Cloudflare’s origin traces back to Project Honeypot, an open-source system designed to track how spammers harvest email addresses. Matthew Prince, co-founder of Cloudflare, explains that while the project successfully gathered data on spammer behavior—such as the one-week average delay between harvesting and the first message—he initially dismissed user requests to build a tool that actively blocked threats. This hesitation stemmed from the technical complexity of developing software plugins for various web servers. The transition from a data-tracking project to a security company occurred at Harvard Business School, where co-founder Michelle Zatlyn identified the commercial potential in stopping web threats rather than just monitoring them. This shift in perspective transformed a side project into a cloud-based security service, moving away from difficult-to-maintain local software toward a more scalable network-level solution.
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