Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. He reflects on founder succession after celebrating Cloudflare's 13th anniversary.
Opinion
Prince: The Bay Area is terrible for scaling companies
“It's, it is, I mean, when we were starting, and by the way, it's why it's the best place to start companies, but it's a terrible place to scale companies.”
Assertion Supported
Prince: The story of eBay starting with Beanie Babies is PR BS
“So, so the eBay example, you're like eBay started with Beanie Babies. So I've talked to the founders of eBay about that. That's complete and utter PR retrospective BS.”
Insight
Prince: Starting in a narrow niche creates local minimums that hinder growth
“Where it runs a risk is if you start, start to say, you know, we've got to do X. First of all, you'll attract people that think X is, even though you say the journey is much longer that they'll think that that's the end state. And then secondly, it might be th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Almost all successful startup founders begin with broad, ambitious visions
“It is very hard to find an actual startup founder that, that started out saying, we're going to do this small niche thing, and then it grew into this, is this big task. Almost everyone early on, you know, it's why founders, you know, can come across as so, so …”
Opinion
Prince: Bootstrapped Tough Mudder might be more successful than Cloudflare
“I think it's an open question whether, you know, they've been more successful or we've been more successful. Like, they have no costs. They've got this thing that's just a machine that just kicks off a ton of cash, and he can go and focus on, you know, other t…”
Opinion
Prince: Jeff Bezos is optimizing his life for Instagram
“And for a long time, I looked at like, you know, Jeff Bezos. I was like, wow, he seems like he has a pretty good life. He's not a pretty happy person. And out today, it seems like he's optimizing his life for Instagram, which is weird.”