eastdakota

I’ve told it elsewhere. Some Googling around may turn it up.

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.

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.

We’d be happy to support Reddit on our free tier. I doubt we’d actually be able to measure the increase in bandwidth costs if they were to onboard.

No problem with gaming & gambling where it’s legal. Lots of problems where 1) it’s illegal; and 2) a customer sets up lots of free accounts to get around local ISP blocks and gets big ranges of our IPs blocked causing significant collateral damage to other customers who share the IPs. In that case we will ask the customer to switch to a solution which requires them to bring their own IP addresses. And because that takes much more bespoke support, we charge for it.

For what it’s worth, seems like it was indeed his address:

https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...

What’s somewhat complicated here is its apples and oranges. Cloudflare offers DNS and a proxy service. The OP is using both. The comparisons are merely DNS services. I wasn’t clear on X whether OP was getting confused that the IP we return via DNS (which points to our proxy) doesn’t change, or if they were concerned that behind the proxy we’re not routing correctly. I think after reading this the answer is the latter. Confident we always will route optimally as it’s in our interest and our customers’. But why we’re not failing over on failure is interesting. That looks like, as John said, a difference between free and paid plans that if it made sense at some point doesn’t obviously today. Will figure out what’s up and get fixed.

I do too.

:-p

You do? You’ve spent more time here commenting than some of the people who got paid under Project Jengo. #odd

You’re… wrong. Massively wrong. And I say that literally as the guy who approved the comparative budgets.

Yup!

And your profession is…?

You don’t still consult your Encarta CD-ROM? How do you ever figure out what’s what?

Thousands, technically.

It’ll be back when we get sued by a troll again. We’ll get as many submissions. We’ll kill another troll. We’ll pay another round of bounties. We’ll not pay patent search agents like you. And life will go on.

Don’t worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to engage in our strategy.

The fascinating thing for me about this comment, and why I find myself weirdly obsessing over it, is how wrong it is about human nature and why we do things. There’s a small set of things we get paid for. There are a lot of other things we do, and even derive value from, that we don’t get paid anything for. Does that mean they have no value? Absolutely not. Every job I’ve taken is not the one that, on paper, I’d make the most from. Every term sheet I’ve accepted didn’t have the highest implied market cap. Am I an idiot? Perhaps. But it’s worked out. Lots of reasons people do things. Sometimes it’s about money. But those tend to be the most boring. Certainly in the short/medium term. I used to think missions were bullshit. Now I can’t imagine how you could ever possibly run a company without one.

PS - we killed a patent troll. A bunch of you helped. How cool is that??! Thank you.

I’m sorry we’ve shown that going to law school is less valuable than some may have thought. My parents had that angst too when I decided not to practice law after going to law school myself. It worked out.

“You didn’t pay enough to my view of experts, but you won, but you could have won and paid more, and that’d be better.” That’s your argument? Just to be clear?

And, note, this strategy has worked pretty (cost) effectively for us before:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/

But you’d suggest we do what everyone else does and hire expensive “experts”? K. Good luck with that.

Oh, forgot, that’s your profession… expensive expert. Carry on.

I’ve not encountered another critter like you. But here you are: a lawyer cum HN poster who believes there are infinite opportunities for your skills and that your skills are infinitely accretive. Odd.

Perhaps you are this magical being I can’t imagine exists. In the meantime, and regardless, irregardless even, facts are: a whole bunch of people submitted prior art that helped us defeat a patent troll that was a net drain on society. As if, mission matters more than money in some cases. Many cases? Most cases? All cases?

I wish you luck rationally optimizing your time. If you figure that out, being the market maker probably will prove more lucrative than being a participant. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Hope you find lots and lots of opportunities for you to… search Google? Good work if you can find it.

Proof is in the pudding, as they say. I've been astonished by the quality of the submissions we've received the times we've fired up Project Jengo. And it's helped us successfully beat — and literally put out of business — the two patent trolls that have come after us.

