Silicon Valley Squares

Hello, hello, welcome everyone to yet another episode of Silicon Valley Squares. I'm your host from the West Coast, Dan Hollinger.

And with me today is a wide assortment of Cloudflare employees, hopefully willing to entertain you be a little bit silly and maybe get some trivia questions right.

So with that, I welcome you to the show.

If you're joining in via the live stream or one of the recordings, welcome and good morning, afternoon or evening.

If you've not seen the show before, it is rather straightforward.

What we do is play a lively game of tic-tac -toe.

I have two contestants here, Jason and Liz, they'll each be trying to get three across three down or three diagonal by asking trivia questions of our lovely guests.

And with that, I'll kick it off to Jason, would you mind introducing yourself to our lovely audience?

Absolutely. Hey, folks, my name is Jason Kincaid. I am on the marketing team at Cloudflare, where these days I have the good fortune of getting to help keep Cloudflare TV on the tracks.

So it's been quite an adventure. So what you're saying is when it goes off the rails, this is your fault.

Yep. 100%. And yeah, they flog me for it occasionally.

Or mine. Yeah, or always. Well, Jason, welcome and best of luck.

And Liz, welcome to Squares. Would you mind giving yourself a quick introduction?

Hi, I'm Liz. I am in the legal contracts group, senior commercial counsel, and I'm in Austin.

And I've been with Cloudflare for five months.

So super excited to be here. Wow, still fresh. Still got the new Cloudflare smell.

All right. So with that, I'll bring the board back up. And I think Jason, you can kick us off.

Where would you like to play? You know, I've been studying my tic-tac-toe strategy.

And I think the middle square is a good place to start.

So let's go with Alex. Robert, good place. Alex, welcome to the Squares. Thank you.

Dan, what's up with your suit? I'm stunned that you own a suit, actually. I own like four.

I have an MBA. I do business. You're opening yourself up for even more.

Oh, bring the ridicule. More attacks. Alex, I think that's a virtual suit.

I really do. It's actually just part of the background. It's Harry Dan's head. It's hard to tell.

It is hard to tell. I've been accused of a virtual suit before.

So Alex, would you mind giving yourself a quick introduction? Oh, sure. I am Alex Steiner from Cloudflare and Special Projects team.

And I lead the group, which is Corporate Business Development and Corporate Strategy.

Awesome.

Well, welcome to the Squares. And you can kick us off with the first question.

This should be a nice softball. What is the name of Cloudflare's solution for protecting TCP and UDP applications?

Cloudflare. ABC XYZ? No, no, it's not that.

It's Cloudflare Spectrum. And it's called Spectrum because it allows us to protect and serve the entire stack from layer seven down to layer three.

All right.

Do a light metaphor. Yeah. Alex, sometimes, sometimes, I doubt... Does that sound credible, Jason?

You seem like you have some credibility on this front. And also, any potential customers who are hearing this might be misled if you were to give an incorrect answer.

So I'm going to agree with what you said. All right. Agree is correct.

So Jason gets center square. And here's the sound effects. Anyone doing sound effects for me?

Liz, the board is yours.

Where would you like to play? Okay, I would like to...

I disagree with Jason's strategy and I think that the corner is the place to start in.

So I would like to start with Thomas Calderon, please.

All right. Well, Thomas is actually missing in action today. So in his stead, I'll still give you the square.

But we have to go back and talk to Alex, if that's okay.

All right. I'm sorry, Liz. Don't let me down, Alex. I'm going to try. All right, Alex, your question.

Ask Thomas. Who founded Apple Computer? You need to get Thomas's accent right, Alex.

Wow. I'm going to say it might be Steve Wozniak.

Remember, Dan, technically correct is the best kind of correct answer.

I think you're tricky.

So, you know, I think this is terrible. I think technically, I think there actually was more than one founder of Apple, but I'm pretty sure that Steve Wozniak was one of those founders.

So I think Alex is right. I think he's done it again.

All right. I will give it to you. Because you'd have a square revolt if you didn't.

Yeah, I like to avoid those. I guess you'd have to have half the square. That's, that's one reason this is a, you know.

We would virtually attack you. Yeah. I mean, some of you know how to hack computers, so we'd be...

Well, that was never proven in a court of law.

