I mentioned last week that when you stress a system and it does not break it gets stronger.

We have done that through COVID and the internet is stronger. Here is that MIT paper again.

This week I was lucky to have my friend Matthew Prince on ‘Panic With Friends’. He is the co-founder of 10 year old Cloudflare, a 1,200 person public company, ticker $NET, with 13 global offices, data centers in 200 cities worldwide, and a $7 billion valuation. The Wikipedia page is here for more details.

Matthew and I met when his co-founder Michelle responded to a tweet at Sundance (back in 2011) that she would give Ellen and I some tickets to movies. Ellen and I have been friends with them ever since.

Matthew took the time to walk through the origin story of the company and the very binary success/failure idea/business/company they had the passion/foresight to start.

We talk about what an anti COVID stock portfolio looks like (in hindsight) and how Cloudflare works and functions to make the internet better, safer, faster.

Every founder can learn a lot from Matthew and Cloudflare as they are at the heart of this new ‘get digital NOW’ transformation that is happening because of COVID.

I think you will see as I do why Cloudflare is such an incredible business and important internet company.

As Matthew says in the podcast, ‘the healthcare workers and the scientists deserve all the credit for being on the frontlines of this crisis, but ‘the cloud’ and companies like Cloudflare are the Ant Man to their Captain Marvel’.

You can listen to the podcast here (also on Apple podcast or Spotify just search my name).

PS – This week I learned about their third co-founder from this tweet by Matthew…

This Wired story is definitely a sad, but worthwhile read.

Full Disclosure – I continue to own shares back from the IPO.