14 ms·

Read our S-1, it's all in there. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519222176/d735023ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477

Read our S-1, it's all in there. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519222176/d735023ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

potency 6y ago
Off topic, but any regrets on getting involved in content policing? It always sat with me as wrong and a disturbing precedent that an internet backbone service such as yourselves would make it their business to shut down unsavory yet legal speech.
- nix23 6y ago
  Wikileaks and Piratebay are customers of CF, so your 'legal speech' must be really something. Any links?
  - largbae 6y ago
    Maybe GP is referring to 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, the DNS resolvers that filter malware and malware+adult content respectively? Both are optional alternatives to the unfiltered 1.1.1.1 DNS service if so...
  - 236dev 6y ago
    The only ones I can think of are The Daily Stormer and 8chan
  - potency 6y ago
    Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince spoke to CNBC upon banning Daily Stormer: “We were worried that people would say, ‘We won’t work with you anymore,’” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told CNBC. “We had to have the conversation now because at some point we’ll be a public company. We had to prompt that discussion,” said Prince, who added “we want to be ready internally by July 2018,” for a possible stock offering. CNBC Link: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-prince-explains-why-he-booted-the-daily-stormer.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-princ... Editorials discussing the event: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-to-draw-the-line-on-hate-speech-online/2017/09/01/025eab10-89da-11e7-a50f-e0d4e6ec070a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-to-draw-the-li... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-stormer-charlottesville.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-...
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      Yes, and then they banned 8Chan just the same (I think? One of those sites where a shooter talked to his friends) as soon as they were under pressure.
      - debacle 6y ago
        Likely the reddit model. Don't ban anything until it hits you in the pocket book.
      - LordDragonfang 6y ago
        If I'm not mistaken, 8Chan also hosted a lot of illegal content in addition to that "legal speech".
        yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        And yet, it was not for anything illegal that they were taken down.
        kbenson 6y ago
        I don't know if it's how it played out, but it's easy to see how increased scrutiny could have lead to the illegal content being highlighted and them getting dropped because it was then reported (possibly many times by many parties that wanted the site shut down for other reasons). In that case, they still would have been taken down because of the illegal content, even if at an (extremely simplistic) surface level the timing seems to indicate otherwise.
    - transpostmeta 6y ago
      So it's literally Nazis.
      - jonny_eh 6y ago
        There's always a line, and therefore, I'm ok with drawing the line at Nazis.
  - creeble 6y ago
    Likewise many DDoS-for-hire services, un-ironically. Dosninja.com for example (there are dozens, though not all Cloudflare protected). Unlike "free speech" sites, the entire point of a DDoS-for-hire site is to suppress speech. Nice to be able to get it both ways!
- amylka 6y ago
  It will remain at the politically correct shutdowns. Look at the list of countries they are doing business with.
- triceratops 6y ago
  Can't the free market sort that out?
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  Why is it a precedent? Nobody was under the illusion that it isn't technically possible for them to shut down some customer they don't like. Nor was/is there any debate about the legality of doing so, So the only reason for continuing to work for/with violent anti-semites was that they wanted to. Until, at some point, they changed their mind. HN has a strange infatuation with this idea of avoiding responsibility by pretending to be powerless. But it's neither morally sound nor logically or legally coherent to pretend to be bound by some principles that are entirely of one's own making.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    > Why is it a precedent? Precedents aren't limited to the legal system. Their actions changed the expectation (ie established a new precedent) for their behavior going forward. > So the only reason for continuing to work for/with violent anti-semites was that they wanted to. Or entertaining broader ideals surrounding freedom of expression? Or perhaps seeing the inherent dangers of living in a society dominated by public outrage? Or something else entirely? > Until, at some point, they changed their mind. Due, by their own admission, to financial concerns. Concerns which wouldn't exist if they and all their competitors were legally required not to discriminate based on otherwise legal content. > HN has a strange infatuation with this idea of avoiding responsibility by pretending to be powerless. I don't see that anywhere in this comment section? Rather, I see people objecting to actions which are legal but which they feel should not be.
morrbo 6y ago
