In 2008 a call came in from the Department of Homeland Security. The people on the line wanted to know what Matthew Prince's spam-tracking data was worth. Prince ran a small company called Unspam Technologies, which supported an open-source project called Project Honey Pot, and he had not expected the government to ring. That call, as he has told it, started the road to Cloudflare.
He was born in Salt Lake City in 1974 and raised in Park City, Utah. His father was a journalist and restaurateur; his mother owned gift stores. She sneaked him into University of Utah computer science classes when he was a child, and he had an Apple II Plus at seven. He went to Trinity College, where he edited the student newspaper, then to law school at the University of Chicago, and he worked at a law firm before teaching cyberlaw.
His father was a journalist and restaurateur; his mother owned gift stores.
The technical half of the story belonged to Lee Holloway. A Cupertino high school graduate who studied computer science at UC Santa Cruz, Holloway was introduced to Prince through a professor and became Unspam's chief software architect. The third founder arrived at Harvard Business School. Michelle Zatlyn grew up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, studied chemistry at McGill, interned at Google and worked at Toshiba before business school. She has said she knew nothing about internet security. She cared, she said, about liking her work.
The three entered Harvard's Dubilier business plan prize and won $50,000. Holloway built the first working prototype while Prince and Zatlyn wrote the plan. The company was founded on 26 July 2009. They briefly considered the name WebWall before choosing Cloudflare, a firewall in the cloud. In 2010 they pitched at a TechCrunch Disrupt competition; Holloway, the engineer behind it, did not go on stage.
The fall-out was slow and personal. In 2012 a hacker group called UGNazi took over accounts belonging to Prince and redirected visitors to the site 4chan. In 2015 Holloway stepped down from the company. The IPO filing explained why: the debilitating effects of frontotemporal dementia, a rare brain disease. Prince and Zatlyn called him the genius who architected the platform, and named their IPO Project Holloway. Years later the company faced a different test, when a bug dubbed Cloudbleed leaked customer data in 2017, and it faced anger for hosting sites such as The Daily Stormer before cutting them off.
Cloudflare listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 13 September 2019 at $15 a share. Its 2025 revenue was about $2.17 billion, still with a net loss of $102 million, and its market value was about $87 billion in November 2026. In San Francisco, a wall of lava lamps still supplies randomness for its encryption.
The lesson is in how the company began: a side project gave three people a view of the web's attackers that nobody else had, and they asked what that vantage point might be worth.