This announcement comes out of Cloudfare’s annual Founder’s letter, https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-annual-founders-lett…. The letter is definitely worth a read:
This week we celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday. We launched the company 11 years ago tomorrow: September 27, 2010. It has been our tradition, since our first birthday, to use this week to launch innovative new products that we think of as our gift back to the Internet.
Since going public, it’s also been an opportunity for us to update our Annual Founders’ Letter and share what’s on our mind. Recently we’ve been thinking about three things: team, the Internet, and innovation.
I found the innovation section to be the most interesting (bolding by me for emphasis):
The Internet may seem static, but it is not. 11 years ago, watching a video online was an exercise in frustration. Today, it seems almost automatic that you can push play on your TV and access nearly any movie ever made instantly. That’s possible because the Internet isn’t static; it gets better through innovation.
At Cloudflare, we’re optimized to catalyze exactly that innovation. It starts with our mission: to help build a better Internet. The word “help” is important, because we know we can’t do it alone. So, wherever we can, we work with others across the Internet ecosystem to push it forward and make it better.
Sometimes people outside the company are surprised by the products we build. In fact, predicting our roadmap is pretty easy. We look at all the steps that are required to load a web page, send an email, stream a video, login to a workstation, or anything else you do online and ask: can we make that more secure, more reliable, or faster? [Gotta love the simple explanation of what they do.]
What’s exciting is that the pace at which the Internet is getting better is accelerating. And, in turn, the pace at which we are able to launch innovative new products is accelerating along with it. As the Internet grows and acquires more capabilities, we believe we will continue to grow with it. An investment in Cloudflare is, fundamentally, we feel an investment in the Internet itself.
And so, this week, we have an incredible series of announcements that are designed to help build a better Internet. We’re entering a new area to close one of the last network security risks that we haven’t historically protected our customers from, driving down costs of core cloud services, pushing the boundary of our network to our customers’ doorsteps, and investing in new technologies that may someday disrupt the web as we know it today.
Thank you to our team, our customers, and our investors. Happy 11th birthday to Cloudflare. And, even as we pick up steam, we continue to believe: we’re just getting started.
It’s amazing to think that in 2010, Cloudfare was just an idea in three people’s mind (the 3rd co-founder sadly passed away from a horrible disease, proving that all the money in the world doesn’t buy happiness).
–Jhon (tip of the hat to Sual)
Long, NET