*APAC Careers Day* Why We Joined Cloudflare, and Why You Should Too

Okay, hi everyone and welcome to Cloudflare TV today. My name is Tony and I'm very excited today to be joined by a fantastic group of marketers here in APAC.

In today's discussion we'll take you through why we all joined Cloudflare and why we think you should too.

As I mentioned we form part of the marketing team here so there'll be a lot of, there'll be a bit of a marketing spin and flavor on today's discussion but whether you're a marketer or not I think you'll be able to take a lot away in regards to the broader things that we do here at Cloudflare but also life at Cloudflare.

What I'd love to do is I'd love to go around and introduce ourselves, let the audience know our role here and and how long we've been at Cloudflare.

So let me kick it off. So my name is Tony Le and I am the head of marketing here at Australia, for Australia and New Zealand and I've been at Cloudflare for a whopping six weeks.

Over to you Krishna. Hi everyone, my name is Krishna.

I'm the head of marketing for APAC and I've joined Cloudflare a little less than three years ago and I have the great honor of leading this best marketing team of the whole galaxy.

Nice, thanks Krishna. Melanie. Hi guys, yeah I'm Melanie Chan.

I help the APAC marketing team with the digital marketing efforts largely in terms of like SEM and PPC ads as well.

Nice. Teresa. Hi, I'm Teresa Wong and I'm head of South Asian marketing.

I've been in Cloudflare tomorrow will mark my two months being here.

Nice, thank you. And Sugun. Hi everyone, I'm Sugun Saidev and I'm the marketing intern and it's been amazing three months with the Cloudflare and amazing team.

Nice, thank you Sugun. Yes, as I mentioned earlier there'll be a bit of a marketing flavor into discussion but before we sort of jump in into it, Krishna are you able to sort of give the audience just a just a quick overview of the marketing team here in APAC please?

Yes, sure, my pleasure.

As I mentioned to you guys before, I joined a little bit less than three years ago and I was the first marketing hire for Cloudflare for APAC.

So yeah, we were like really small crew.

I think when I joined three years ago it was about 40 people in Cloudflare Asia and Singapore so really small group and yeah, it was early days and it poses a lot of great challenges for marketing.

Early days, we were a young brand, we were growing our awareness, we were growing our interest in our product solutions etc and we're really trying to get at least some penetration in the mindshare of the enterprise segment.

So it was really hard work but really exciting work as well.

So how do we get in the early stage where we have a small team and nobody knows who we are and we start getting some attractions for Cloudflare etc.

So in the early days, we just try to find the largest microphone that there is in the market.

So we're always like going on trade shows, doing a lot of sponsorships etc like who has the biggest audiences, let's make sure we're there, our brand needs to be there, I need to shout on the rooftop about our products and our services and that's what we did and then we also try to find other organizations that has in similar stage like us or like-minded organization and we partner with them to get a little bit more of the groundswell noise going on and early days, it was just hitting the road like we were on the road constantly from market to market, opening up booths, making sure that we are getting our message across and target audiences that we have.

So that was the early days. Now three years forward, now we are having a team of marketers of 11 people strong.

We're still having the same grit in terms of founding the pavement and making sure that we create and generate a lot of noise for our brand and for our solutions but we're a little bit more mature now.

We have now a bigger team, we are now much more thoughtful and we're now much more strategic in our approach.

So we're still doing the same thing, we're still doing a lot of dimension, we're still doing a lot of regenerations as well but we do it of course on a much much bigger scale.

On one side, we have a strong digital team that focuses more on the scalable, programmatic, performance-based optimizations of numbers and reach.

So that digital team manages everything from SEM, PPC, ABM, content syndications, webinar, emails, outbounding, telemarketing, the whole shebang.

So they're thinking really about how can I get the most bang for my buck and investments and reaching out as wide as audiences as we can and the team's still growing and the vast majority of our budget and attention and our results is focusing on digital especially during the COVID pandemic where everything moved digitally.

So that's a big part of our team. The other side of our team is what we call the country marketing managers.

So those are the teams that are distributed in our region, wherever we have an office we want to put a marketer there in place because we have a mature sales organization in those markets.

Tony being one of those examples where we have a strong sales organization in Z based out of Sydney.

So then we have a strong marketer Tony that is part of that particular team and thinks what's the best strategy and tactic and execution and media mix going forward for that particular region and those mixes can be different from other regions.