All right, Liz, you get the square. So now we're back to Jason.

Where would you like to play? Let's try Andre.

Andre, the Stalwart Squares alumni. Yes. Where are you joining us from?

I, as you can see behind me, I am joining you from the delightful seaside village of Whitstable, Kent, UK, apparently in the county of Canterbury, which is, you know, an old place where a bunch of people used to meet and they wrote a book about it.

Yeah. Are you plugging a book here? Are you actually legitimately plugging a book?

I am plugging a book, yes. We're getting more and more on par with the real show here.

It's about a bunch of, it's about a bunch of dogs.

It's called Canterbury Tales. That was the rewrite. Thank you, Carrie, for getting that pun.

I appreciate you. All right. Well, Andre, you may make fun of me for this question, but true or false, the first webcam ever was set up to monitor a coffee pot.

Okay, so here's the thing. I will make fun of you.

Yep. Because this is a reuse. You're recycling questions now. You're, you, you and I have hung out far too much now.

We, we, I know the questions that you've asked before.

The, the question, the, the answer is obviously no. Because the first camera that was set up was to watch a thermometer.

Watch a thermometer. All right.

Okay. So the, the, the, I didn't say either of, I didn't say either true or false in, in my answer.

So I'm going to go with false. All right. Going with false. Do you agree or disagree with that, Jason?

Do I agree that it is true or false? False.

That the first webcam was trained on a coffee pot. Just want to make sure I'm following that.

Let's, let's make this slightly less difficult. Oh yeah. Andre said false.

I'll, I'll say the first webcam was not on a coffee pot. Do you agree with that assessment?

I disagree with Andre. That's all I wanted. Just in general.

All right. If everyone told you the first episode, it is true. The first webcam was set up because the engineers were lazy and didn't want to look at the coffee pot.

Victory. Yes. Apparently, apparently Jason has watched this show before and I've become too predictable.

Apparently. Is what I'm hearing. Yeah. You need, you need to actually start giving trustworthy answers at some point.

All right.

We also have a similar thing for Cloudflare TV. The first thing we trained it on was fans, literally ceiling fans, so that we could have motion in the background.

Is it still spinning? Yep. It's still spinning. It's still spinning. So, and so we had the running thing of fans of fans.

If only we had a perpetually moving object famously in our office in San Francisco.

Yeah. Maybe a wall of some sort.

That was too much work. Too much work. Too much. Yeah. Yeah. I'd have to pipe that in all the way.

As an MVP. All right, Liz, the board is yours and it looks like the, your spot might be obvious for you.

Okay. Um, I can't see the board. Oh, I did not press the button.

There we go. Awesome. Yes. It's an obvious space. I would like to ask a question of Janet, please.

All right, Janet, welcome to the squares.

Would you mind introducing yourself? Hi, I'm Janet Van Hise and I am Cloudflare's head of people.

So the HR function. All right. So everyone be on guard.

Yes. So everyone here is on notice. Or maybe, you know, maybe not on guard. Just let's be nice to each other.

Well, what we always are, you know, high empathy, deeply curious.

All right, Janet, you actually got answering questions. One of our more technical questions.

Oh, yay. Oh, Liz, you're in good hands. Yeah. I have like been many times accused of being the most technical person at Cloudflare, so I got this for you.

Awesome. This is a question actually put in place in response to one of our previous questions where the answer was actually incorrect.

So your question is, what is a kibbeh bite or how many bites are in a kibbeh bite?

Are you sure this is not more like a pet based question?

Cause it feels like what I, what I give my cat every morning.

And oral care, oral care for the kibbeh bite of kibble.

Yeah. Then no, that's really what it is. It's for cats that have oral problems, dental hygiene problems.

It's a special type of food that you give to them in order to, um, in order to give them a cleaner gums and remove any tartar and plaque buildup.

All right. Liz, when you say that after this, Dan, I'm going to make fun of you again.

That's fine. It's that type of episode. We have to wait for Janet to clear.

And then, at least, at least you're, you know, allowing me to like prep for it.

Jason, don't you have like some poll or Ollie? Can you like kick Janet off real quick so we can talk about this?

We can mute her. We can mute her. All right, Liz, you agree with the.

I stand by my statement that everyone here is on notice.

