I am delighted to share that I have joined Cloudflare as its first Chief Information Officer to help scale the company in this new phase of its business. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be joining Cloudflare, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do my part to help build a better Internet.
At one of my previous companies, I made a bet on Cloudflare to equip us with security and performance solutions across a very decentralized global set of products and services. This is something that would have been very difficult without a cloud solution like Cloudflare’s. Since then I’ve been watching Cloudflare grow, and have always been very impressed by the speed of innovation and transparency, but also how Cloudflare operates: doing the right thing, with integrity, and above all building trust with customers and partners. The “do the right thing, even if it’s hard” mentality that I saw from Cloudflare since I started doing business with them as a customer, was key for me. When I heard that Cloudflare was looking for its first CIO I was excited to have a discussion to see if I could help.
During the interview process I got a sense of how the values that are so important to me from a culture point of view were coming across consistently from everybody that I met with. Every person I spoke with was extremely committed to helping build a better Internet; it wasn’t just a tagline. The true mission and ability to impact so many people globally was something that was super motivational for me. Also, growing the company, but doing it the right way with empathy and bringing people along. I couldn't have worked for a company where building that trust through values and integrity wasn't something that was front and center. Building a diverse team was another focus. I kept hearing this over and over again, which is something that I am very passionate about and committed to as well.
It is a very exciting time to join the team. Cloudflare just went public, and the requirements of a public company are significantly higher from a compliance point of view. Cloudflare’s culture is engineering and product driven, and all about speed of innovation and delivering value to our customers; being able to maintain that culture and output, while at the same time keeping up with new legal requirements as a public company drives significant needs in terms of systems, end-to-end processes, integration, and efficiency in general. This, in a company like Cloudflare that is growing the way it is, was a significant challenge that drew me in. At the same time, the ability to be a part of an organization working hand-in-hand with product engineering made this even more appealing, as my background is in software leading teams in both the engineering and IT departments.
I am incredibly excited for this opportunity to embark on this journey with everyone on the team and to help build a better Internet. Helping to solve incredibly interesting and complex problems that Cloudflare navigates on the intersection of technology, security, privacy, legal frameworks, and on (the landscape will always be developing) is an incredible opportunity.
Solving problems globally—it’s just amazing to be able to be a part of something like that!