If it were merely marketing spend for customer acquisition, I bet the ROI on the lava lamp wall in SF has been 100,000x. This isn’t hard to figure out.
Actually, it’s because we believe innovation is easier the further you are from HQ. And Portugal is wonderful. I’m spending about 4 months of the year there with the team who hail from around the world.
If you figure out how to model this fluid dynamics accurately over any reasonable period of time, call me. Lots and lots of more valuable things you could do with that, e.g., accurately predicting the weather.
I was speaking more to something which happens with some consistency even in a random system. For instance, waves hitting the same piece of rocks over and over till the rocks take on a certain shape.
They should never all be off at the same time. We do cycle through each of them turning off for a period of the day. But, even if they were all off, there are lots of other sources of entropy we use, most of which are for more traditional if far less visually interesting.
Mistakes inevitably happen at scale. Sometimes they’re not caught by traditional channels. What I try and encourage is our leaders to take responsibility and fix them wherever they see them. Which is what John did above.
If the support side of things isn't scaling the same way the technology is, then maybe the whole business isn't "scaling". You can't just make one side work and then throw your hands up in the air and say, well, it's just too many user to have proper support. I mean, that's how it works but it's not how it should work.
"Whereever they see them" implies to me that it's not a systematic solution that is ever able to scale unless they scale their "leadership" the same way.
I don't think "wherever they see them" is the entire solution to scaling. I'd imagine that they have a whole system in place - an imperfect one because all systems are - that includes more than one part of it. That is "leadership fixes issues wherever they see them" is an component the system, not the system as a whole.
Even if you saw all the "cf fucked up" tweets/posts/etc, you still couldn't make that assertion without knowledge of all the times they didn't fuck up. People are far more likely to make noise about issues than things just working. This assertion is like assuming the starbucks corporation is incapable of producing a coffee people will buy because you saw a couple tweets about a messed up order.
Great thing about entropy is that adding more never hurts. This is one of many sources — both more conventional as well as unconventional — that we use. If it were to go offline, or somehow be corrupted, it wouldn’t hurt our ability to generate entropy across the Cloudflare network.
What I love about this, the lava lamp wall in San Francisco, and the double pendulums in London, is that it takes something very abstract and makes it tangible for our team and our customers.
These are my favorite types of marketing - what I'll just call 'part of the actual stack'. Would be great if there was a Berlin office so I could join!
> Great thing about entropy is that adding more never hurts.
I used to think the same but here's a counter-example of a (hypothetical) attack based on a malicious entropy source being able to manipulate the hash/PRNG output:
Ah, pendulums. They had some cool ones in the museums we used to visit. One was 2+ stories high and it would knock down dominoes to reckon the time of day as the Earth perturbed its motions.
Another much smaller pendulum in the hands-on science exhibits, you scooped sand into it and then set it swinging freely across a square black surface. It would trace out amazing patterns as it spilled sand hourglass-style.
So then some bully would rock up next to me and smack the pendulum, stop it from swinging, and spill a big blob on the formerly-geometric pattern. And they invariably said "just to see what would happen". AStonesThrow would have a small meltdown or become rather indigant. I suppose their empirical science is just as valid as kicking down sandcastles on the beach.
And that's how I came to prefer single-player games...
Had the dotcom bubble not burst I’d likely be an attorney. I’d accepted an offer at a law firm in San Francisco to work in their Securities practice, largely taking companies public or doing M&A.
In March of 2000, the firm called and said: “Good news bad news. Good news: you still have a job [unlike a lot of my law school classmates]. Bad news: we don’t need any more Securities lawyers, but we have lots of room in our Bankruptcy practice.”
Being a Bankruptcy lawyer didn’t sound like fun. A law professor’s brother was starting a B2B startup. He offered me a job. The startup was a colossal failure, but I was hooked on the idea of a group of people starting something from nothing.
Next ~8 years were painful with lots of ideas that went no where, but it all worked out. So, in the end, always remember that but for the dotcom bubble bursting, I’d be keeping track of my time in six minute increments.
Always remember that without the dotcom bubble, eastdakota would be counting in 6 minute increments :P
Sincerely, can you say more about the 8 years of pain? I’m curious how you navigated that, especially with/without relationships, family obligations, “runway” restrictions, etc
Edit: looking at the profile, eastdakota is CEO and cofounder of CloudFlare. There are probably interviews and Wikipedia pages that address my questions.