Okay. Um, so Janet, um, I, I will always have sort of a special connection to Janet because she gave me my last interview before I, um, it was official that I was going to be joining Cloudflare.

Um, and like Janet, I also like cats and I help with taking care of our cats and the cat's teeth.

And, um, I, however, am maybe just a teensy bit more of a nerd than I realized, cause I know that this is a thing.

It's not just a cat treat. Um, so I'm going to disagree with Janet. All right.

Disagree is the right choice. And so Andre, if you'd like to let me have it while I go ahead and put this, uh, Oh, on the board.

It actually sounds like Liz should be the one to let you have it.

Go for it, Liz. What, what is a kilobyte? Um, okay.

So it's two to the power of 10, I think, 1024 bytes. And I have no idea why it even exists because it's, I think it exists just cause it's fun to say and confuse people.

Yeah. Isn't that the law of large numbers right there? Yeah. So, so for, for context, uh, on previous episode, I asked what four kilobytes were in bytes and recently the definition was changed, so that's no longer a trick question that four kilobytes represents 4,000 and not two to the power of 10 times four.

So hence the question of what is a kilobyte?

All right.

Jason. I think Liz would have believed me, Dan, if you didn't say, Janet, I'm giving you a technical question.

That could have been a setup. I could be working on behalf of the squares to just like mislead the contestants.

I mean, I feel I'm neutral, but probably not, especially with Andre.

All right. I'm just here to keep you honest with you and your virtual suit, Dan.

All right. Jason board is yours.

Where would you like to play? I think I have identified Liz's strategy and she's going to go for Jenny next.

So let's go for Jenny. All right. Jenny, welcome to squares.

Would you mind introducing yourself? Yeah, thanks, Dan. Jenny, I'm on the product design team, so it's fun to be here with all my coworkers, past and present.

Awesome. Welcome to the squares. Your question, um, LimeWire, Kazaa, and Napster were all sites and applications famous for what, or maybe infamous?

There's a great, great mixology sites of the nineties. You know, drinks, they share your, your favorite cocktail mixes illegally with your friends and people across the world.

Yeah. You know, I've heard of these mixes and they can, uh, have some pretty interesting consequences that said, this is a kid friendly show, everybody.

I mean, to be fair, some of those mixes were open source.

Okay. They were fine. Yeah. And butter beer is hard to come by anyway. So we don't really, they were pub domain.

It was fine. That's that said, I think in this case.

I'm going to have to disagree with Jenny. I think those apps were, I don't know.

There are various dark arts that I've never dabbled in.

You don't have to, you don't have to say the correct answer. You don't have to say that.

Yeah. Yeah. You just have to agree or disagree. You don't have to.

Okay, fine. But I know the correct answer, but I'll just disagree with you.

We believe you. All right. That is, that is correct. They were used to, uh, illegally download music and I'm sure no ever, ever done it.

All right. Let me bring the board back up competitive game.

Liz, where would you like to play? Um, at least it looks like I need to ask Elisa, Alyssa, a question.

All right, Alyssa welcome.

Would you mind giving yourself a quick introduction for all your cloud flare TV fans?

Oh, sure. I'm Alyssa. I'm head of public policy and I'm based in Washington, DC, which is in the throes of summer right now.

So miserable is what you're trying to get swamp.

Like actually it would be the other description, which is actually might be, yeah, yeah.

I mean, air conditioned the swamp. It's fine. All right.

So your question, 1998 was the launch year of this popular search engine, it was an excellent year.

1998, lots going on in the search engine space. Uh, you know, I, I remember the, the sort of launch of Lycos like, uh, you know, close, near and dear to my heart, um, many years ago.

Um, so I'm going to go with that. All right.

Lycos. Do you agree or disagree? I don't even remember Lycos. Um, so that's impressive.

Um, was that the one with the dog commercials? That was the dog. I think.

Yeah. Um, and, and I remember during that time, there were a lot of search engines actually, um, coming out.

And so, but there's one that's kind of like a very dominant search engine that we still know about that I'm pretty sure launched in 98.

Um, that wasn't Lycos, but I don't know. You might also be right. Lycos may have also, but I'm going to disagree.

All right. Disagree is correct. Uh, the answer was Google.

No one ever uses that. I was betting on ask keys. It was, it was launched in 1998, uh, actually the same year as Napster.