Having talked with several of them, most of the people who submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout. Several winners have actually asked that the payout be donated back to other organizations fighting patent trolls. This isn't intended to be anyone's full time job. It is intended to reward technical people with industry knowledge who may be able to help surface prior art and are as sick of patent trolls as we are.

We don't use ReCaptcha and haven't for many years. If it looks like a Cloudflare page but it has ReCaptcha on it, it's a fake.

For standard, legal web traffic Cloudflare will always be free. If you’re using us for just that and anyone on our sales team ever pressures you to upgrade, email me because it’s an explicit violation of our policies. Sales people are humans, so sometimes they make mistakes, but I can set it straight. Here’s my email:

matthewatcloudflaredotcom

So what are the cases you may have read about. They fall into two big buckets:

1. Streaming Video

A video stream is just a series of image files strung together. So some people have tried to use our free service to serve video. This causes two problems. First, a second of video is often as much as 10x the bandwidth as a typical web page load. We’ve done a lot to make bandwidth costs low, but it can add up fast.

Second, the people who tend to do this sort of janky video streaming are often streaming pirated video content. When that happens and we don’t shut it down we get sued. That’s costly.

We do offer a service to stream video. It’s creatively named Stream. It’s elegant and not janky and designed to be the least costly way to stream video content. It’s cheap but it’s not free.

2. Illegal Content

The site that is in the link you referenced was serving a gambling site to a jurisdiction where gambling is illegal. The problem was, the jurisdiction retaliated by blocking their IPs. If that only blocked the one gambling site, that’s their problem. But we share IPs between customers on our low end plans. So if a customer does something illegal somewhere and it causes an IP to get blocked then it causes harm to a bunch of other customers.

The solution is dedicated IP addresses. In a case like this we have a product called BYOIP (which is exactly what you think it is). It’s bespoke and expensive for us to maintain and customers who care about it tend to be customers who have budgets to pay for it, so it’s expensive. We could probably invest engineering resources to make it less bespoke, but there’s really not a ton of demand.

This customer was doing something illegal somewhere according to some government. We said — no judgment — but you’re getting our IPs banned and causing harm to other customers and we can’t let that happen. We presented a solution (albeit an expensive one). They balked and wrote a blog post. And now people assume there’s a bait-and-switch sales strategy. There’s not. Turns out people who use our Free plan rarely turn into million dollar customers. And people who are million dollar customers don’t really even consider our Free plan. So the world generally sorts itself correctly.

We get stymied by our policy of not talking about the details of customers without their permission, so it makes it hard to respond to blog posts like that one. But enough people have asked me about it and I’m tired enough about it that I’m going to make the decision to revise the policy: we won’t publicly disclose any details about a customer without their permission; but if you write a blog post complaining about us and leave out the salient details, then we’ll reserve the right to fill those details in.

Anyway, in 99.99% of cases, and especially if you’re not janky streaming or doing something illegal, our Free plan will work great for you and you’ll never hear from anyone on our Sales team.

It matters still in so far as if you turn this feature on your site will continue to work as expected even with Polyfill[.]io offline.

Oh… drones are a really devious idea. You can imagine all sorts of political messages that someone may want to leverage an event like this to broadcast.

Also wonder if there’s a buffer overflow attack or some command that could cause them to get stuck flashing rapidly or something that would be really annoying. Surprised by the lack of encryption or any security on devices like these. For a long time there was no encryption on the Shure wireless mics most big shows use. Hopefully that’s been corrected as that seems like a real way you could cause (dangerous) problems at an event like a stadium concert.

Which begs the question: how hard is it to build a 30W, portable IR spotlight that you could get through a concert’s metal detector unnoticed?

I still wonder if it would be possible for a rogue concert goer to hijack a side of the stadium to display something. All sorts of trouble you could cause.

I may have gone to the Taylor Swift show in Lisbon, wondered how they were able to precisely control these without carefully handing them out, gathered a few from my fellow concert goers, and presented them to John last night over dinner with a challenge to figure it out. All my guesses were more complicated than the actual answer.