Who Founded Cloudflare?

Matthew Prince is Cloudflare's co-founder, CEO, and board chair. In 2004 he and Lee Holloway built Project Honey Pot, which let website owners track spammers harvesting email addresses but could not stop them. While at Harvard Business School, Prince worked with classmate Michelle Zatlyn on a plan to sit in front of websites and block that traffic, and the three founded Cloudflare in 2009. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2010 with free protection for any website. Prince led Cloudflare through its September 2019 NYSE IPO and its expansion from web security into Zero Trust networking, developer services, and AI tools. Under his leadership revenue passed $2 billion in 2025 ($2.17 billion), and he has become one of the more outspoken tech executives on deplatforming, privacy, and AI crawler economics.

Matthew Prince was born in 1974 in Salt Lake City.

Michelle Zatlyn is Cloudflare's co-founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer, and a member of its board. She met Matthew Prince at Harvard Business School, where the two developed the business plan that became Cloudflare in 2009. She has led go-to-market, operations, and company-building functions as Cloudflare grew from a startup into a public company with more than 5,000 employees.

Michelle Zatlyn was born in 1979 in Prince Albert.

Lee Holloway co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 and was its first lead engineer and systems architect. He had earlier built Project Honey Pot with Matthew Prince starting in 2004, and he designed much of Cloudflare's early software infrastructure. Holloway later stepped away from the company after being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, an illness his family and Prince have spoken about publicly. Lee Holloway was born in 1981.