1. Turning Down a Seat on a Rocket Ship w/Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare

First Pitches with Lolita Taub and Eric Bahn

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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