Matthew Prince
Co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare
A free tier that quietly became internet infrastructure
Rating
82Impact score
Domains
CDNSecurityEdge computing
Scouting report
Co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 with Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway and gave away DDoS protection and a CDN to anyone who asked, which is why a large share of the web now passes through it. The company open-sourced Quiche, Pingora and the Workers runtime, funded Let’s Encrypt, and runs Project Galileo for civil society sites at no charge.
Curator’s note
Gave away the expensive part and made the internet structurally dependent on it.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Matthew Prince by TechCrunch, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Sources
- 01Matthew Prince en.wikipedia.org
- 02Cloudflare en.wikipedia.org
- 03Pingora github.com