And keep in mind, like even Wikipedia was only launched in 2001.

For the record, I do remember Lycos, although I did know it was Google, but you know, I do remember Lycos.

I don't remember who was the dog though.

All right. Melissa, you got to stick with your story.

You can't admit that you gave the wrong answer. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

Oh no, my bad. I mean, it was Lycos. Definitely Lycos. Squares are infallible here.

All right. Jason, the board is yours. All right. Very competitive.

Not too many, uh, possibilities to win except Carrie. Let's go with Carrie.

I see there's one opportunity. Carrie, welcome back. Would you mind giving a quick introduction?

Thank you. Hi, I'm Carrie. I'm a designer based in San Francisco.

And I've been on the show before, not to brag, but not as many times as I'm here.

I mean, this is now a resume point for, for some folks. Yeah.

At least I'm doing it at least LinkedIn glitter. Like will you endorse me?

You haven't yet. You know, best square ever. Wow. Shots fired at Andre. Thank you.

All right. Well, next step is I asked for new, like background square designs. Like I'll make a juror for that.

Yeah. Three to 12 months and I'll see if I mean, I think Dan is very much in favor of the quality over quantity.

I'm shooting for quantity here.

All right. Carrie, welcome back. Your question. The first network connection was made between Stanford research institute and this California university.

Yes. Yes. I remember the, the ARPANET thing from, from our, uh, CS history.

Um, it didn't go very far. It just went over to Berkeley. Hmm. What do you think?

And that I think Carrie knows her stuff. And so I am reluctant to doubt her on this front.

That said, I went to UCLA and I think I took math classes in the same building where this node was.

So I'm going to disagree with her. Oh man, Carrie, you got, you got the wrong end of that stick.

Trying to, trying to fool the person that went to the school.

That's damn it. I should have read your resume. Yeah, it was UCLA.

I would have added more to my life. More than necessary. Yeah. All right.

Next time. Don't get comfortable. All right. There's the state of the board. Liz, where would you like to play?

And keep in mind, I'm in a stalemate. The first to five will technically win the game.

Would you, would you like to choose Brian or Oliver?

Brian, please. All right, Brian.

Welcome to the squares. Would you mind introducing yourself? Hi everybody. My name is Brian Petrosky based out of San Francisco and I'm the product manager for the load balancing product.

Very excited. All right. Any load balancing questions? I hope so.

All right. I'll have to check. Brian, what operating system was first developed in 1969 by AT&T?

Oh goodness. Um, all these Java things that came up with like coughing stuff and it's all, there's like a assembly or I'm going to, I'm going to take a shot in the dark.

I'm going to go with what I believe it is. I'm going to say, uh, Unix, the, one of the originals.

You're in good hands. Don't worry.

Gotcha. Yeah. He looks trustworthy. Liz, what, what are your thoughts? Uh, well, I haven't had the chance to meet Brian yet, but, um, I got exposed to some programming back in the eighties and, um, I'm pretty sure Brian's spot on.

I think he's right.

So I'm going to agree. All right. It is Unix. And so get the square and we'll, we'll have a full board game.

Woo. Nice. All right. Jason, would you like to close out the game?

Can you close out game one? Yes, please. Oh, I know. I know I can trust you on this.

All right. Yeah. I feel like that I'd like pick last. All right.

Oliver, would you mind introducing yourself? Uh, yes. So I'm the director of engineering of the emerging technology and incubation group.

The new team renamed, um, worked on various products, including the one that everybody's watching today.

That was for TV. Awesome. All right. In what city in 1978 was the first online bulletin board developed?

In what city was the first PBS? Ah, I see.

Yes. I didn't get on this PBS scene at that point in time. So that was way early for me as the, uh, but, um, I believe the first one was in New York.

All right.

New York. Do you agree or disagree? Or were you there? I mean, if you were there, just let us know now, you know, the, uh, it was a little before my time, just a smidge.

And I'm really struggling with this one. Cause I don't know the answer.

And Ollie is a highly credible person. And yet of all the cities out there, you know, there are so many possibilities aside from New York.

What's the likelihood that he knows the specific city.

And so in this case, Ollie, I never doubt you, but I'm just playing the odds in this point.

