you have a product is always tricky, but one thing resonated with every candidate: Cloudflare's core mission — to help build a better Internet. "That was a project that smart engineers could get passionate about," the founders noted. The early hires came from Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Mint.com. The team could be counted on fewer than two hands. Their data center locations on one hand.
In June 2010, Cloudflare quietly launched a private beta to select members of the Project Honey Pot community. The whole team held their breath. Then something surprising happened. Users began writing in that not only was Cloudflare protecting them against bad actors, but their sites were loading, on average, 30% faster. The efficiency of the system, the layer of caching for static resources, and the sheer volume of garbage traffic that Cloudflare stripped away meant the product offered not just security but performance. Two value propositions for the price of one. The bouncer was also a personal trainer.
Seven Minutes at TechCrunch Disrupt
On September 27, 2010, on a blue-lit stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Matthew Prince shuffled nervously while the audio-video crew attempted to connect his presentation to the projection screens. Three judges in professional business attire sat behind him on low white couches that were more Star Trek than midcentury modern. Zatlyn was already troubleshooting the slides. Prince wore dark blue jeans and a simple black blazer over a dark gray T-shirt bearing the logo of an orange cloud. Zatlyn wore a white blazer — the inverse of Prince — with the same graphic tee.
After a minute of filler by the event host, the slides connected. Prince introduced Zatlyn and Holloway, who sat in the back of the room. Then he jumped into a seven-minute simultaneous pitch and launch of Cloudflare. It was, by any measure, an audacious thing to do — not just pitch but actually launch the product live, on stage, at a conference. "Launching is a sacred event," Prince told the audience. "You only get to do it once."
Cloudflare took second place at TechCrunch Disrupt that year. But second place at a pitch competition turned out to be largely irrelevant to the company's trajectory. What mattered was that the product was live, the mission was articulated, and the world was watching.
The founding team had arrived at a structural insight that would define Cloudflare's business for the next fifteen years: the internet wasn't designed for the scale and complexity it now handled. It had evolved, patchwork-style, from an academic tool into the lifeblood of modern society. "It was meant for a small number of people to share research," Zatlyn would explain years later. "Now, it powers every part of life." Network appliances — firewalls, load balancers, network optimizers — had always been hardware boxes that companies purchased and installed on-premise. Cloudflare's bet was that all of this would inevitably migrate to the cloud, and that the company that built the most efficient, most flexible, most programmable cloud network would win.
The Architecture of Efficiency
The technical decisions made in Cloudflare's first years — decisions shaped as much by constraint as by vision — would become the source of durable competitive advantage. The founders articulated this clearly in their 2019 S-1 shareholder letter, a document that doubles as a manifesto for a particular way of thinking about internet infrastructure.
The first key decision: subscription-based pricing, not usage-based billing. The reasoning was counterintuitive but precise. Cloudflare was competing with hardware manufacturers. In the on-premise hardware world, when you suffered more cyber attacks you didn't pay your firewall vendor more, and when you suffered fewer you didn't pay them less. If Cloudflare was going to build a firewall-as-a-service, it needed predictable pricing that reflected how companies already paid for their hardware. Usage-based billing would have punished customers for being attacked — exactly the wrong incentive.
The second: more data was always better. "Like an Internet-wide immune system," the founders wrote, "we could learn from all the bits of traffic that flowed through our network." Every additional customer, every additional request, every additional bit of traffic made the system smarter for everyone. This network effect — every new node strengthening the whole — meant that Cloudflare never wanted to discourage any customer from routing any amount of traffic through its network, large or small. The logical conclusion was radical: a generous free tier.
The third: ruthless efficiency. "Efficiency is in the DNA of Cloudflare because it had to be," the S-1 letter stated. To compete with hardware appliances on price while serving the entire internet required inventing a new type of platform — built on commodity hardware, architected so that any server in any city could run every one of Cloudflare's services. This wasn't just engineering elegance. It was survival logic.
