1. Turning Down a Seat on a Rocket Ship w/Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare
First Pitches with Lolita Taub and Eric Bahn
English - January 06, 2021 08:05 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBEntrepreneurship Business Education How To fundraising venture capital venture capitalist business pitch startup pitch entrepreneurship eric bahn first pitches founder hustlefund Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
In a Harvard Business School commencement speech, Sheryl Sandberg famously said, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.”
This was advice given to her by Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt when Sheryl was contemplating taking a job offer at Google. This advice would hold true 6 years later, when Sheryl left Google to become Facebook’s COO.
While it sounds like a no brainer now, can you imagine being offered a seat on a rocketship and turning it down?
That’s exactly what our guest on First Pitches, Michelle Zatlyn, did. Michelle is the co-founder and COO of Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company with a mission to help build a better Internet.
While in business school, Michelle was given an offer to join LinkedIn pre-IPO. But instead, she turned it down to go build Cloudflare with her co-founders. Not only did she turn down a seat on a rocket ship, but she did so to start a business during an economic downturn.
While most people would see this as extremely risky, Michelle trusted her instincts, and today she is in a very small club of female executives who have founded public companies and the only one running one worth over $10 billion today.
You’ll have to listen to find out how the rest of the story unfolds.
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