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Reflections on TechCrunch Disrupt Launch

10/04/2010

2 min read

When Michelle, Lee, and I started working on Cloudflare back in the
Winter of 2009 the plan was always to launch at TechCrunch. You make
plans like that in order to give you some sense of a light at the end of
the very long tunnel that is building a startup, but it's rare that
things actually work out as you plan. We thought we were onto something
special based on the feedback from our early beta users, but Cloudflare
was really a long shot for TechCrunch. We're a tough story to tell,
we're not the typical TechCrunch consumer Internet company, and, as Mike
Arrington said on stage right before we won the award for "Most
Innovative Company," we're a bit "boring" and doing something akin to
"muffler repair" for the Internet.

Turns out the Internet has had a broken muffler for a while, and seeing
the pent up demand for a service like Cloudflare has been awesome. In
the seven days since our launch, the traffic through our network has
increased almost 10x and, if you measure all the page views or unique
visitors passing through our site, in one week we went from the 1,000th
largest site online to one of the top 50. We now power more page views
and see more unique visitors than a major site like CNN.com. That's
pretty amazing.

If you're a startup and you get a chance to launch at a TechCrunch
conference, I can't recommend it more highly. Heather, Erick, Mike, and
everyone else on the TechCrunch team were professional and worked hard
to make sure we told Cloudflare's story in as compelling a way as
possible. The launch of a startup is a sacred event. You only get to do
it once. We couldn't have been happier with how Cloudflare's went, and
we can't wait to tell everyone what we're up to next!

Reflections on TechCrunch Disrupt
Launch

We protect entire corporate networks, help customers build Internet-scale applications efficiently, accelerate any website or Internet application, ward off DDoS attacks, keep hackers at bay, and can help you on your journey to Zero Trust.

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Matthew Prince|@eastdakota
Cloudflare|@cloudflare

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