The freemium model — giving away core services for free to millions of users while converting a fraction to paid plans — was not a typical strategy for an infrastructure company. Traditional competitors sold expensive hardware to large enterprises. Cloudflare instead pursued what Zatlyn liked to describe as making the internet better for everyone, not just those who could afford enterprise-grade security. "Part of our DNA is to provide more value than we capture," Zatlyn said on the day of the IPO. "We think that's the way to build an enduring company."
Efficiency is in the DNA of Cloudflare because it had to be. Being entrusted with investors' capital is a privilege and we make investments in our business always with a mind toward being good stewards of that capital.
The Holloway Codename
There is a shadow narrative running through Cloudflare's story that the company has never tried to hide but that rarely receives its proper weight. Lee Holloway, the third co-founder — the one who built the backend of Project Honey Pot, who created the first working prototype, whose flexible architecture adapted and scaled as the company grew — was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. He stepped down from the company in 2016. Wired published a devastating profile of his decline, a piece that Cloudflare's community would describe as sobering, melancholic, and poignant.
Holloway's technical vision remains foundational to the company. His code still runs. His architectural decisions still shape how Cloudflare's network operates. And when the company prepared for its IPO in 2019, the internal codename was Project Holloway.
The gesture — quiet, deliberate, unannounced to the public — says something about the culture that Zatlyn and Prince built, and about the kind of loyalty that runs underneath the technical and commercial achievements. You do not name your most important corporate milestone after a colleague who can no longer remember building the thing unless the values are real. Unless the community actually matters. Unless Saskatchewan's emphasis on "you're in it together" migrated intact from the prairie to Palo Alto to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Ringing the Bell
On September 13, 2019, Cloudflare went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol NET. The company had initially indicated a share price between $10 and $12, adjusted it upward before pricing, and ultimately priced at $15 per share. By the end of its first day of trading, shares were up 20%, bringing the valuation to over $5 billion. The IPO raised roughly $525 million — bringing total capital raised, including venture funding, to nearly $1 billion.
Zatlyn rang the opening bell. She was surrounded by her family, friends, board members, and a group of 150 early and global employees. The company live-streamed the ceremony to offices around the world. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe tweeted congratulations, noting she was the first tech founder from Saskatchewan to ring the bell at the NYSE.
"There are so many founders who want to get to that point and never do," Zatlyn recalled. "It's so rare and I am so proud. That moment really made me realize what a group of people can accomplish when they have a shared goal."
She was asked, in a TechCrunch interview that day, whether the stock's 20% first-day rise meant the company had left money on the table. Her answer was characteristically deflationary: "The markets are going to react how they react, but it's part of our DNA to provide more value than we capture."
The IPO arrived at a fortuitous moment, though Zatlyn couldn't have known it at the time. Six months later, the COVID-19 pandemic would drive an unprecedented surge in internet traffic as the world shifted to remote work, remote education, remote everything. Cloudflare's infrastructure — designed from inception to be flexible, programmable, and scalable — was built for precisely this kind of moment. The percentage of Fortune 1,000 companies paying for Cloudflare's services rose from 10% at the time of the IPO to more than 16% within a year. Across the web as a whole, Cloudflare grew from powering 10.1% of the top 10 million websites to 14.5% in the same period.
Switzerland, 8chan, and the Content Question
There is a tension at the heart of Cloudflare's position — one that Zatlyn has navigated with a combination of principle and pragmatism that not everyone finds satisfying.
When you operate infrastructure that routes roughly 20% of the world's web traffic, you inevitably carry traffic for entities you find repugnant. In August 2019, just weeks before the IPO, Cloudflare made the rare decision to terminate service for 8chan, a message board favored by mass shooters to spread their manifestos. The company had previously removed The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, as a customer. Both decisions generated intense public debate.
