Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, a cybersecurity firm,says that adding more employees too quickly can erode the foundations of company culture. To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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What were your early years like?
I grew up in a small town in Utah. There were just 60 of us in our graduating class. I did debate and a little bit of theater. I was also a skier and worked on the weekends as an assistant ski instructor.
Tell me about your parents.
Both my parents are entrepreneurs. My dad has done a million things over the years. He’s been a journalist. He started his own stock brokerage firm. He owns more than 30 restaurants across three states now. I definitely saw the struggles of entrepreneurship. Restaurants are a really tough business.
My mom owned a collection of gift stores, and I would work for her when I was in school. She has a really great eye for spotting the next trend.
How have they influenced your leadership style?
My dad was always good at what I would describe as panicking early, which I think of as looking way out over the horizon and thinking through a decision and the 50 steps down the road. That’s served me really well.
My mom would always say that it’s better to have a couple of nice things than a lot of mediocre things. We’ve applied that lesson at work, to do a few things really well.
Did you have an idea what you wanted to do for a career when you went to college?
When I was 7 years old, my grandmother gave me an Apple II Plus for Christmas, and I took to it like a duck to water. Computers made a lot of sense to me. My mom used to sneak me into computer science classes at the University of Utah, pretending that she was taking the continuing education classes, and I would basically do all the work.
So I planned to study computer science. But I took a couple of courses and I was bored out of my mind. So I transferred my major to English literature, and kept computer science as a minor.
When I graduated, I had job offers at a bunch of tech companies that I thought weren’t going to go anywhere, like Netscape and Yahoo and Microsoft. And I remember thinking that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in front of a computer writing code. So I decided to go to law school.
I eventually found my way to the world of start-ups. I became pretty hooked on starting something from scratch. Working at a start-up is almost like a drug. There’s something very powerful about going from an idea on a piece of paper to enough money in a bank account to fund it, to building a team.
I started working on Cloudflare as a business-school project in 2009, and my co-founders and I opened an office in California in January 2010.
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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.