Those 8 years were painful. To make money, I worked as a bartender, an LSAT test prep instructor, as an adjunct law professor at a law school that was so bad it doesn’t exist anymore. I remember 4am at the bar in Chicago where I worked, cleaning up some patron’s puke off the floor, and thinking: I need to figure something else out.
All the time I was trying to find an idea for a startup. I still had the lawyer bit flipped on so lots of things I tried had a legal/regulatory bent. That was definitely a blind spot that held me back for a while.
The fun YC-related story on the founding of Cloudflare is that, before YC, Paul Graham used to host a conference called the “MIT Anti-Spam Conference.” He invited me the second year of the conference (2003, I think) to give a talk on how to write effective anti-spam laws. The very technical crowd was polite to the lawyer. I met a ton of interesting people, many of whom played outsized roles in machine learning over the next few years, including John Graham-Cumming, now Cloudflare’s CTO. Paul invited me back the following year saying I should do something similar.
I was pretty sure the audience wouldn’t tolerate the lawyer giving another talk about regulation, so I went to a young engineer on the team of the (bad) startup I was working on and suggested we build a system to track how spammers scrape your email addresses. He agreed to build the backend if I built the front end (which I largely stole from the hot startup of the time: LinkedIn). That turned into Project Honey Pot, which I gave a talk on at Paul’s conference. Project Honey Pot gave the initial seed of an idea that turned into Cloudflare. And the young engineer was Lee Holloway who cofounded Cloudflare with me and Michelle Zatlyn.
Lesson to me has always been even in times where you don’t feel like you’re making forward progress in your life and career, find ways to stay involved with interesting people and projects and chances are they’ll pay dividends in ways you don’t expect later in life.
I clearly remember walking back to Paul’s house in Cambridge after the 2004 conference where I’d presented Project Honey Pot. I believe he and Jessica had relatively recently started dating. They were talking about startups and how people didn’t understand how they worked. Paul suggested they should teach a class at MIT. And that, of course, is what later turned into YC.
There were other dramatic events that evening in Cambridge that I think sharpened all our minds and made us appreciate there’s no time like the present, but I’ll leave that story for another day.
I met a ton of interesting people, many of whom played outsized roles in machine learning over the next few years, including John Graham-Cumming, now Cloudflare’s CTO.
And the other way around. I met eastdakota which would later lead to me being at Cloudflare. Turns out networking (human and computer) is important.
And then, 20 years later, I meet a kid on the local playground who claims to be the son of one of the Cloudflare co-founders or CTO. I was thinking, wait, isn't JGC in Britain, not Boise? Even though the kid was visibly disappointed that I'm bearish on nVidia and LLMs, he strained my understanding of how puts work in stock trading. So that amusing conversation, sporadically interrupted by loading and unloading my toddler from the swingset, encouraged me to get more familiar with the broader investment market, beyond the simple kid invest products I've been working on the past four years. So thanks for that proverbial push on the swings, Cloudflare kid!
There's not a high chance that this piece of history will be lost "forever", it will just remain as a HN comment.
I wonder what would be the best way to harvest these and add them to, say, a wikipedia page. I'm pretty sure it's something that you could decently do with an LLM.
Damn, what a turn of opportunities from just saying yes and showing up (and obviously a ton of hardwork and sacrifices). Thanks for sharing!
I can't resist ...
> There were other dramatic events that evening in Cambridge that I think sharpened all our minds and made us appreciate there’s no time like the present, but I’ll leave that story for another day.
> ... appreciate there’s no time like the present ...
The present is now! Some of us are dying to hear the story.
Definitely. I think this is true of the internet in general, we have an amazing ability to communicate with almost anyone, even busy experts in niche fields, if we just make/ask something that interests them. I don't think I appreciate that enough.
I have plenty of friends who went down that path. They’ve done very well as lawyers. But suffice it to say that if offered they’d readily trade places.
Maybe, although the people just getting into the field probably aren’t making the fortunes and there wouldn’t be the satisfaction of building something real.
Wow! You ended up building a not-so-small piece of today's internet. Congrats.
Edit: one question I have for you: besides the "sliding door" moment of dropping the lawyer career and choosing another one, what convinced you to abandon a law career entirely? Most other lawyers would have sticked there.
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