Zatlyn's position has been consistent but uncomfortable. "We don't think we should be deciding what content should be online," she said at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in October 2019. "However," she added, "somebody should." She invoked Switzerland — the politically neutral country — as the company's aspirational model. "We're going to provide service to anyone whether we like it or not."
The discomfort is the point. Infrastructure providers face a structural dilemma that has no clean resolution: act as content moderators and you become, in effect, an unelected private regulator of speech; refuse to moderate and you enable the worst actors on the internet. Zatlyn and Prince have consistently argued that the right answer is better law, not better infrastructure-level policing. "Some of the laws penned 25 years ago don't take into account that technology has democratized," Zatlyn noted. The next ten years, she predicted in 2019, would be about policy changes.
Six years later, the policy landscape has shifted — but not resolved. Cloudflare's position has evolved. In July 2025, the company became the first internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers from accessing content without permission or compensation by default, a decision that positioned Cloudflare as a defender of content creators' rights in the age of large language models. The Switzerland metaphor had always been incomplete. Switzerland, after all, has banking secrecy laws and money-laundering regulations. Neutrality is not the same as passivity.
The Internet's New Business Model
The 2025 Annual Founders' Letter — the sixth in the tradition Zatlyn and Prince established at the time of their IPO — articulated a vision that went far beyond cybersecurity. It was, in essence, a theory of the internet's future.
The argument was provocative: the basic business model of the internet — create compelling content, be discovered, generate value from the resulting traffic — had remained remarkably consistent for fifteen years. Whether through ads, subscriptions, or commerce, traffic generation had been the engine powering the entire web. But AI was changing that equation fundamentally. Search was giving way to answer engines. Users were increasingly getting summaries rather than visiting source websites. Content creators' businesses were being undermined by AI agents that consumed their work without generating the traffic that funded it.
"Without a change they will still kill content creators' businesses," the letter stated bluntly. "If you ask your agent to summarize twenty different news sources but never actually visit any of them you're still undermining the business model of those news sources."
Cloudflare's proposed solution — what Prince called "pay-per-crawl" — was a mechanism to allow content creators to charge AI companies for accessing their work. The company, which already sat between content creators and AI crawlers by virtue of its network position, was uniquely positioned to implement such a system. Whether it would succeed was another question entirely. But the ambition was characteristic: Cloudflare, which had started by protecting small business websites from hackers, was now proposing to restructure the economic foundations of the entire web.
Zatlyn framed the AI transition with the same combination of optimism and caution that had characterized her approach to content moderation. "AI is reshaping the Internet, and Cloudflare is helping to create the conditions needed for a new model as the web moves from search-driven to AI-driven," she explained. "This commitment to building guardrails for innovation has been at the heart of Cloudflare since its earliest days."
The word guardrails is doing significant work in that sentence. Not walls. Not barriers. Guardrails — structures that keep things on the road without stopping them from moving.
The Rate at Which You Learn
There is a question that recurs across Zatlyn's public reflections, asked in different forms by interviewers who cannot quite believe that someone with a chemistry degree, no background in internet security, and no Silicon Valley connections co-founded a $70 billion infrastructure company. The question is some variant of: What gave you the confidence?
Her answer is always, essentially, the same — though the phrasing varies enough to suggest it's genuine rather than rehearsed. "You're going to find yourself in a situation where you are not anywhere near credible to make a decision, but you have to make a decision," she told Qualcomm Ventures. "And so, all of a sudden, this rate at which you're learning matters a ton. And it doesn't mean you always have to get everything right, but can you learn from it: How fast do you get better? I think it's a really huge superpower."
This is not the standard founder bromide about "fake it till you make it." It is something more nuanced — a theory of competence that privileges learning velocity over prior knowledge. The chemist can run the cybersecurity company if she can metabolize new information faster than the domain narrows. The outsider has an advantage if she sees the structural pattern that the insiders, blinded by their own expertise, cannot.