Teresa is managing the South Asia region and it can be a completely different go-to-market strategy.

So that's how we kind of divided our team right now where we have the digital team that think big and think more of the reach and optimization of performance but then we have the custom high touch bespoke strategies and tactics going on for each region because each region is different.

So that's how we set up our team, that's how we set up our workflows as well and then that's how we go to market in APAC.

Nice, nice. Thank you Krishna.

Thanks for the insights. Just to let viewers know I guess today what we're going to do is go through a bit more in regards to why we all joined Cloudflare, some of the fun exciting things that we do here, also you know why we think that you should join Cloudflare and then we'll also touch upon you know some of the openings that we have and give you guys a bit more detail about that.

So I guess we'll sort of jump straight into it.

I guess what we're going to do is I want to let the viewers know why we joined Cloudflare and I can sort of kick that off for me.

It was very much about three things. It was about the purpose, the people and the product.

Cloudflare's purpose is to help build a better Internet.

I strongly believe that the key word within that sentence is to help. You know we don't make any bold claims about you know we are the Internet, you know our role is just you know to do the part to build a better version of the Internet.

Secondly the question there is do we have the right bunch of people and culture to really help drive this purpose.

So you know here at Cloudflare we're all about diversity.

You know diverse backgrounds and views really help us to cover our blind spots.

So whether you're a square peg and concerned about fitting into a circle hole you have nothing to worry about here at Cloudflare.

And lastly our products.

Our products and our features are constantly pushing the envelope. We're really out there challenging the norms and as a marketer it's very exciting to have great products to market and that actually makes our jobs a lot easier.

Also another good reason is swag.

We have some really good swag. So you can see everyone on the call today has Cloudflare swag on.

Yep trust the marketing team to to rock up with the swag.

So during onboarding all the new starters get a welcome kit which has your swag.

So that's another good reason to join as well. Theresa I might just pass it over to you just get your thoughts on why you joined Cloudflare.

Okay thank you Tony.

Well yeah so as I reflect upon this before I joined Cloudflare I took a sabbatical to try something new and something different for two years.

So I gave entrepreneurship a shot. At least I know I tried but by the end of it I know I missed being a B2B marketer that brings with it you know the stress, the adrenaline, the camaraderie with like-minded teammates that are really hell-bent on delivering the best campaigns that produce results.

So when an opening came up for Cloudflare to lead the South Asia marketing I was ready to take on the challenge.

Consistently I've heard only good things about the company, the culture, the products.

Yeah so what really stood out for me were three things Michelle Zeppelin our Cloudflare CEO, Cloudflare's core values and the strive to build a diverse and inclusive workplace that you mentioned about too Tony.

So but if I'm only allowed to choose one reason because of time it would be Michelle our COO and co-founder who really stood out for me on so many so many levels.

When Cloudflare first IPO in 2019 she stood on the podium with her husband and kids.

She literally did what many women thought they couldn't and that's having a successful career with a supportive family.

Especially for women in IT space in the tech space this really is an inspiration.

She is also a firm believer that it is okay to have a winding career path or getting out there to see the world.

I mean such experiences are an asset to the organization.

Especially for someone like me who took time out to be an entrepreneur I don't feel that I have to find an excuse or apologize to take time out of the corporate life.

Yep thanks so easy yeah I totally agree.

Michelle is a truly an inspirational leader and a driver of our core values here.

Melanie could you shed some light on why you joined Cloudflare? Yeah sure so I guess for me personally I'm pretty passionate about how tech can bring about a valuable impact onto society.

So at that point of time when I was looking for my next opportunity I was looking for an organization that had innovation embedded in the DNA of its products and even its practices.

So I think when the opportunity for Cloudflare came about I got really excited about the prospect of supporting the marketing initiatives of a global innovation leader.

Yeah moreover I think what we have now how the ethical usage of big data is being a heavy concern that's being posed onto big tech nowadays.

I was extremely impressed by how Cloudflare continually strives to maintain data privacy on its network.

You know from respecting local laws like the GDPR to building the next generation of privacy preserving protocols these initiators really reflect Cloudflare's values as core.

So yeah I guess to put it simply I joined Cloudflare because I found this a line of my values and passions.

Yeah nice thank you. Yeah no it's actually really good to hear another example where I guess our personal values really line up to what Cloudflare is doing so that's great thank you.