II love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted to say don't change. Your lz4 implementation, aes gcm golang optimizations have directly benefitted me. Coupled with really high quality post mortem articles, articles on interesting things like compression, encryption, networking, a few random articles (the privacy focussed file system recently comes to mind, written at the same time I was making my own distributed fs) just leave me with a lot of respect for the culture there. I was worried a bit when I saw the initial IPO that the free tier would leave (despite promises it wouldn't) but that doesn't seem to be the case. Literally the only bad thing I've seen on the site is recently you switched from recaptcha to a new one that I had a real tough time with logging in today - it was a bit glitchy on my pc. The only suggestion I thought of as well would be a simple "maintenance mode" similar to the "I'm under attack mode" which would allow those of us without super-ha to quickly toggle on something to pop up a "sorry server"/site is down form maintenance page without having to mess with our proxies/web servers. Anyway I know this comes across as totally kissing-ass but I just wanted to say thanks to someone who actually works there. Everyone fat fingers stuff every now and again,don't sweat it.
- benmanns 6y ago
  If you use Cloudflare workers, you could put together a maintenance page with a simple script + Cloudflare Workers KV as a toggle switch. It would cost $5/mo if you're not already using workers.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  It's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/ https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline... I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.
Arnt 6y ago
Congratulations with growing so big. Why aren't there dozens of lookalikes by now? I mean CDNs that will let you override the origin's cache instructions and do a decent job of DDOS protection, and whose feature list otherwise looks a little like Cloudflare's.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 6y ago
  Yes, why isn't the CDN a commodity?
  - Kalium 6y ago
    CDNs are expensive to build, and often not very useful to customers until you've built out a large portion of it (actual hardware required, you can't just run it atop AWS). On top of this, much of the money is in Enterprise. So you've got to compete with Akamai, AWS, Fastly, Incapsula, Cloudflare, and several other notable ones to get any customers to speak of. There are smaller CDNs out there. You can find them readily enough.
    - amelius 6y ago
      Yes, but for a customer it's trivial to swap out one CDN for another, isn't it?
      - Kalium 6y ago
        Depending on how you integrated it and how deeply, it may be trivial. Certainly going from one DNS-based CDN to another can be pretty easy - a Cloudflare / CloudFront swap could be quick. Which suggests to me that CDNs are already a commodity in some ways.
- aspir 6y ago
  One answer - It's much, much harder to build and operate a global network infrastructure that it might seem. It's also even harder to invent some sort of "killer feature" or other genuine innovation on the experience. You're likely not using Cloudflare simply for commoditized pipes alone, but for other features or designed experiences in their offering. A second answer - there are a bunch of bottom-barrel commoditized pipe services. You likely haven't heard of them because they're so generic. They've existed before Cloudflare, and more will be created in the future https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-management/country-reports.html https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-m...
michaelbuckbee 6y ago
Hey John, thanks for taking the time to reply. Respectfully, the info in the S1 (flywheels, etc.) seem to be what sustains you _now_. Maybe a better question is "how did you identify and kick off that flywheel?"
- eganist 6y ago
  Don't take this as being glib, but isn't this the entire point of funding rounds? Demonstrate growth and talk about a few approaches to creating a business model that you're investigating, which then brings investors on as they're betting you'll find one that'll succeed?
chacham15 6y ago
The relevant excerpt seems to be here: Market Opportunity We believe our platform disrupts several large and well-established IT markets. The key markets that are addressed by our platform include VPN, internal and external firewalls, web security (including web application firewalls and content filtering), distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention, intrusion detection and prevention, application delivery controls, content delivery networks, domain name systems, advanced threat prevention (ATP), and wide area network (WAN) technology. From our analysis based on IDC data, $31.6 billion was spent on those products in 2018, which is expected to grow to $47.1 billion in 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%. We also are actively developing new products to address adjacent markets including compute, storage, 5G, and Internet of Things (IoT) that are not included in the estimate of our addressable market.
- thepangolino 6y ago
  That’s just general market analysis. It doesn’t say anything about what their hedge is. Or was it simply that the existing actors were that inefficient/price gauging.
kbenson 6y ago
LOL, I'm sure it is, but referring someone that is wondering about the "back of the napkin math" to an approximately 250 page S-1 filing is sort of ludicrous.
nabeards 6y ago
Since you’re here, any response to the top comment re: inaccessibility to disabled persons?

