Lessons

Drink more water - This Saturday it was really hot. I trained and almost passed out because I was dehydrated. Drink more water… please 🙂.

Understand who you are talking to - Last week I had the opportunity to accompany my father to a few meetings. One thing I noticed was that the smartest people were listening and processing information at the highest level. A common statement was, “based on what you said earlier….” I think this is an important skill to develop as time goes on.

Company - Cloudflare

The coolest companies are the ones you’ve never heard of, but are everywhere. Cloudflare is one of those. They are the big bouncer at the door of your favorite bar, and their job is to keep the assholes out.

Because everything is moving into the cloud, almost everything has an inherent security vulnerability. Cloudflare is a distributed service, which helps deal with those vulnerabilities, and help improve website performance. They block bots, speed up websites and prevent resource abuse. The company also offers a free price point, which enables software developers to use their product with little risk.

These are products that are only growing in usage, because of the consistent growth in cloud computing. Cloud computing is when companies outsource their servers to a facility for heat and space efficiency. Because this is internet infrastructure, Cloud services must be trustworthy and reliable. This extends to data protection laws, which are a European right.

Cloudflare’s revenue has grown about 50% each year since 2020. However, that has been met with operating losses because of their emphasis on growth. The company is highly reliant upon an efficient salesforce, because their projections rely on continued growth. Sales and growth are the most important piece of Cloudflare’s business.

It is also wild that their gross margin hovers around 75%, but the company manages to operate at a loss. This is a trend I’ve seen with several large software infrastructure businesses. They spend 48 cents of every dollar they earn on sales and marketing… seems high.

Articles

Dan Carlin - BLITZ Human Resources

This is an amazing anthology on the history of slavery. Yes, it’s 5 hours long, but you’ll come out with a changed understanding of the trans-atlantic slave trade.

Deep-sea mining may soon ease the world’s battery-metal shortage

We’ve invested more into exploring space than we have our oceans. Coincidentally, Oceans definitely contain many of the rare earth metals we need to fuel global electrification efforts.

Mining in oceans seems like a better path forward than the current state of affairs, which is centered around bulldozing forests in indonesia. However, we don’t yet know the long term impacts and regulations that are built around the practice.