Cloudflare, Inc.
Leadership History
2 leaders · 2009 to present
Matthew Prince is the CEO of Cloudflare, in the role since 2009.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew Prince | Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chair | 2009 | Present | 17 |
| Michelle Zatlyn | Co-Founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer | 2009 | Present | 17 |
Cloudflare sits between internet users and the websites, apps, and corporate networks they connect to. When traffic passes through its network, Cloudflare caches content close to users, filters out attacks such as DDoS floods and malicious bots, and can run customer code at the edge. It says roughly 20% of websites use its services. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company went public on the NYSE in September 2019 and had 5,156 full-time employees at the end of 2025. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Cloudflare makes money by selling subscriptions and usage-based services that run on a single global network. Millions of websites use a free plan; paying customers move up to Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans for advanced DDoS mitigation, web application firewall, bot management, and support. Enterprises also buy Cloudflare One, a Zero Trust and SASE suite priced per user that replaces corporate VPNs, plus email security. A fast-growing developer platform (Workers, R2 storage, D1, Workers AI) bills on usage. Because every server runs the full software stack, new products ride on infrastructure Cloudflare already operates, which keeps non-GAAP gross margin in the mid-70s (75.8% in 2025).
Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chair
2009 – Present
17 years (current)
Co-founded Cloudflare in 2009, led it through its September 2019 NYSE IPO, and has grown annual revenue past $2 billion (2025) while expanding from web security into Zero Trust, developer, and AI services.
Co-Founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer
2009 – Present
17 years (current)
Co-founded Cloudflare and built its operations and go-to-market organization.
Co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 with Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway and, as President and COO, has led operations and company-building as Cloudflare scaled to more than 5,000 employees.
These officers report to the chief executive and are not part of the CEO timeline above.
Cloudflare still loses money on a GAAP basis: its 2025 GAAP operating loss was $207.2 million, and the Q2 2026 GAAP operating loss widened to $205.7 million as stock-based compensation and AI infrastructure spending rose. Gross margin is also compressing, falling from 78.7% (non-GAAP, 2024) to 73.1% in Q2 2026 as the company adds GPU capacity and serves more usage-heavy workloads. In Zero Trust it competes against established security vendors Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks, and hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud bundle CDN and DDoS protection into their clouds. Reliability is a reputational risk too: a configuration error caused a widespread global outage on November 18, 2025, briefly taking down many large websites.
Matthew Prince is the co-founder, CEO, and chair of Cloudflare. He holds a BA from Trinity College, a JD from the University of Chicago Law School, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Before Cloudflare he co-founded Unspam Technologies and Project Honey Pot.
Matthew Prince co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 with Michelle Zatlyn (who serves as President, Chief Operating Officer, and Director) and Lee Holloway (the first lead engineer, who designed much of Cloudflare's early software infrastructure).
In 2008 while studying at Harvard Business School, Prince and Zatlyn realized that Project Honey Pot (which tracked how spammers harvested email addresses) had accumulated large cybersecurity threat data that could be turned into a cloud shield to protect websites from attacks.
Cloudflare launched publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September 2010.
Cloudflare priced its NYSE IPO at $15 per share in September 2019 under the ticker NET, raising about $525 million. Prince kept voting control with co-founder Michelle Zatlyn through Class B shares.
Prince has argued that infrastructure providers should generally stay content-neutral, while explaining publicly when Cloudflare dropped sites such as The Daily Stormer (2017), 8chan (2019), and Kiwi Farms (2022). He has also pushed for free encryption and, since 2024, for publishers to control and get paid for AI crawler access.
Co-founder Michelle Zatlyn is President and COO, and Thomas Seifert has been Chief Financial Officer since 2017.
The founders operate on the mission 'To help build a better internet', ensuring that the speed, security, and computing power previously available only to internet giants are accessible to everyone, from individual developers to Fortune 500 enterprises.
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO. He is known for his highly outspoken nature, occasionally sparking massive controversy by unilaterally deciding to kick extremely toxic websites off Cloudflare's protection network.
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