Founders and CEOs on Reddit

Matthew Prince

Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare

How we know it's theirs

His 2014 r/IAmA AMA, posted from this account

We retrieved 6 posts and 23 comments from u/EastDakota, dated 2006 to 2021, most often in r/IAmA, r/technology and r/netsec.

Best moment

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “I am CloudFlare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince, AMA”

Hi Matt How did you get some of your first customers? Any strategies you can share?

u/EastDakota replied

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CloudFlare was born, in part, out of Project Honey Pot (http://www.projecthoneypot.org), an open source project that Lee (@icqheretic) and I started 10+ years ago. CloudFlare's first users were Project Honey Pot members. Our first email to them asked for a helluva leap of faith. Originally, the way you signed up for CloudFlare was by giving us your registrar's username/password. We wrote a little crawler that would login to your registrar, scrape all the DNS info, and then update your name servers. When we first emailed people we didn't have a UI beyond a little box that said something like: "Give us your GoDaddy username/password." It was pretty crazy that people did it, but we'd built a ton of trust with them over the years running PHPot without ever asking for anything in return.

The other fun PHPot story was that when we were first starting we didn't have any money for equipment. Michelle (@zatlyn) suggested that we email all the PHPot users who lived around the Bay Area to see if they had any extra servers. So we did. Emailed about 100 people. Got a ton of replies. Michelle drove around in her little Jetta picking up all the servers. None of them worked, but we were able to take parts from them to cobble together 2 that kind of ran. It was on those two servers we built the first prototype of CloudFlare.

More moments

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “I am CloudFlare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince, AMA”

Did you write much of the original cloudflare code base?...if so, what was the most difficult thing about transitioning into your current non-coding role? What do the 3 remaining lines you wrote in CloudFlare do?

u/EastDakota replied

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Lee Holloway, one of my co-founders, was the technical genius behind CloudFlare and wrote the vast majority of the code. I built the first version of our front end and some other random bits of code along the way. The last bit of my code that is left is around our Always Online feature. If you look at how it handles background AJAX requests to see if the site has come back online and think, "That's janky," now you know why.

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “I am CloudFlare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince, AMA”

Hi Matt, What were some of the challenges you faced when starting up CloudFlare in the beginning? If you could sum up the first few years of CloudFlare in one word, what would it be?

u/EastDakota replied

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Everyone thought we were crazy. "You're going to get people to switch their DNS to you, route their traffic through you, and you're going to do it by shipping equipment to locations around the world?! You're nuts." I saw someone Tweet the other day that every entrepreneur's superpower is naivety. I think that's right. Had we known all of what was really involved in building CloudFlare I don't think we'd have ever gotten started. But I'm glad we did and enjoy coming to work every day to build something that is literally help build a better Internet.