Cloudflare vs Unilever: Founders, CEOs and History

Cloudflare

Founded

2009

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Current CEO

Matthew Prince

Employees

5,156

Unilever

Founded

1929

Headquarters

London, United Kingdom

Current CEO

Fernando Fernandez

Employees

96,092

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.

Unilever

• William Hesketh Lever

  William Hesketh Lever (later Lord Leverhulme) co-founded Lever Brothers with his brother James in 1885 and built it around Sunlight Soap, one of the first branded, individually wrapped soaps sold at mass scale.

• Samuel van den Bergh

  Samuel van den Bergh led Van den Bergh, a Dutch margarine maker that became one of Jurgens' main rivals. The two families combined their businesses into Margarine Unie in 1927, and Margarine Unie merged with Lever Brothers in 1929 to create Unilever.

• Anton Jurgens

  Anton Jurgens' family firm was among the first to manufacture margarine commercially in the Netherlands after the product was invented in France. Jurgens competed for decades with the Van den Bergh family before the two merged into Margarine Unie in 1927.

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.

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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

Unilever

1. Alan Jope2019–2023

   Chief Executive Officer

   Jope simplified Unilever's legal structure and organisation, which made later portfolio separations easier.

   Source
2. Hein Schumacher2023–2025

   Chief Executive Officer

   Schumacher reset Unilever around fewer, bigger brands and set up the Ice Cream demerger before stepping down in February 2025.

   Source
3. Fernando Fernandez2025–present

   Chief Executive Officer

   As CFO, the highly experienced Latin American executive enforces absolute financial discipline, attempting to restore investor confidence after years of sluggish stock performance.

   Source

Cloudflare

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

Unilever

• Dr. Squatch2025Undisclosed
• Wild2025Undisclosed
• Minimalist2025Undisclosed
• Paula's Choice2021Undisclosed
• Sir Kensington's2017Undisclosed
• Weis2017Undisclosed