>>Block on the ground from galvanize San Francisco. It's the cue covering amplify women's pitch night. Now here's John furrier. >>Okay. Hello everyone. We are on the ground here in San Francisco at the galvanize incubator. I'm John fur, the founder of Silicon angle media, just the cube on the ground. And we're here. Michelle Lin. Who's the co-founder of CloudFlare and also head of user experience, giving a fireside chat here at the girls in tech amplify event about women in entrepreneurship. Co-founder entrepreneur yourself. Welcome to our on the ground. Thanks for joining me. >>Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, >>John. So Ashley we've been, we love the women in tech. We just spent an amazing time at Grace Hopper, which 16,000 people. I was one of 1000 men. So I felt I loved it actually. So I love many women in tech, but here more importantly in the bay area. And we're in San Francisco, Silicon valley entrepreneurship is in the blood. >>Yes. Yeah, no, we're so lucky where we, where we live. I feel like, you know, so many people, when you spend time in the valley, you realize, you know, everyone's talking about the next great idea. It's, you know, you go to a party, everyone's talking about what, what they're working on or an idea they have. It's not like that everywhere. And so we're really lucky where we get to live and, and have the resources failed to execute on these different, sometimes crazy ideas. >>So you're giving a fireside chat. You just came off the stage here with all these women entrepreneurs to pitch tonight, tonight. So it's all about getting the pitch out there, talking about your experience. Obviously CloudFlare, your company, you co-founded and head of user experience. You're doing a great job. Great success. You guys, you great customer base, great growth. What, what did you talk about? >>Well, what, well, what did I talk about? So the, you know, we launched at an event like that six years ago. And so, you know, what I talked about with the audience was I was in your seat six years ago, and now six years later, we have a great business. We have real customers that are using CloudFlare. We help make the internet faster, safer, better for more than 4 million internet properties, 15,000 new sites sign up every single day, whether you're small business or large business, a blog, an API, an app, you can use CloudFlare to be fast and safe. And, and what I shared was I was in your seat six years ago, and here are some lessons or ahas I've had along the way that I wish I had known. >>How did you guys get started? Take a minute to explain the story. Were you guys rubbing nickels together? Did you have the master idea? Was it heavily funded on the front end? Take us through the journey, the beginning. >>So we started to work on this idea of if you are a small business or somebody with content online, how can you be as fast, as safe as somebody like google.com? google.com is the fastest and most secure internet property on the internet. How can you make that available to anybody with internet property? And there are over 350 million and we said, feels like there's an opportunity. And that's how we started. And so we started with, could we execute on this? And we started to make progress. We were students when we started. And >>So that helps in the overhead. >>It, it did help us the overhead and whether you're a student or whether you're doing it as part of Y Combinator or, >>Or moonlighting or project >>Lighting, there's lots of different ways that people do. But we were, students's great time to start working on a business idea cuz you're right, your overhead's very low. And when we graduated, we felt so much passion around the idea. We moved out to California to give it a go full time. And when I think back now, I think what was I thinking? I mean, it was, >>Was it blind? Faith just let's go out there. >>It wasn't blind faith. We had, we had, we had done some initial validation, but we didn't have a working product. And so it was early. Yeah. And we came out here to build it, but we, but we believed so strongly in it that we wanted to give it a go. We kind of said, feels like we're onto something. You felt it. I felt like that I'm so I moved, we packed our things in a U-Haul. We were living in Boston. My, my, my co-founder and I, we packed our things in U-Haul him and his mother drove the U-Haul from Boston to San Francisco. >>That's a good mom, >>A very good mom. You, >>The mom award for >>That mom, mom award. And, and we showed up and, and you know, for the next year and a half >>Working good mom become a user. Cause you know, the mom test is always key for right. Yes. Products, validation, especially head of user experience. >>Right, right. Exactly. We, she is not, but we have a lot of small businesses, bloggers, large businesses. Yeah. A lots different types of customers, nonprofits that now use CloudFlare to be fast, safe, and available around the world. But it was really this conviction around. We felt like we could democratize the web. We felt like if you were a business with something to say, we wanted to give you the same resources as Google's technical operations team. >>You know, one of the things I'm observing, I've been out here now, 18 years, I moved from Boston as well in 1999. And when I sold my company out here, it's like, okay, I have to be here. It's so much different, different culture and picked up and, and moved. Right? So what's your advice now? Cuz now the world's different. There's so much more entrepreneurship because the democratization of obviously mobile and cloud have really created a low bar to get into the game. And so you're seeing a lot more diversity, certainly not enough, but a lot more. What's your advice of folks? Even my youngest daughter, who's a sophomore in college. They're oh dad, I got a nap. I'm gonna do this app. I'm like, okay, hold now, settle down. What's your advice. Cause this is now kind of breeding and people are trying to find out when do they know the gut? Is the gut