Introducing The Cold Start: pitch your startup live at Cloudflare Connect

Sixteen years ago, Cloudflare was one of more than 1,000 startups hoping for a spot on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

We were not, on the face of it, an obvious choice. Cloudflare was infrastructure: we made websites faster and protected them from attack, which was not well understood by the general market at the time. Infrastructure is often invisible right up until the moment it becomes important.

But on September 27, 2010, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn got on the Startup Battlefield stage and launched Cloudflare to the public. During the presentation, people started signing up. Then more people started signing up. By the time the judges had finished asking questions, hundreds of websites had joined Cloudflare, putting our initial five data centers to the test in real time. In the seven days following, traffic through our network increased almost 10x and Cloudflare jumped from the 1,000th largest site online to one of the top 50.

Cloudflare didn’t win the main trophy that day. At the awards ceremony, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington described what we did as something akin to "muffler repair for the Internet" and honestly, he had a point. But then he named us the Most Innovative Company. As Matthew wrote later: "You may not win the trophy, but you'll receive something else far more important."

There are moments in the life of a company when somebody gives you a room, a microphone, and a small amount of time to explain the thing you have spent months or years obsessing over. Most of the time nothing magical happens. Sometimes, though, the right people hear it at the right moment and suddenly an idea that has mostly existed between a handful of people starts moving through the world.

This October, as Cloudflare turns 16, we want to give five early-stage startups a stage of their own.