A Second Billionaire Is Born From Cloudflare, a Stock Price Surge

The assets owned by Michel Zatrin, co-founder of Cloudflare, which provides infrastructure and security services such as a content delivery network (CDN), exceeded $ 1 billion. This is because the stock price of the company, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has more than doubled from a year ago, reaching a record high of $ 108.93.

Zatlin is the President and COO of Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, and owns approximately 5% of the company’s stake. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince holds a 13% stake in the company, with assets of more than $ 1 billion in May last year, but Zatlin becomes Cloudflare’s second billionaire after Prince. It was.

Cloudflare protects the websites of more than 4 million customers from security threats such as DDoS attacks. The company says it is blocking 70 billion cyberattacks per day.

Cloudflare’s share price, which was $ 18 at the time of its listing in September 2019, has risen about 500% from its IPO price due to the tailwind of the pandemic. The company’s sales, which were $ 287 million in 2019, increased to $ 431 million in 2020. However, net losses also increased from $ 106 million in the previous year to $ 119 million in 2020.

Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Prince and Zatlin, who met at Harvard Business School, and lead engineer Lee Holloway. Holloway was diagnosed with intractable frontotemporal dementia in 2016 and left the company.

Cloudflare’s customers have been criticized for including controversial sites such as the far-right site The Daily Stormer and the bulletin board 8chan. The company described its service to these customers as being based on freedom of speech, but the criminal in the August 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, posted a statement to 8chan. In response to that, the service provider to 8chan was terminated.

Last year, Cloudflare provided a free service to election-related sites and provided free tools to support vaccination. The company also announced that it will partner with JD Cloud & AI, a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, to operate and support 150 data centers across China.

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