Blake Mycoskie started the first buy-one-give-one company. Revenue from Tom’s Shoes now approaches $400 million a year. ALDI dared to enter the competitive U.S. market in 1976. The supermarket chain now has 2,147 locations in the country. Twitter once turned down a $500 million purchase offer from Mark Zuckerberg. A decade later, it had grown by 324 million users.
In each of these examples, one person or an entire leadership team was willing to take a calculated risk. The capacity, aptitude and willingness to take a business risk is critical. Risks that pay off not only increase profits — but help companies evolve public perception and reach new heights.
Company culture sets the tone for everything that happens inside an organization, and leaders who build a culture that encourages wise risk-taking will reap rewards. Cloudflare is one organization that encourages and expects its employees to come up with big ideas and try new things.
The approach has helped the public tech company build a network capable of reaching 95 percent of the world’s population in a fraction of a second.
Built In Austin sat down with Cloudfare Vice President of Product Management Alyson Carbral to talk about dreaming big, effective collaboration and what it means to focus on storytelling.
Cloudflare is a server network that protects and accelerates online applications without adding hardware, software or code.
What is notable about working at your Cloudfare?
Cloudflare is a bold and ambitious company that inspires an entrepreneurial mindset. Ideas of big bets can come from anyone across the company regardless of role. And those ideas are met with excitement. Cloudflare doesn’t have timidness when it comes to changing product direction or taking moonshots. It is a fantastic place to dream big.
Cloudflare isn’t timid when it comes to taking moonshots — it’s a fantastic place to dream big.”
Cloudflare has a huge focus on storytelling. Answering questions like, “Why would anyone outside of Cloudflare care about xyz?” is essential for product success. The storytelling focus helps draw the connection between how your work impacts customers, the tech industry or the broader internet experience.
Everyone at Cloudflare has technical curiosity. That doesn’t necessarily mean expertise, but a hunger to learn and understand how the internet works. From our sales team to our accounting team, we have folks genuinely interested in Cloudflare’s role in running the internet. We also have many, many, many leading experts across technical domains willing to teach from the basics. No questions are perceived as dumb. There is an overarching patience for learning.
What is the impact of the work you are doing?
Cloudflare is an essential part of the internet, powering roughly 20 percent of the web. We have our infrastructure deployed in over 300 cities and over 100 countries across the globe. Every product we deliver helps build a better internet by creating faster, more reliable, more scalable and more secure experiences.
I work on Cloudflare’s developer platform, which automatically allows application builders to take advantage of our global network. Developer products have compounding impact as they impact all the user applications built on top of them. If an e-commerce website uses Workers to power a shopping cart and R2 to store catalog information, the e-commerce web experience will reap the benefits of all performance and scale improvements to those underlying developer platform products.
Given the scale of Cloudflare’s network, which is one of the largest and most interconnected, even the smallest changes have a huge impact on applications and their end users. When it comes to the quality of their web experiences, end user expectations have never been higher. At Cloudflare, we are excited to build products that help application owners live up to those expectations