feeling? Do you trust your gut? What is that feeling? It's like falling in love for the first time. You don't, you really know. And so you do it, but you know, I'm saying it's one of those things. >>Well, one thing I've learned is don't give relationship advice. So, you know, I, I, I, you know, the, so I guess the same kind of goes up to the entrepreneurs, but there are a couple things that I've learned, you know, again, we've we started CloudFlare six years ago and things are going very well. We're really proud of I I get up every day and I think, wow, I'm so proud of the work we're doing. And so, you know, I think it's, I love the idea that people are dabbling and, and that it is much easier to pursue these ideas. And I think that's amazing and we should, we should, you know, hold onto that dearly. But doing things as a side project versus full time are two different things. Right? And I, so the questions that entrepreneurs or some founding teams, good questions, limit tests that they can ask themselves are, do I believe so passionately about this idea that I want to commit the next eight to 10 years to it? >>Cause that's how long it is. It's eight to 10 years. This is not, doesn't take a one. It doesn't take two years. It is average time to exit. If you take all the startups is eight to 10 years. And so it's like, do I wanna work on this from the next eight to 10 years? And when we started CloudFlare six years ago, you know, we would go around and say, Hey, we wanna help make their should out a better place. And people would laugh at us. They said, that's an audacious goal. Why you never, but we, I >>Love that many J outta something, the contrarians are the ones who do it. I mean, maybe Nutton DRA. I remember he just went public. He was laughed at light speed, funded him and look at no one got that until four years in like, whoa, he thought differently. So trust your gut and you gotta have a belief. Well, >>It's just this idea of like, do I wanna do this? Like, is there something big here that I wanna work? Is this a, a, like a media enough problem and idea that I wanna work on it for the next eight, 10 years? Yeah. And if the answer is yes, then it's a great, then, then yes, you should keep doing it. And then, and then the second thing is, can I attract all the right people to make it happen? >>Talking about the team dynamic? Cause I know, you know, I've done a bunch of ventures myself and I always, again, I agree with you. I do give relationship advice. I just, but that's me. I always say, be careful on the team. You can't dial a team. You can't like just dial up and say, I need a co-founder or I need this person. It really is a unique selection process. Your thoughts on that, because it also depends in the dynamic funding cycle. If you're self-funding or your bootstrapping to revenue, certainly if you're contrarian, no one's gonna get funding. Maybe some seed will come your way, but that won't last long. Yeah. So the team really is gonna be the, the make or break your thoughts on team selection, team process. >>It, I most important thing I do every day is, is the team we work with. It's can you attract the right people to come work at CloudFlare can make, can you set them up for success so they can do their best work. And I spend 99% of my time thinking about that. And it's never enough, like it's >>In the early days when you guys were moving out here, did you have funding? >>When we moved out here? We didn't. We, we didn't, we, we, so we didn't have funding. When we moved out here, there's three, co-founders working on it, making progress. And then it became, >>Did you make revenue first or get funding? Seat funding? >>We, so we worked on it. We kinda felt like we had a lot of conviction. We there's a small team, the three of us, we ended up raising money and then we hired folks and then we built the product. So we definitely had funding before revenue, but we, the founders worked on it before, before anyone else, because we just couldn't. And >>Who were the investors? >>Vero, peon, NEA, union square ventures outta New York. And then some, >>Several, they had a good sizeable and tier one VC's NEA. Certainly great VC. Yeah, we have great, great history. >>Yes, we have. Excellent. We I'm, I'm very biased, >>But yes, Fred contrarian, which is good. The contrarians usually get the big hits. >>Well, the, the union score ventures outta a New York, they really understand how the internet works. I mean, that's their whole thesis. Yeah. And I mean, they're very technical venture capitalist from, I mean, Fred, Brad, Albert, I mean, Andy, they all really understand how the internet works. And when you're building a company like CloudFlare, where we're helping make the internet a better place, that's very useful that they understand how the internet works. >>So I gotta ask you, we have a minute left. I want to get the women perspective because I was just talking at world of Watson, certainly. And then at Cuban with some of the red hat folks and talking about diversity, and I said, look at 50% of the population is women. Those are the users now. So like, why are male gonna be developing the product? We need to have a perspective. So, you know, cause we're on this whole mansplaining thing. And I'm like, well, mansplaining is also software too. If men are developing the software. So there is an aspect of user user experience that has to take into account the target audience. >>Yes, absolutely. >>The easy answer is get more women to design product, but how do you, how do you, how do you think about that? And what's your thoughts on the current state of the, the, >>So there are more men than women in technology. Yeah, absolutely. But there are a lot of women and it's not like I know every single one of them, there are a lot of us and they're working on so many interesting. There are so many amazing women working on interesting problems in tech. And I think that's great. And so showing more of those stories to inspire the next generation women is awesome. I think that