Now to the next question and it's definitely the question that's on the tip of every listener's tongue.

It's you know what are some of the cool things that we do here at Cloudflare and what makes them unique?

For this question I'm looking at you Krishna you know you were the one that started the APAC marketing team here from scratch so you've worked across you know multiple markets you know what are some examples that you've got to share?

Well we've done so many cool stuff it's very very hard to pinpoint one but I think from an overall perspective I can tell you what's cool about Cloudflare at this moment of time it's really joining an organization that is building something really really great and when I say build it means really building from scratch and I think that is something very very exciting for me as a marketer where you know we're the first generation in the market so there is no existing playbooks or something that to follow.

We need to draw our own path and you need to build something from scratch.

You're building your business, you're building your team, you're building your brand awareness everything from ground zero.

So we started three years ago from a standstill and that's for me as a marketing leader that was actually the coolest part of the whole gig is build something from scratch.

I'm not just sitting behind a laptop and a screen and manage everything from an ivory tower.

No, we're all going to go down and get our hands dirty and build something with your hands and that is really really exciting.

As we're entering the later part of hopefully the COVID era we've done really start accelerating the hyper growth and that's where we start hitting up strides so that's what's a bit more unique and challenging opportunities for us.

We're also very close to the business. I've been to other organizations that marketing is far removed from the core revenue and the core business.

In this team, in this company we're not. We are part of the business and it is so refreshing that you can see our marketing work and marketing campaigns has a direct impact in pipeline and revenue in a very short time and if we don't as a team show up for work the business will suffer right and that is an amazing moment in time where marketers can actually be part of the business and influence the business going forward.

It's also so very very cool.

From a marketing perspective, the challenge for us and for me is how do you connect something so technical like cyber security to human emotions and making the human connections and that's where the art of our work comes from.

How do you translate a very technical aspect of website performance and cyber security and how could you connect that emotionally with the human and that is what is challenging for a marketer to join this team because that's a puzzle that we need to unlock every single day to making that human connections in a very very technical environment and that's where the art of marketing comes from.

So those are all like a very very exciting stuff for me from looking from where I am.

Nice, thank you Krishna.

I appreciate the level of detail you've gone into. I'm sort of going to take that point about the human connection and sort of jump over to my next question.

I know, Teresa, you sort of mentioned something in our team catch-ups. Something cool that you've done recently at Cloudflare.

Can you sort of give us a bit more detail about that?

Yeah, so you know seriously in Cloudflare, my mind is just expanded.

I feel like I have grown as a person. My brain and mind has blown but what was really cool for me that one time was when I signed up for a class called people reading.

My God, it's like now looking at the smiles, I know what's behind that smile now.

So that to me was really cool. Nice, nice. Do I have to be worried when we have our one-on-one catch -ups, you know?

Keep your best face forward.

No, that's pretty, that's pretty cool, it's pretty cool. That sort of is a good segue I guess to my next question.

I sort of wanted to touch a bit more on everyone's experience at Cloudflare and how they sort of related to the Cloudflare culture.

I know when I was sort of looking to join Cloudflare, you know, I was looking into, you know, finding a bit more about the Cloudflare culture.

So Krishna, I might sort of come back to you just to sort of tell the audience a bit more about the Cloudflare culture.

Yeah, you guys mentioned it already before with the examples that you put in with Michelle Zappman and how she put in the IPO with family and with her husband and you touched also Tony and everybody else about how different the culture of Cloudflare is.

The key point is diversity and you touched on it before that the benefits of being a diverse team, it allows you to identify blind spots that you're perhaps not aware of with people with different backgrounds, different education, different ethnic backgrounds as well.

All of that creates a much better work environment and create much better output in work because everybody brings something else to the table.

So diversity is a very, very key thing with us.

As part of the diversity, we're also very, very open to form any employees resource group.

So what that means is that every employee that can form their own group of like-minded people and then start promoting their background and their lifestyle and being proud of being part of the team.

We have many, many of those examples.

We have something like Green Cloud, a group that cares about sustainability.

We also have Proudflare, Asianflare, Daisyflare, all that stuff we have just to make sure that everybody has something that they have a sense of belonging to.

So that's big of our culture as well. Two other things that I would like to touch is about curiosity.