Read our S-1, it's all in there. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519222176/d735023ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

potency 6y ago

Off topic, but any regrets on getting involved in content policing? It always sat with me as wrong and a disturbing precedent that an internet backbone service such as yourselves would make it their business to shut down unsavory yet legal speech.

nix23 6y ago
Wikileaks and Piratebay are customers of CF, so your 'legal speech' must be really something. Any links?
- largbae 6y ago
  Maybe GP is referring to 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, the DNS resolvers that filter malware and malware+adult content respectively? Both are optional alternatives to the unfiltered 1.1.1.1 DNS service if so...
- 236dev 6y ago
  The only ones I can think of are The Daily Stormer and 8chan
- potency 6y ago
  Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince spoke to CNBC upon banning Daily Stormer: “We were worried that people would say, ‘We won’t work with you anymore,’” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told CNBC. “We had to have the conversation now because at some point we’ll be a public company. We had to prompt that discussion,” said Prince, who added “we want to be ready internally by July 2018,” for a possible stock offering. CNBC Link: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-prince-explains-why-he-booted-the-daily-stormer.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-princ... Editorials discussing the event: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-to-draw-the-line-on-hate-speech-online/2017/09/01/025eab10-89da-11e7-a50f-e0d4e6ec070a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-to-draw-the-li... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-stormer-charlottesville.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-...
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Yes, and then they banned 8Chan just the same (I think? One of those sites where a shooter talked to his friends) as soon as they were under pressure.
    - debacle 6y ago
      Likely the reddit model. Don't ban anything until it hits you in the pocket book.
    - LordDragonfang 6y ago
      If I'm not mistaken, 8Chan also hosted a lot of illegal content in addition to that "legal speech".
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        And yet, it was not for anything illegal that they were taken down.
        kbenson 6y ago
        I don't know if it's how it played out, but it's easy to see how increased scrutiny could have lead to the illegal content being highlighted and them getting dropped because it was then reported (possibly many times by many parties that wanted the site shut down for other reasons). In that case, they still would have been taken down because of the illegal content, even if at an (extremely simplistic) surface level the timing seems to indicate otherwise.
  - transpostmeta 6y ago
    So it's literally Nazis.
    - jonny_eh 6y ago
      There's always a line, and therefore, I'm ok with drawing the line at Nazis.
- creeble 6y ago
  Likewise many DDoS-for-hire services, un-ironically. Dosninja.com for example (there are dozens, though not all Cloudflare protected). Unlike "free speech" sites, the entire point of a DDoS-for-hire site is to suppress speech. Nice to be able to get it both ways!
amylka 6y ago
It will remain at the politically correct shutdowns. Look at the list of countries they are doing business with.
triceratops 6y ago
Can't the free market sort that out?
IAmEveryone 6y ago
Why is it a precedent? Nobody was under the illusion that it isn't technically possible for them to shut down some customer they don't like. Nor was/is there any debate about the legality of doing so, So the only reason for continuing to work for/with violent anti-semites was that they wanted to. Until, at some point, they changed their mind. HN has a strange infatuation with this idea of avoiding responsibility by pretending to be powerless. But it's neither morally sound nor logically or legally coherent to pretend to be bound by some principles that are entirely of one's own making.
- Reelin 6y ago
  > Why is it a precedent? Precedents aren't limited to the legal system. Their actions changed the expectation (ie established a new precedent) for their behavior going forward. > So the only reason for continuing to work for/with violent anti-semites was that they wanted to. Or entertaining broader ideals surrounding freedom of expression? Or perhaps seeing the inherent dangers of living in a society dominated by public outrage? Or something else entirely? > Until, at some point, they changed their mind. Due, by their own admission, to financial concerns. Concerns which wouldn't exist if they and all their competitors were legally required not to discriminate based on otherwise legal content. > HN has a strange infatuation with this idea of avoiding responsibility by pretending to be powerless. I don't see that anywhere in this comment section? Rather, I see people objecting to actions which are legal but which they feel should not be.

