Originally aired on January 26 @ 8:30 PM - 9:30 PM EDT
Community makes Cloudflare a great place to work - it's all about people. In this panel, we will discuss how to build and nurture a diverse and inclusive community in the workplace, Learn more about past activities and achievements, current projects and future expectations from our Employee Resource Group leaders!
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Hi, thanks so much for joining us on Cloudflare TV for today's Cloudflare Careers Day focused on EMEA. Today's session that we've got, I'm moderating a session with five of my colleagues on community at Cloudflare. I'm Malavika. I'm a product manager based out of our London office and I'm really excited to be able to moderate this session. And I'm going to hand it over to my colleagues to introduce themselves today, starting with Chad. Hi everyone. It's really good to be here. I'm really excited to tell you a little bit more about the experience here at Cloudflare. Just to introduce myself. So my name is Chad. I look after the Sub -Saharan African market from a commercial perspective as an AE. Next, I'm going to hand over to Justina. Hello everyone. My name is Justina. I work in the customer support team as a team lead and I belong to the Lisbon office. I'm originally from Hong Kong and actually hired in London first and then I moved to Singapore and now I'm in Lisbon. So it's been a bit of fun across different countries as a customer support team member. I'll go next. Is it me next? Yes. Yes. Perfect. So hey everybody. I'm Izmina. I work in the London office as an account executive at Cloudflare. I started about three years ago and I started as a BDR and then moved my way up into the career of Cloudflare as an account executive at Cloudflare. Yeah, I think that's about it. Yeah, based in London. Awesome. Omer, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure thing. So hi, I'm Omer Yoachimic. About two years ago, I moved from Israel to London where I am now the product manager for Cloudflare's DDoS protection service and also a member of Proudflare and Judeoflare, the two ERGs. And then I'll be the last person to present. My name is Francisco. I'm a customer success team lead in the London office. I'm originally from Uruguay and I joined Cloudflare in July last year as a customer success manager and then I was able to progress to a team lead position. I'm really excited to be here and join this space with all of you. Thanks so much all of you for joining us today to share your stories. So one of the ways that Cloudflare really organizes around community is through employee resource groups, which we call it Cloudflare ERGs. And so with that, maybe Yasmina, do you want to tell us a little bit about the ERGs that you're involved in? Yeah, absolutely. When I started at Cloudflare about three years ago, I saw that Cloudflare had a lot of ERG groups that I wanted to get involved with and one of them was Proudflare. And I saw people go into this lunch group and I was like, hey, everybody's wearing really cool Proudflare t-shirts and it looked like a really cool community to be a part of. So I started going to Proudflare and since then I really looked at all the ERG groups. So Women's Flare is one that I'm involved with. But I really focused on Proudflare. I thought I'm just new in Cloudflare, I'm going to focus on one and then slowly became the leader together with Omar and Jen Landon of the Proudflare group. Can you tell us a little bit more about the communities that Proudflare supports? Yeah, so Proudflare is obviously a platform for the LGBTQ plus environments and members, but also for allies. I think it's very important to be inclusive and give a safe space and platform to support topics that are relevant, but also make sure that people feel like they belong and can be completely themselves. And that is sort of what Proudflare represents. The way that we do that, of course, is by lunches. We have a chat room internally that we can share ideas on and shine lights on topics that are very important to Cloudflare. Women's Flare is a part that I am a part of. I'm active in it. I'm looking at groups, looking at how we can support women in Cloudflare. The way that I would say for people to really look into it is we have a blog and all blogs are posted on Women's Flare and Proudflare, and we talk about topics that we find help us as a community within Cloudflare. Awesome. Omar, would you like to talk about some of the groups that you're involved in at Cloudflare? Yes, of course. So Proudflare and Judeo Flare. I won't talk more about Proudflare because Jasmina covered it. So Judeo Flare is Cloudflare's Jewish employee resource group with about 50 members worldwide. And besides sharing photos of home-cooked dishes from the Jewish cuisine, such as shakshuka, hummus, challah bread, we support each other, celebrate our holidays, and also remember the six million victims of the Holocaust. Omar, do you have any tasty recipes for latkes to share with me? Oh, yeah. I just Google it and take the one with the most number of, you know, the highest rating. And on that topic, last year we actually held a Hanukkah-themed team lunch in the London office with all the special dishes such as latkes, which are, for those of you that don't know, are kind of like a hash brown, but also can include corn and other vegetables, and also sufganiyot, which are basically jelly doughnuts with powdered sugar, and other delicious stuff. Yeah, so those that don't know it... You should bring them to the Proudflare meeting next time. That sounds amazing. Sounds delicious. Speaking of delicious food, I know Latin Flare also is always sharing tasty treats. Francisco, do you want to share a little bit more about some of the ERGs you're involved in? Yeah, sure. I'm involved with Latin Flare. We're in cloud, which are two separate ERGs. In Latin Flare, for instance, we have had many different activities to celebrate our Latin culture. Our goal is, similar to what Yasmina was saying, is for people to feel included, no matter where they are from. And of course, we welcome allies from any backgrounds. Sometimes there are people that are interested in knowing about the Latin culture. Some people joined our group because they were going to travel to Latin America, and they were asking, oh, where should I go? What kind of food should I eat? So yeah, there's a little bit of everything perspective. Before COVID, we had different events. Some of them went from happy hour with Latin food, more specifically empanadas and alfajores, and some drinks. And