CloudFlare Makes The Web Faster

If you use CloudFlare at the time you know that the answer is yes. CloudFlare ”makes sites twice as fast, protects them from attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click,” according to my July 11 interview with its co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince and its co-founder & user experience, Michelle Zatlyn. And CloudFlare is big — Prince claims that 10% of the Internet passes through its network.

The concept of CloudFlare started in January 2009 as an entrant to the HBS Business Plan competition as Project Webwall. Afterwards making it into the second round, Prince and Zatlyn decided to build a prototype in a week — and approached Holloway for help. The team won the competition.

CloudFlare just hired its 22nd employee and is “growing like crazy.” The site is “20 times” as big as it was nine months ago and now gets ”eight billion monthly page views.” It hires engineers with personality, according to Zatlyn, and wants them to share its mission of “powering a faster, safer Internet.”

If CloudFlare can hire enough good people to keep up with demand, the Internet will be faster and safer. And CloudFlare’s investors will be amply rewarded for their capital.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm he founded in 1994. By conducting over 150 consulting projects, he has helped governments and businesses to identify, evaluate and profit from growth opportunities that spring from new technologies. Three of his portfolio companies were sold for a total of $2 billion.

He teaches business strategy to undergraduate and graduate students at Babson College -- BusinessWeek ranked its undergraduate strategy department #2 in the U.S.

He has appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, CBS's Evening News and Early Show, CNBC, CNN, and PBS's Nightly Business Report as so then as on NPR's MarketPlace. And he's been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, BusinessWeek, and Fortune