That is really, really important for us. We like to be surrounded with lifetime learners and people that are constantly being curious and poking questions and asking why and why can't we do this differently?

How can we do this better?

Why not change this? So having that mentality of lifetime learner and being curious is something that I think everybody that I've come across with in Proudflare possesses in some sort of form.

And the other one is collaboration.

And you heard collaboration a lot with other companies as well. And of course, collaboration is super, super critical and necessary.

But our translation of collaboration is actually leading with empathy, right?

When you engage with our teammates, what does it mean with leading with empathy?

It's always assuming the best of other people, always assuming the good in other people.

And that's how you start your engagement with everyone, being a teammate.

And you guys are pretty new.

And you guys experienced it as well, where once you're onboarding and you touch somebody over the shoulder, everybody's willing to help you out.

Everybody's willing to drop what they're doing and spend five minutes with you and explain how it works.

And that's really, really ingrained with us. So curiosity of learning, collaboratively with empathy.

And I think the most important thing is we're really promoting diversity in our company.

Nice, nice. Thanks.

Thanks, Krishna. I think that really resonated with a lot of the viewers out there.

So Melanie, could we hear a bit more about, I guess, your experience with the Cloudflare culture?

Yeah, sure. So I think very much in line with what Krishna mentioned, there's really much respect and support, both in the marketing team and across lateral as well with other teams, where the management team really fights and believes in the success of your projects.

It really epitomizes the idea of a dream team, I think.

So yeah, as a company that strives to democratize work culture, I think we're given a high level of independence and accountability to experiment.

And this is something I really appreciate from a digital marketing point of view, because it's aligned with the experimental nature of the trade itself, right?

We need that space to explore, to be really able to test out hypothesis to know what works and what doesn't before we can then scale up on performing campaigns.

Yeah.

Nice, nice. Thanks. Yeah, totally agree with you. I think there's a saying that we have in marketing team, it's one team, one dream.

So thank you. Sughun, we've yet to hear from you.

And I just sort of wanted to highlight your position here at Cloudflare as it definitely talks to a lot of young people out there and new marketers, definitely ones who are looking for their first dream job.

Could you share your experience and your sort of interaction with the Cloudflare culture?

Sure.

Thank you, Tony. So yeah, for the past three months, I had the pleasure of working as a marketing intern at Cloudflare.

And this internship was unlike any other.

It demonstrated Cloudflare's leadership and giving students meaningful opportunities to explore their interests and contribute to Cloudflare's mission, which is to build a better Internet.

And I think that what made this internship really unique was that even in times of remote working, I had the opportunity to connect with people from cross-function teams on one-on-one Zoom meetings and work on some amazing projects in a very short span of time.

So I totally feel that this is only because Cloudflare as a company has urged me to push myself towards learning new things, taking up challenges and delivering the best for future.

And I think that makes it a great place to work.

Nice. Nice. Thanks. Yeah. It's always great to sort of hear the perspective from someone who's quite early in their career.

I know that we've had many conversations about you learning new things.

So I'm really excited about seeing you grow here at Cloudflare.

So thank you. I guess jumping over to the next question, I guess what we want to hear is, you know, some, you know, we've heard things about why we joined Cloudflare, our great culture.

But I guess we also wanted to call out, I guess, what are some of the recent and ongoing initiatives, whether it be from Cloudflare product team or marketing, that we sort of see as being inspiring.

So Therese, I believe you have a good example about this.

Yep, definitely. I think what I was really impressed, like being a newcomer in the company just around three weeks ago, Cloudflare launched the Impact Week.

And this is where Cloudflare highlight and reflect around our environmental, social and governance initiative.

In short, ESG initiatives. And this is really important to let people know that while we are in pursuit of excellence for our life, for the world, and this applies for everyone, not just Cloudflare, but in Cloudflare, we do it not at expense of the environment or the people.

So that was really something that I took away as what Cloudflare will do to support the environment and, you know, in pursuit of excellence, we do it well.

Yep. A great example.

Yeah, I too value Impact Week. I think it's great. It shows, you know, that Cloudflare considers, you know, things outside of the business as well and sort of our impact on that.

So Melina, I believe you have an example to share as well.

Yeah. So we're actually running an ongoing marketing campaign that's creating awareness about Cloudflare security services for ransom-based DDoS attacks.

