Matthew Prince

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chair of the Board Cloudflare

Last Reviewed: October 1, 2026

Executive Summary

Matthew Prince co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 and has been its Chief Executive Officer ever since. The company began as a way to stop the spammers and attackers that his earlier project, Project Honey Pot, could only track. It has grown into what it calls a connectivity cloud: a network that delivers security, performance and reliability across on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications, and on which customers increasingly build their own applications. Cloudflare reported $2.17 billion of revenue in 2025. In 2026 Prince has been arguing that AI agents are rewriting the economics of the web, and that Cloudflare should build the rails for that shift. A lawyer by training as well as a technologist, he has chaired or co-chaired the company’s board throughout.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder of Cloudflare and its Chief Executive Officer since July 2009.
• Chair of Cloudflare’s board from July 2009 to February 2025, and Co-Chair with Michelle Zatlyn since then.
• Led Cloudflare’s initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2019.
• Co-founded Unspam Technologies and has chaired it since December 2001.
• Co-created Project Honey Pot with Lee Holloway in 2004.
• Holds a B.A. from Trinity College-Hartford, a J.D. from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar.

Professional Journey

Prince studied English, with a minor in computer science, at Trinity College in Hartford, and then took a law degree at the University of Chicago. He co-founded Unspam Technologies, a software and services company, and has chaired it since December 2001.

In 2004 he and Lee Holloway built a system to track how spammers harvested email addresses from websites. That became Project Honey Pot, which eventually drew thousands of websites from more than 185 countries. Cloudflare describes it as the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.

In 2009 he took a sabbatical to study for an MBA at Harvard Business School. There he met Michelle Zatlyn, who saw that the idea could go beyond tracking threats to stopping them. With Holloway, the three refined the concept into a “firewall in the cloud”, which gave the company its name. Their plan won the Harvard Business School Business Plan competition in April 2009. Prince graduated as a George F. Baker Scholar and received the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship.

Cloudflare raised its Series A in November 2009, ran a private beta from June 2010 and launched publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt on 27 September 2010, with Prince and Zatlyn presenting on stage. Prince has been Chief Executive Officer since July 2009 and chaired the board from the start. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2019. In February 2025 Zatlyn became Co-Chair alongside him.

Cloudflare now describes itself as serving businesses of all sizes across security and connectivity, with customers increasingly building applications, including AI applications, on its network. It reported revenue of $2.17 billion for 2025, up 29.8 percent. In the second quarter of 2026 revenue grew 36 percent to $696.1 million. Prince said then that “the web shifts to AI answer engines and agent-driven commerce” and that Cloudflare was building “the infrastructure, controls, developer tools, and payment rails for the Agentic Internet”.

Cloudflare’s Investor Day biography notes that he is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award.

Education

Trinity College-Hartford

B.A., English, with a minor in Computer Science

University of Chicago Law School

J.D.

Harvard Business School

M.B.A., George F. Baker Scholar; Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship