Vendor lineage
Cloudflare
Began as a project asking where spam came from, and became infrastructure after users asked it to stop the spam instead.
In 2004 Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway built Project Honey Pot to answer a narrow question: where does email spam actually come from? Anyone with a website could participate, and thousands in more than 185 countries did. The users kept making the same request - do not just track them, stop them - and five years later that request became a company.
Prince met Michelle Zatlyn at Harvard Business School during a sabbatical, described the project, and the two of them plus Holloway founded Cloudflare in July 2009. It won the school's business plan competition that April and closed a $2.1M Series A in November from Venrock and Pelion.
The product was a reverse proxy you joined by changing your DNS, which is a genuinely low barrier: no hardware, no software, no contract, and a free tier from the beginning. That freemium decision was strategic rather than generous. Every free site sends traffic through the network, and every attack against a free site is an attack the network learns to recognise for everyone else.
**That is the same argument this timeline shows three times before.** IronPort made it about email sender reputation in 2002. Zscaler made it about web traffic in 2007. CrowdStrike made it about endpoint behaviour in 2013. Cloudflare made it about the web itself, and got its initial threat data from a spam-tracking project - which is where IronPort had started too.
Public launch was at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2010, and traffic went from roughly 50 million page views a month to over 5 billion within the first year.
The company has since become something harder to categorise: DDoS mitigation, WAF, DNS, zero-trust access, and a serverless compute platform that runs code in the same points of presence that serve the cache - which turns a content network into somewhere applications actually execute. It went public in 2019, and its network now spans more than 300 cities.
It also occupies an awkward position it did not entirely choose. A company that will serve almost anyone, at scale, for free, ends up making decisions about who may remain online - and has been criticised both for acting and for declining to.
- Cloudflare's own account - Project Honey Pot in 2004, the users asking them to stop the attacks, meeting at HBS, the November 2009 Series A with Venrock and Pelion
- Company history: founded July 2009, the April 2009 HBS competition win, TechCrunch Disrupt launch, 50M to 5B page views in the first year