Cloudflare Co-Founder Michelle Zatlyn’s Advice on Hiring, Fundraising, Scaling, and more

Michelle Zatlyn (@zatlyn), co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare, joined Village Global co-founder and partner Ben Casnocha for a masterclass with our founders in late 2020.

They discussed:

The origin story of Cloudflare, including how the co-founders met, and how Michelle realized that she too could start a company.

Her advice on fundraising after raising more than $300M for Cloudflare, including why you should keep the rest of the VC partnership in mind, and how to show rather than tell in your pitch.

How they found the best talent, including why their blog brought them plenty of inbound interest, and why searching far and wide around the globe for engineers helped them build their team quickly.

Why they don’t use recruiters at Cloudflare.

How to turn a weakness into a strength.

How to process feedback and when it makes sense to ignore it.

Stories of extreme frugality in the early days of the company, including building their own Ikea desks.

How an emotional response by customers helped them know they had product-market fit.

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