Matthew Prince
Co-founder 2009Background
Matthew Prince co-founded Cloudflare after realizing that the network built to track email spam could be repurposed to secure and accelerate all web traffic, a pivot that saved the company from insolvency and created the foundation for the modern edge computing industry.
Role at Cloudflare, Inc.
Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn, emerging from a specific security project initiated at Harvard Business School. The founding story is a brilliant example of transforming a niche utility into a global infrastructure company. In 2004, prior to attending Harvard, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway (a brilliant systems architect) had created 'Project Honey Pot.' It was essentially an open-source community project designed to track how spammers harvested email addresses from websites. Website owners installed a small piece of code that allowed Prince and Holloway to monitor amounts of malicious web traffic. However, the project only tracked the bad actors; it didn't actually stop them. By 2009 Prince was attending Harvard Business School and partnered with classmate Michelle Zatlyn to figure out how to turn this dataset into a viable business. They realized that the underlying architecture of the internet was flawed. When a website faced a surge in traffic (either legitimate or a malicious DDoS attack), the servers would crash. Traditional hardware solutions (like physical firewalls) were expensive and only accessible to corporations. Prince, Holloway, and Zatlyn founded Cloudflare with a foundational mission: to 'build a better internet' by providing enterprise-grade performance and security to anyone with a website, routed through the cloud. They launched at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2010. Their immediate success was driven by Lee Holloway's brilliant, efficient network architecture. Tragically Holloway was later diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and stepped down, but the foundational architecture he built allowed Prince and Zatlyn to scale Cloudflare into an entity that now handles a significant percentage of all global internet traffic.