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eastdakotaHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

All the time I was trying to find an idea for a startup

… 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. …

Original discussionWhen the Dotcom Bubble Burst350 source comments · at import
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pinkmuffinereHN

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.

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InfinitesimusHN

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.

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jgrahamcHN

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.

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simonebrunozziHN

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.

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