BlackRock vs Cloudflare: Founders, CEOs and History

BlackRock

Founded

1988

Headquarters

New York, NY

Current CEO

Larry Fink

Employees

24,900

Cloudflare

Founded

2009

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Current CEO

Matthew Prince

Employees

5,156

BlackRock

• Larry Fink

  Fink joined First Boston in 1976 and became one of its youngest managing directors, running a mortgage-bond desk that was highly profitable until a 1986 interest-rate move cost it about $100 million.

• Robert S. Kapito

  Kapito worked alongside Fink at First Boston and joined him in founding BlackRock in 1988.

• Susan Wagner

  Wagner ran many of the functions that let a small bond shop grow into a global firm, including strategy, corporate development and operations.

• Barbara Novick

  For roughly BlackRock's first two decades Novick ran its global client business, winning the institutional mandates that funded the firm's early growth.

• Ben Golub

  Golub led much of the quantitative work behind BlackRock's risk-first approach, building analytics for mortgage prepayment, interest-rate and credit risk that became central to Aladdin.

• Hugh Frater

  Frater was one of the mortgage specialists who helped launch BlackRock's fixed income business and held senior roles at the firm before leaving.

• Ralph Schlosstein

  Schlosstein brought corporate finance and public policy experience to the founding team; before Lehman he worked at the US Treasury and on the White House domestic policy staff during the Carter administration.

• Keith Anderson

  Anderson ran BlackRock's fixed income investing for two decades, the core of the firm until iShares arrived with the 2009 BGI deal, and sat on its executive committee. In 2008 he left to become Chief Investment Officer of Soros Fund Management.

Cloudflare

• Matthew Prince

  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.

• Michelle Zatlyn

  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.

• Lee Holloway

  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.

BlackRock

1. Larry Fink1988–present

   Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

   Fink co-founded BlackRock in 1988 and has run it for its entire history, taking it from a bond boutique to the world's largest asset manager.

   Source
2. Susan Wagner1988–2012

   Co-Founder, Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman

   Co-founder who led strategy, corporate development and operations, including BlackRock's side of the MLIM merger and the BGI acquisition, before retiring from management in 2012 and joining the board.

   Source
3. Robert S. Kapito2007–present

   President

   Co-founder who long ran BlackRock's Portfolio Management Group across fixed income, equity, liquidity and alternatives before becoming President in 2007, overseeing day-to-day operations.

   Source
4. Rob Goldstein2014–present

   Chief Operating Officer

   Named COO in 2014 after running BlackRock's global institutional client business; oversees operations across the firm and sits on the management committee created in 2025.

   Source
5. Martin Small2023–present

   Chief Financial Officer

   CFO since 2023; leads financial planning and investor reporting and has laid out the 2030 targets for private markets, technology and digital asset revenue on earnings calls.

   Source
6. Adebayo Ogunlesi2024–present

   Chairman and CEO, Global Infrastructure Partners

   Founder of GIP who joined BlackRock's leadership when the deal closed in October 2024; leads its infrastructure business, including the Aligned Data Centers and AES transactions.

   Source

Cloudflare

1. Matthew Prince2009–present

   Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chair

   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.

   Source
2. Michelle Zatlyn2009–present

   Co-Founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer

   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.

   Source
3. Thomas Seifert2017–present

   Chief Financial Officer

   As CFO, he consistently delivered high revenue growth while carefully controlling capital expenditures, allowing Cloudflare to heavily invest in its serverless Edge computing network.

   Source

BlackRock

• Preqin2025$3.2B
• HPS Investment Partners2025$12B
• Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP)2024$12.5B
• Aperio Group2021$1.1B
• eFront2019$1.3B
• Barclays Global Investors (BGI) and iShares2009$13.5B

Cloudflare

• Human Native2026Undisclosed
• Astro Technology Company2026Undisclosed
• VoidZero2026Undisclosed
• Replicate2025Undisclosed
• Nefeli Networks2024Undisclosed
• Baselime2024Undisclosed