So I think what's really unique about from a marketing perspective is that, you know, while the company, you know, creates brand awareness and its positioning for this series of products, we're actually also creating a strong public awareness on the recent increase in ransom-based cyber attacks that has been occurring globally.

Yeah.

Yeah. Nice. Nice. Now you're spot on there. I think there's a lot of marketing campaigns in which we work on that do relate to real issues out there in the world.

And it's always good to be able to talk to, you know, your friends and family about stuff that you're doing to sort of, you know, help some of the issues out there.

I guess over to the next question, probably one of the most anticipated questions is, I guess, why you should join Cloudflare?

I can sort of kick it off. I guess from my view is, you know, to be honest, a lot of marketing roles within the tech industry are quite similar in some shape, way or form.

But I think one of the key differentiators is definitely the company culture and how leaders involve all staff in the decision-making process.

So a hot topic today is how the global pandemic has changed, I guess, where and how employees work.

At Cloudflare, we are working on an initiative called Back to Better.

The leadership team have not decided in isolation how the workforce should return back to work.

You know, instead they've gone out there, they've conducted employee surveys and they're listening to us.

They've listened to what other tech companies doing within the industry.

And our plan is to experiment and see what works and also to see what our employees prefer as well.

Melanie, I'll pass it over to you.

I guess you've got a bit of insight into why others should join Cloudflare.

Yeah, so I have three good reasons why I think someone should join Cloudflare.

I think one is, you know, if you're someone who looks for impact in the work that you do, you know, in spending that money to do something that's worthwhile, I think you really see your work efforts address real cybersecurity needs that are currently out there.

As what Tony mentioned with the pandemic at the moment, there's an increase in cybersecurity attacks that, you know, Cloudflare is at a position to address at the moment.

You also get to connect with a multinational pool of aspiring individuals who are just as ambitious as you are.

So, you know, you get to learn and grow with all of us and I think that's worthwhile.

And lastly, you get to co-create a better Internet and world with Cloudflare, yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

Thank you. Now that we've sort of taken everyone through, you know, why we join Cloudflare, what are some of the cool things that we do?

We've talked about a few individual journeys and why we think, you know, the audience should join Cloudflare.

It'd be great to go through, I guess, some of the openings that we have and what makes them exciting.

So Krishna, I'll pass it over to you to talk a bit further about this.

Yeah, we have some several senior positions within the marketing team open right now.

The first thing I would like to highlight is at the beginning of this talk, we discussed a little bit about how important the digital arm is within the team, how important digital is, especially during the whole COVID pandemic as well, where everything moved digitally.

One of the roles that's open right now is the head of our digital team.

So the head of the ManJam campaigns that's managing everything that we have on the digital space.

It means that leading a team on SEM, PPC, all the search engine marketing that's out there, not only at Google, but thinking about Baidu, thinking about Yahoo, Japan, etc.

in Korea. And really, we have a really strong vision on how we drive performance marketing that way.

Also driving a bunch of talented people in driving ABM, confidence indications, webinars as well.

A lot of outbound marketing is part of that as well.

In addition to, but not, you know, less than thinking about organic inbound as well.

So we already have a strong team, but we need a strong leader at the moment.

And that's a very, very exciting role. So the head of the ManJam campaigns marketing manager is open at the moment.

Besides that, we are having, we have offices in Beijing, and we have an office in Tokyo as well.

And we're looking for a strong marketer, just like Teresa just at Sony, to have all of our marketing efforts and marketing motions in those offices in Beijing and in Tokyo as well.

So those are the senior positions that are open currently now. A head of marketing for North Asia, that includes Japan and South Korea.

A really, really exciting regional role, the head of marketing for the greater China region, that includes, of course, regions as mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau as well.

Yeah, so a lot of exciting stuff, a lot of roles that can create a real impact in business.

Nice, nice. Thank you, Krishna. And just to re-highlight, if anyone is interested in joining Cloudflare, simply head over to Cloudflare .com forward slash careers.

But before you head over, do spend some time on Cloudflare TV.

Watch a few segments from our CEO, Michelle. She really talks about, I guess, the purpose behind the hiring process, why we do take the time to find the right person for the role, but also the right fit within the culture.

I think we're sort of nearing the end, so I just want to take the opportunity to thank you here, the team for joining us, and then the audience.

And I hope you've been able to get something valuable out of the discussion.

Thanks all. Hey guys, thanks for listening.