Matthew Browning Prince

In 2008 the Department of Homeland Security came to Prince about the data collected by Project Honey Pot, the spam-tracking side project he had built with the programmer Lee Holloway, asked, "Do you have any idea how valuable this data is?" and offered about 20,000 dollars for it.¹ The better question arrived at Harvard Business School, from a classmate named Michelle Zatlyn, who asked why the pair could not stop the attackers instead of merely tracking them. The answer became Cloudflare, Inc., an American network and security company whose service sits between websites and the wider internet, filtering out malicious traffic while speeding up legitimate requests, and Prince is its co-founder, executive chair, and chief executive. Cloudflare provides content delivery, protection against denial-of-service attacks, domain name resolution, zero-trust access, and edge computing, and by early 2026 it sat in front of roughly 21 percent of all public websites.

Background

Matthew Browning Prince was born on November 13, 1974, in Salt Lake City, Utah. His father worked variously as a journalist, restaurateur, and stockbroker, and the family had deep ties to Park City, Utah, where relatives built the Stein Eriksen Lodge. Prince descends from the Browning gunsmithing family: his ancestor John Browning designed the M1911 pistol, the M2 Browning, and the Browning Auto-5 shotgun, and Prince has framed this lineage as a family history of building things the world had not seen. His grandmother gave him an Apple II Plus for Christmas in 1981, and as a child he took university computer-science classes alongside his mother at the University of Utah.¹

Prince studied at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, earning a bachelor's degree in English literature with a computer-science minor between 1992 and 1996, where he edited the student newspaper and built an early online-only magazine. He went on to earn a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 2000 and a master of business administration from Harvard Business School in 2009, where he was named a George F. Baker Scholar.

Getting started

Prince worked at the law firm Latham & Watkins during the dot-com boom and graduated from law school as the bubble burst, followed by a brief stint at a failed online insurer, GroupWorks. Beginning in 2003 he taught cyberlaw as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.

He co-founded Unspam Technologies with the programmer Lee Holloway, who had turned down offers from Google and Facebook to build with him. Together they created Project Honey Pot, a tool that tracked spam and email-harvesting activity across the web. It grew to roughly 100,000 webmaster participants in 185 countries. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security contacted them wanting to buy the data, reportedly asking, "Do you have any idea how valuable this data is?" and offering about 20,000 dollars.¹

The pivot came at Harvard Business School. Prince described Project Honey Pot to a classmate, Michelle Zatlyn, who reframed the opportunity, asking whether the pair could not just track the attackers but actually stop them. They sketched the idea, originally called Project Web Wall, on a napkin at a Sheraton in Palo Alto during a business-school trip to Silicon Valley, with professor Tom Eisenmann advising. The concept won Harvard's Dubilier Prize and its 50,000 dollars.²

What he built

Cloudflare was formally founded on July 26, 2009, by Prince, Zatlyn, and Holloway. Holloway built the first prototype while Prince and Zatlyn were still at Harvard, and he remained on the engineering side; the company later honored him by giving its 2019 public offering the internal codename Project Holloway. Cloudflare raised a 2.05 million dollar Series A round in November 2009. When the beta opened in June 2010, it revealed an unplanned benefit: the service made sites roughly 30 percent faster, not merely safer.² Cloudflare launched publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt on September 27, 2010, finishing as runner-up and being named most innovative company, with investor interest following within two weeks.²

Cloudflare went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NET on September 13, 2019, priced at 15 dollars a share.³ For fiscal 2025, public filings reported revenue of about 2.168 billion dollars, a net loss of about 102 million dollars, and roughly 5,156 employees. In May 2026 the company cut about 1,100 roles, around 20 percent of its headcount, citing AI-driven efficiency, and it reported record quarterly revenue of 639.8 million dollars in the first quarter of 2026, up 34 percent year over year. In January 2026 Cloudflare acquired Replicate and Human Native, both AI plays, and in late 2025 it suffered two high-profile global outages that took down major sites.

How he operates

Prince has publicly wrestled with the power that running such infrastructure gives him over online speech. Defending service to one controversial site, he said, "A website is speech. It is not a bomb."³ He terminated service to The Daily Stormer in 2017 and to 8chan in 2019 after real-world violence, each time voicing discomfort at being cast as the internet's de facto arbiter of speech, and he defended the suspension of Kiwi Farms in 2022 after a harassment campaign.³ Personal-security incidents shaped his public profile, including a 2012 hack and doxxing and a 2014 armed police raid prompted by a spoofed emergency call.

Where things stand

As of 2026, Prince remains chief executive and co-chair of Cloudflare, a major if not consistently profitable public internet-infrastructure company navigating AI-era headcount cuts, acquisitions into AI data and inference, and reliability scrutiny after the 2025 outages. His net worth was estimated at about 5.5 billion dollars as of February 2025, reportedly making him the wealthiest person in Utah. In March 2023 he and his wife, Tatiana Prince, acquired the Park Record, a Park City, Utah newspaper, tied to his family's roots there.

Key facts

• Descends from the Browning gunsmithing family, whose members designed the M1911 pistol; Prince invokes this lineage often.
• Built Project Honey Pot, a spam-tracking side project that the Department of Homeland Security wanted to buy before Cloudflare existed.
• Cloudflare's discovery that its security service also made sites about 30 percent faster was accidental, surfacing during the 2010 beta.
• The company idea was sketched on a napkin at a hotel during a Harvard Business School field trip to Silicon Valley.
• Third co-founder Lee Holloway stayed out of public view; the 2019 initial public offering was internally codenamed Project Holloway in his honor.
• Cloudflare sat in front of roughly one in five public websites while cutting about 20 percent of its own workforce in 2026, citing AI efficiency.