morrbo 6y ago

II love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted to say don't change. Your lz4 implementation, aes gcm golang optimizations have directly benefitted me. Coupled with really high quality post mortem articles, articles on interesting things like compression, encryption, networking, a few random articles (the privacy focussed file system recently comes to mind, written at the same time I was making my own distributed fs) just leave me with a lot of respect for the culture there. I was worried a bit when I saw the initial IPO that the free tier would leave (despite promises it wouldn't) but that doesn't seem to be the case. Literally the only bad thing I've seen on the site is recently you switched from recaptcha to a new one that I had a real tough time with logging in today - it was a bit glitchy on my pc. The only suggestion I thought of as well would be a simple "maintenance mode" similar to the "I'm under attack mode" which would allow those of us without super-ha to quickly toggle on something to pop up a "sorry server"/site is down form maintenance page without having to mess with our proxies/web servers. Anyway I know this comes across as totally kissing-ass but I just wanted to say thanks to someone who actually works there. Everyone fat fingers stuff every now and again,don't sweat it.

benmanns 6y ago
If you use Cloudflare workers, you could put together a maintenance page with a simple script + Cloudflare Workers KV as a toggle switch. It would cost $5/mo if you're not already using workers.
renewiltord 6y ago
It's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/ https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline... I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.

Arnt 6y ago

Congratulations with growing so big. Why aren't there dozens of lookalikes by now? I mean CDNs that will let you override the origin's cache instructions and do a decent job of DDOS protection, and whose feature list otherwise looks a little like Cloudflare's.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amelius 6y ago
Yes, why isn't the CDN a commodity?
- Kalium 6y ago
  CDNs are expensive to build, and often not very useful to customers until you've built out a large portion of it (actual hardware required, you can't just run it atop AWS). On top of this, much of the money is in Enterprise. So you've got to compete with Akamai, AWS, Fastly, Incapsula, Cloudflare, and several other notable ones to get any customers to speak of. There are smaller CDNs out there. You can find them readily enough.
  - amelius 6y ago
    Yes, but for a customer it's trivial to swap out one CDN for another, isn't it?
    - Kalium 6y ago
      Depending on how you integrated it and how deeply, it may be trivial. Certainly going from one DNS-based CDN to another can be pretty easy - a Cloudflare / CloudFront swap could be quick. Which suggests to me that CDNs are already a commodity in some ways.
aspir 6y ago
One answer - It's much, much harder to build and operate a global network infrastructure that it might seem. It's also even harder to invent some sort of "killer feature" or other genuine innovation on the experience. You're likely not using Cloudflare simply for commoditized pipes alone, but for other features or designed experiences in their offering. A second answer - there are a bunch of bottom-barrel commoditized pipe services. You likely haven't heard of them because they're so generic. They've existed before Cloudflare, and more will be created in the future https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-management/country-reports.html https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-m...

michaelbuckbee 6y ago

Hey John, thanks for taking the time to reply. Respectfully, the info in the S1 (flywheels, etc.) seem to be what sustains you _now_. Maybe a better question is "how did you identify and kick off that flywheel?"

eganist 6y ago
Don't take this as being glib, but isn't this the entire point of funding rounds? Demonstrate growth and talk about a few approaches to creating a business model that you're investigating, which then brings investors on as they're betting you'll find one that'll succeed?

chacham15 6y ago

The relevant excerpt seems to be here: Market Opportunity We believe our platform disrupts several large and well-established IT markets. The key markets that are addressed by our platform include VPN, internal and external firewalls, web security (including web application firewalls and content filtering), distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention, intrusion detection and prevention, application delivery controls, content delivery networks, domain name systems, advanced threat prevention (ATP), and wide area network (WAN) technology. From our analysis based on IDC data, $31.6 billion was spent on those products in 2018, which is expected to grow to $47.1 billion in 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%. We also are actively developing new products to address adjacent markets including compute, storage, 5G, and Internet of Things (IoT) that are not included in the estimate of our addressable market.

thepangolino 6y ago
That’s just general market analysis. It doesn’t say anything about what their hedge is. Or was it simply that the existing actors were that inefficient/price gauging.

kbenson 6y ago

LOL, I'm sure it is, but referring someone that is wondering about the "back of the napkin math" to an approximately 250 page S-1 filing is sort of ludicrous.

nabeards 6y ago

Since you’re here, any response to the top comment re: inaccessibility to disabled persons?