Saskatchewan billionaire, Prince Albert’s Michelle Zatlyn, becomes Wall Street tech titan

By Glenn Hicks

It has been 17 months since Prince Albert’s Michelle Zatlyn spoke to us after she and co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange following the hugely successful IPO (Initial Public Offering) of their company Cloudflare. It ushered in a new and stratospheric chapter for the ground-breaking tech company.

paNOW News Director Glenn Hicks caught up with Zatlyn after the whirlwind of the past year and a half which has brought much change: investors have reaped gains of 400 per cent, Cloudflare’s list of clients has skyrocketed, and her stake in the enterprise added many more zeros to her personal financial worth.

—

Prince Albert-raised Michelle Zatlyn speaks with the energy and promise of a Saskatchewan spring sunrise. Big things are happening and there’s the prospect of more to come. She has an aura of confidence that comes from presiding over the eye-catching tech company she co-founded and that has become a darling of Wall Street.

Zatlyn recently added the role of president along with her chief operating officer responsibilities at Cloudflare, the San Francisco based multi-billion-dollar global firm specializing in making the Internet safer and faster for an ever-blossoming list of clients and their websites, apps, and teams.

Billion-dollar lady

She’s eager to share – I had hoped for five minutes of her time and she gives me 20, helped I think in part because she’s talking to someone ‘back home.’ Zatlyn is humble and immensely proud of her Saskatchewan roots. In fact, the only time during our phone interview where she shows the slightest hesitancy is when I ask her how it feels to be a billionaire on paper. Perhaps, not surprisingly, she turns my brash question into an opportunity to sing the trend-setting praises of her home province.

“No one has ever asked me that question before… you’re the first. So, there you go, Saskatchewan paving the way!” she says in deliberate over-the-top reverence of the Land of the Living Skies. You can’t help but think the name Cloudflare has a hint of Prairie connotation to it.

For the record, Zatlyn’s stake in Cloudflare, based on its market capitalization of $28 billion, amounts to over $1 billion. That’s ‘one’ with nine zeros after it. We’re in a binary digital world but that one and all those zeros mean so much more than code. However, she’s clearly not as interested in her bank balance as I am, although agrees to give the billion-dollar question further consideration… but not yet.

“Now that you’ve asked, you’ve got me thinking… and that may become something I’ll think more of and have a stronger point of view on. Maybe we’ll have to check back in on that one.” I can’t wait.

Mass appeal, big numbers

With that little matter settled she’s happy to share the pride and satisfaction she has for her team that has signed up three million clients including the likes of Shopify, Garmin, big banks and endless others.

“[Our customers] range from small businesses and entrepreneurs, to developers, students with hobby projects, government agencies, to the Fortune 1000,” she explains.

While things had been hectic for Cloudflare in the years leading up to going public, the arrival of the COVID pandemic took things up a mega notch.

“Internet traffic has gone way up and businesses have had to really pivot to more visual-first experiences. If a business moves online you need something to sit in front of it to make it faster and reliable so it can compete, or for consumers to even consider it,” she says.

And clients have indeed flooded en masse to a company Zatlyn says offers a far more accessible security and performance service, that costs as little as $20 a month and takes less than five minutes to sign up for.

“We take the really big problems [of the Internet] that everyone has, and we make the [solutions] simple and accessible,” she says.

The company boasts a client base of approximately 25 million Internet properties with 20 million HTTP requests per second on average. It says their network is growing by tens of thousands a day.

Ambition and the future of tech

Did Zatlyn ever imagine she would one day be part of the leadership of such a huge piece of global Internet infrastructure? She says ambition has always been part of who she is, even as a youngster at Prince Albert’s Ecole Holy Cross and Carlton Comprehensive High School.

“I was a very ambitious student and really lucky to have great teachers who supported me and parents and siblings who were cheerleaders along the way. I have always been very ambitious and always been in pursuit of something, of capturing an opportunity, loved being part of things and kind of biting off more than I can chew. That’s part of my DNA.”

And she hopes and expects there are others out there ready to make their mark too.

“I’m very bullish about Saskatchewan and especially regarding tech which is playing a bigger role in society. So, for those entrepreneurs in Saskatchewan, lean in. It’s growing, it’s not going away. There are so many problems that aren’t going away. We need people in Saskatchewan to solve them.”

Zatlyn, once the captain of the basketball team at Carlton High, keeps leading from the front, solving the Internet’s problems, millions at a time.