And so I'm going to disagree with Ollie.

Cause he was using stats. There's no trust. Yeah. Using stats.

Well, the disagree is correct. Uh, it was actually in Chicago. All right. So Ollie's the nicest disagree.

Yeah. It's like, it's not you. It's statistics. I'm sorry.

Like, I'm sorry, baby. That was not the city Jason was thinking of. All right. And with that, that closes out game one, a hyper competitive game.

And of course, game one was brought to you by the Cloudflare Partner Network.

Why? Because I work for the partner team and I put this show together.

So if you'd like to learn more about becoming a partner, feel free to check out portal.Cloudflarepartners.com to learn more about enablement and training, co-marketing material and joint planning.

All right. And with that, we'll try to have other opportunities for other groups to advertise.

Oh, there are product placement. Actually. There are. If anyone, if anyone can help me, can we get some love?

Oh, send me the slide. They are all vetted by Dan.

Yeah. He doesn't propose. Exactly. Maybe I'll get Carrie to, uh, you know, improve on them.

I think in 12 months, or a little something on the side, you know?

Yeah, exactly. Do one in five minutes. Some light bribery. Light bribery.

Just like, all right. Liz, would you like to kick off game two? We might not finish, but we'll see how far we can get.

Um, sure. Uh, I would like to start with Oliver Yu, please.

All right, Oliver, your question. What is the origin of the Internet term spam?

Uh, it actually, the, you mean like what it's supposed to represent or like, where did the term come from?

Where did the term come from? Ah, the term comes from the, the terrible meats that used to be, used to feed the military and then like, because it was so terrible, they used that term to represent the trash that you get in your mail when, when the undesired stuff.

All right.

Liz, do you agree or disagree? Um, so that was about something to do with fairies.

Um, I'm, I'm gonna, I, sorry, Ollie. I think I'm going to disagree. That just, it doesn't seem.

It doesn't seem. Monty Python quote incoming in three, two, one.

So, so ultimately spam, uh, was used in a Monty Python skit in the 1970s. Where do I have to do it?

Or you'll have to do it. As it, as it implied. It's I don't like spam.

It's appropriate. I'm so British. This is great. Yeah. So from that, from that skit, we got the Internet term spam.

All right. So Liz gets the square.

All right. Jason. That's literally the best thing I've learned all week. Thank you for that, Jason.

And thank you, Andre, for just really bringing it to life for me.

Monty Python quotes need to be a mandatory part of this show. Moving forward.

Should be like a, at least one square approved. Yeah. Those are the secret square, the Monty Python questions.

It's like the daily devil. That's right. The daily devil.

Yes. All right, Jason, where would you like to play? I, I liked my strategy from last time.

Let's go with Alex. All right. Alex center square. How, how are, how's our Chinese operations going?

Right. It's going good. That's not the question.

We should, we should actually, we should bring in some of the team for the show as well.

I'm more, more than happy to host them. Yeah. All right. Your question, a Cloudflares, two factor authentication method supports hardware keys.

True or false? Um, well, the question is hardware.

So I want to say false since we just, we just replace all hardware, but in this case, that is true.

So you gave both answers. Yes.

That was no, no, no.

No, I, I, I am confident Jason in this answer. That is, that is true. Okay. I agree that it is true.

But yes, Cloudflare now supports hardware second factor off.

All right. That is correct. So good, good choice. And Jason gets center square.

All right, Liz, you got time for one more. How would you like to close out the game?

Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do.

Um, I would like to ask a question of, um, Janet again, please.

All right, Janet, your game two question.

I don't know how much of a sci-fi fan you are. Oh, huge. All right. Awesome.

The book Neuromancer by William Gibson published in 1984 popularized this Internet term.

What is that term? Okay this is funny that you bring this up right now because we just got done talking about it because it's weirdly spam.

Spam said confidently do you agree or disagree or agree or yeah.

I don't read a lot of William Gibson because he gets a little bit dark for me but I know that that's not right.

I disagree. Disagree is correct. The term is cyberspace and so close.

It's all about the confidence of delivery.

All right and with that that brings us to a close.

Welcome and thank you all for joining. Thank you all my squares for having a blast over these past 30 minutes.

Thank you and if we have any cats or dogs we can show them now.

All right thank you everyone and have a great week.

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