Michelle Zatlyn

I'm Incredibly excited to be joining @Cloudflare today as SVP of Emerging Technology. I’ll be leading ETI, Cloudflare’s skunkworks, working with the ridiculously talented and ambitious team there to build Cloudflare’s next generation of products and businesses. The mandate for ETI is to look beyond the core business today, make ambitious bets on what will matter tomorrow, and turn those bets into businesses that shape the company’s future. I’ve long believed that open and free access is one of the most powerful forces we have for creativity, competition, connection, and opportunity. Open source software, open models, and access to knowledge give more people the ability to build—and an open Internet lets them reach the world. But keeping the web open means constantly pushing back against walled gardens and gatekeepers. As AI changes how people find information, use software, and interact with each other, preserving that access becomes even more consequential. Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to protect the open web and has a long history of doing so. We saw it again two weeks ago: when the php2shell vulnerabilities hit PHP, which runs almost 70% of the web, Cloudflare had protections live before the flaws were even public, automatically, for every site behind it, including the ones on the free plan. That independent global network puts powerful capabilities in the hands of builders everywhere. On Cloudflare’s developer platform, you don’t pick a region: every service runs in every data center, in nearly 350 cities around the world. And it’s backed by a culture of experimentation and shipping that I’ve admired for years. The team consistently turns ambitious technical ideas into things people can actually use. I’ve been a Cloudflare user for over a decade, and today it’s where I build and run my own projects, from a website for a friend’s barbecue restaurant to the infrastructure behind my home network. I’ve experienced firsthand how much it makes possible. From Stack Overflow to Stacks to investing in and advising founders, I’ve always loved building things that help people build things. The common thread is giving more people access to the tools, knowledge, and infrastructure to build on their own terms. I love working with people who see what’s possible, giving them the room to pursue it, and building the teams and businesses that make it real. At Cloudflare, I get to bring those things together at an extraordinary scale, in service of a mission I deeply believe in: helping build a better Internet. There’s a lot to build. I’d love to hear what you think we should take on. And if you want to come work on it, DMs are open.

Pick your cofounders carefully and everything else is so much more fun!

Catching a ride to SF with @tiesto and rip this Cloudflare show together

Cloudflare Connect is easily the best conf I’ve been to in a long time. Kudos to the team behind it.