Zatlyn created a board game in her junior achievement class as a teenager — "my first exposure to learning to create something that people wanted," she recalled. The instinct to test products against real human desire, to iterate based on feedback rather than assumptions, was there before business school gave it a vocabulary. At Harvard, she surveyed 500 website owners before committing to Cloudflare. At Cloudflare, she and her co-founders obsessed over qualitative feedback from their earliest beta users. The scientific method — hypothesis, experiment, observation, revision — migrated from the chemistry lab to the startup.
"I was not an expert in these areas," she admitted, speaking of internet security at the time of Cloudflare's founding. "But I knew that if we were successful in this endeavor, it would be something I'd be really proud to be a part of." The self-knowledge embedded in that sentence — I don't need to be an expert, I need to care enough to learn — is the quiet engine of her entire career.
The Bouncer and the Personal Trainer
Fifteen years after its launch, Cloudflare operates as what Zatlyn describes as a "connectivity cloud" — though her preferred metaphor is more vivid. The company, she says, is "a digital bouncer and personal trainer" for online experiences: simultaneously optimizing performance while keeping malicious actors at bay.
The network spans over 330 locations across more than 120 countries. It routes approximately 20% of all web traffic. In a single day in 2025, Cloudflare blocked 247 billion cyber attacks on behalf of its customers. The company counts among its clients small businesses, nonprofits, major enterprises, and governments. It helped the Wikimedia Foundation recover from a massive DDoS attack in 2019 that rendered Wikipedia inaccessible worldwide. It protected COVID-era vaccine distribution systems. It serves companies like Shopify and institutions like Arizona State University.
The scale is staggering, but Zatlyn has consistently resisted the temptation to speak about Cloudflare in terms of dominance or market share. The language she reaches for is always about the mission — building a better internet — and about what remains undone. "We're still in the early innings of how people, services and businesses will interact online over the next 30 years," she said in 2025, fifteen years in and still using the vocabulary of beginnings.
There is something almost perverse about this — a company worth $70 billion, protecting a fifth of the web, describing itself as early-innings. But the claim is less humility than strategic clarity. If the internet's business model is about to undergo its most fundamental transformation since the advent of search, then the company best positioned at the infrastructure layer — the one already sitting between content creators and AI crawlers, between origin servers and end users, between the old web and whatever comes next — has an enormous amount of building left to do.
Zatlyn married an entrepreneur from Oakville, Ontario, in 2011. They have two children. She serves on the board of Atlassian, the Australian collaboration software company. She sits on the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Foundation board. She has been named to Fortune's 40 Under 40, Forbes' America's Richest Self-Made Women list, Inc. Magazine's Top 15 Women to Watch in Tech, and Elle Magazine's Women Who Rule Silicon Valley. She hosts a recurring series on Cloudflare TV called Yes We Can, interviewing women entrepreneurs and tech leaders. In her spare time, she does yoga and works on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.
The crossword detail is almost too apt. A person who spends her weekdays building infrastructure for the entire internet spends her weekends filling in a grid, one square at a time, looking for the word that makes everything else fit.
On September 27, 2025 — the company's fifteenth birthday, its crystal anniversary — Cloudflare did what it always does on its birthday: launched new products and features, gifts back to the internet. Zatlyn and Prince recorded a special episode together, revisiting the early days. They talked about the office above the nail salon, about Lee Holloway's code still running in the system, about culture taking shape from people's personalities and from the mission they share.
Somewhere in the conversation, Zatlyn spoke about what the company had become. "We've created something special that is generational and will still be here in 30 years," she said. "Which like just saying those words, I'm not sure I thought that when I started the company. It's almost — wow. It's a huge responsibility, huge privilege." She paused. "I feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world getting to do what I get to do because it's hard to recreate that."
Fifteen years earlier, above a nail salon in Palo Alto, a team that could be counted on fewer than two hands had built their first prototype. The Saskatchewan girl who almost became a doctor, who was turned away by America's immigration system and came back through Harvard's front door, who knew nothing about internet security but knew she cared enough to learn — she was still on the field.
