Michelle Zatlyn (Cloudflare) - Scaling with Resilience
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2021
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Michelle Zatlyn is the co-founder, president, and Chief Operating Officer of Cloudflare, an internet security, performance, and reliability company that is on a mission to help build a better internet. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, Zatlyn discusses the intense challenges involved in scaling a high-growth business, and offers insights about how to find optimism and build a great team amid those challenges.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Who you are defines how you build. |
| 0:05.0 | This is the Entrepreneural Thought Leader series. |
| 0:09.0 | Brought to you by Stanford E. Corner. |
| 0:13.0 | Today we are delighted to welcome Michelle Zatlin to ETL. |
| 0:19.0 | Michelle is the co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare, an internet |
| 0:24.7 | security performance and reliability company that is on a mission to help build a better internet. |
| 0:30.6 | Michelle is also another testament to how America is the beneficiary of outstanding Canadian talent. |
| 0:36.5 | Michelle was born and raised in Canada, went to McGill, where she got her bachelor's degree |
| 0:41.5 | in chemistry for all you chemistry majors out there, as well as business, and went on to do |
| 0:46.6 | everything from being an economic research analyst to marketing, to being a product manager, |
| 0:51.7 | before she came all down to the good old United States for business school at Harvard. |
| 0:56.2 | And she got her MBA at Harvard. |
| 0:58.5 | And at Harvard, she also met Matt Prince, who was going to be her future co-founder on this wild journey of starting Cloudflare. |
| 1:05.7 | And at the end of business school, she also worked at Google, did a stint at Google. |
| 1:09.6 | And then at the end of business school in 2009, she founded and started Cloudflare with Matt. 12 years later now, Cloudflare |
| 1:17.6 | is a $21 billion company with over 1,800 employees. And Michelle is still at the helm as the C-O, |
| 1:27.0 | which is very rare to have a founder for that full |
| 1:29.3 | arc. So please join me in welcoming Michelle. Michelle, lots of virtual love and applause from you from |
| 1:35.9 | the broader YouTube and Stanford communities. Thank you for the warm welcome, Ravi. And I will say, |
| 1:42.2 | I do a lot of speaking. And that may have been the best, |
| 1:45.7 | one of the best introductions I've ever been given. So maybe you should just come with me all around |
| 1:49.6 | and you can just do that again because that was good. Oh, I'm happy to. I'm happy to. Well, thank you, |
... |
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