Matthew Prince

Matthew Prince studied English and computer science at Trinity College, earned a law degree from the University of Chicago, and later an MBA from Harvard Business School. Before Cloudflare he co-founded Unspam Technologies and, with Lee Holloway, started Project Honey Pot in 2004 to track how spammers harvested email addresses. He also taught internet law, which shaped his later public positions on content neutrality and privacy.

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.