there are a lot of women who are trying to figure out what they wanna do with their career, might making a career switch. If you're at all interest in technology, it's a great industry. You get, you get to work on very hard problems. At scale. People are very smart and talented. It's a growing industry, which means financially there's often like a good outcome. And so I hope that more women will get into the industry. >>You know, surfaces, the surface area of opportunities are expanding too big data as attracted a whole nother realm of visualization. Where are the geeky data geek artists where are not just not just software anymore. It's an increased surface area, >>Health tech. How do you do? I mean, there's so many different. I mean, technology is a touches, so many different facets of our lives. So for folks who are like, well, I don't know anything about it, but I'm kind of interested, encourage, again, women and men to say, this is a great industry that you should really take seriously. And we need more and more smart, passionate people who are really willing to roll their sleeves and work hard to come and execute because there's so much opportunity ahead that there's more opportunity ahead of us than behind us. It's a great industry to pursue >>Michelle final question. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now. >>The coolest thing I'm working on right now? Well, we, I, the favorite part of my job is people. So I get to hire lots of great folks all the time. So that's what I love the most. And so it's hiring recruiting, building out the different function teams, both here in San Francisco as well around the world. We have a London office, the Singapore office. That's what I love the best. So that's the coolest thing. Always people, people, people, the second coolest is we're thinking about our 2017 plan, right? We're at the end of 2016, it's, what's the product roadmap look like for next year? What does that, how does the budget stack up against that? And I think that's pretty opportunity because I think we've done a very good job as a business executing to date. But as you go through that excu exercise of saying, Hey, what does 2017 look like? And having to like write it down. You realize we have so many things left to do ahead of us. And I think that's a good place to be in >>Final, final question. Since I always get these questions after my final question, which is becoming part of the course with great guests like yourself, what is the, the, the, the, your advice for folks out there, whether it's small, medium size business or enterprise to a large scale enterprise customer who says, you know what we are on this digital transformation, we are gonna be cloud native. We're implementing more DevOps, our developers now on the front lines of the business value, how should they be thinking about how to craft their apps, their experiences and their teams. >>So we work with a lot of large organizations who, who are saying, Hey, how do we make sure we have all our security aligned? Or how do we make sure we, we have a global audience? How do we make sure it's faster around the world? And these are hard problems that they have to deal with. And I would say that large organizations respond in two ways. And I think some that are very, very good. This is a lesson that I think other large organizations don't necessarily no one's telling them is we have, the days of sending out RFPs are kind of, don't do that. Don't send on RFP. What, what, what, what is a yeah, >>Agile, right? >>Well, or in RFPs, they serve a purpose. It's fine, but what's better. We have a lot of large organizations that say, here are the problems we need to solve. We think that your team is smart or technical, or we'd like to get to know your team. Could you help us solve these problems and how, and it becomes a much more collaborative process and you basically large organiza, large organizations get the power of our engineering team to help solve their problems, to help educate their engineering team of a ways to approach it. And the really smart large organizations are doing that. And so it's not an RFP, it's saying, Hey, these are the problems. They come to companies like CloudFlare or others saying, Hey, you guys seem like you're gonna be around for a while. How could you help us solve these problems? And the good companies will say, well, we can help you with these. We can't help you with those. Yeah. Go talk to these people for those >>To lock in one year, licenses are like, >>And >>It's not even budgeting differently. >>Right. And it might not even be, you know, necessarily, Hey, it's not a contrary. It's more always have a conversation and you start to develop a relationship. Okay. Now we're ready to buy. And you know, each other, it's, again, it's hardship, it's a partnership and some large organizations approach kind of the digital transformation that way. And I feel like that's a very smart way versus, oh, this is our problem. Here's list of companies. We're gonna ask solutions to and get you to bid on it, which is fine once you know what the problem is. But there's a whole step before during these digital transformations, if you're a large business of, I don't even know how to characterize the exact problems I'm solving and the great organizations are saying, let's go get some of this, this tech talent from these small organizations to help us think through how to solve it >>And work together, hold >>Hands, work >>Together, hold hands across the bridge to the future. >>And so that's something where I think that that can be a great leverage point. >>Michelle Adeline co-founder of CloudFlare. Congratulations on your success. Go get CloudFlare, great product we're gonna do that I've been convinced to do. We should be using it@siliconangle.com and the cube. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining me. I'm John fur here on the ground at Galvan I in San Francisco for the girls in tech startup pitch competition. We right back with more. Thanks for watching.