then we have had more business-oriented presentations, one of them being what's the impact that Cloudflare is making on Latin America. And then we have had panels with top people from Cloudflare, also from other companies outside, that they were telling us about their journeys and what kind of challenges they went through when going to the UK, the US, or, well, many other different countries that they are working from. Awesome. And Justyna, do you want to tell us a little bit about some of the ERGs you're involved in? Yeah, for sure. Actually, the same as Yasmina, I am a part of the Proudflare group as well. Actually, I encountered it during my orientation. Andrew, the one who found Proudflare, was doing a presentation during my very first beer meeting that I joined. So I was like, OK, this is something I want to be involved in. And he was like, OK, whoever wants to join, please come talk to me. And this is how I started getting engaged in the Proudflare community. So when I move around offices, I also get to take it with me and started a little bit of new events in the new offices that I joined. So that was fun. And by default, I'm also involved in Womenflare because everybody who is a lady in the company or who want to identify themselves as a woman can join as well. And AsianFlare also is something that I am involved in. It's actually funny because you would imagine AsianFlare is for people who are in Asia. You would expect that our Singapore office is more active in this. But actually, it's more our EMEA office and our U.S. colleagues that are the most active in this AsianFlare. And I think this very last ParentFlare that I'm involved in is not really directly involvement. I'm not a parent myself, but because we have a team of individuals that are parents themselves, so we want to make sure that we give them enough support as well. So ParentFlare is somewhere that I would get resource from in order to help our parents in the team. So yeah, those are the four that I'm involved in. Awesome. And Chad, do you mind sharing a little bit more about the groups that you're involved in? Yeah. So I'm actually just involved in one group. I don't have that many that I'm participating in like my colleagues, but that just goes to show how many groups there are at Cloudflare and how diverse and how much involvement you can get from being at the company. The group that I'm representing is Afroflare. So I'm originally from South Africa, as you can tell from my accent, if you were guessing. But yeah, when I moved to London and I joined Cloudflare, I was introduced to the Afroflare group and immediately I signed up. And the purpose of the group is to represent people from African and Caribbean descent at Cloudflare and give them a safe space to celebrate our culture and also come together and help each other, you know, develop in our careers. So it's a really, really exciting group that certainly I love to be involved in. Recently, we celebrated Black History Month as one of our initiatives. And yeah, we celebrate a number of events throughout the year. Yeah. And as Chad mentioned, we have so many groups. And to be honest, there's more than the ones we've spoken about today. In the U.S., we've got Native Flare for Indigenous peoples in the U.S., as well as in the APAC region. We've also got These Flare for people from South Asian backgrounds. And, you know, the world is your oyster. I think if there's an interest group, you can create it. And groups are not just organized based off of cultural traditions, but they might be special interest groups like Green Flare, as Francisco talked about, or Sober Flare for individuals who are recovering and want to have a chance to share their concerns about that. And so, actually, you know, one of the things I think, though, as we think about engagement in the community and forming community, I think in light of COVID, it's really difficult with everyone working from home to feel engaged in the community. Chad, do you want to talk a little bit about, I guess, Black History Month was in the month of October in the U.K. And I think, actually, COVID gave the Afro Flare group an opportunity to make it really special. Would you like to share a little bit more about the activities that you did this month and kind of how it was different this time around because of COVID? Yeah. COVID was obviously one of the big challenges. We celebrated Black History Month during the lockdown. And the, I think, the coolest opportunity that we had as a result of this is we were able to celebrate it company-wide for the first time in kind of Afro Flare history. And this was done because we had to figure out new ways to celebrate and it was all done remotely. So, Cloudflare supported us with Cloudflare TV, which you're watching today, and we effectively hosted all our events on Cloudflare TV. This was a way that not only could our entire company be able to tune in and we're able to reach them, but also we're able to invite members of the public to join in and watch and follow. So, if you kind of tune into Cloudflare TV on a regular basis, you will see the reruns of some of our episodes. And we had a really, really exciting lineup. We jam-packed the schedule. We wanted to have something every day, but we know that that's just not possible if you've got work to do. So, we didn't have anything on Mondays, but every other day there was an event and we highlighted talks within the Cloudflare community through knowledge sharing. We've got so much talent at our company and we thought it was important to provide a platform for our colleagues to share their skills, not just with our company, but also to the world. We also invited a number of external speakers who are industry leaders in technology in Africa. And we also had some fun and games as well by having an episode on Silicon Valley, sorry, Silicon Squares, one of our game shows on Cloudflare TV. One of my favorite things, I always love a good Zoom background. Chad, do you want to tell us a little bit about some of the other ways too that you engage the community with Zoom backgrounds and such? That's right. Yeah. So, the idea was, first of all, we had to shift our entire thinking to digital. And besides just thinking, when you plan an event, you always think, okay, cool, let's do cooking and share our food, or let's have an event and play music from our culture and things like that. And obviously that's very hard to do online. So, we were like, cool, what assets do we have? We've got Zoom backgrounds. I think I can quickly preview one of my Zoom backgrounds that we did. So, we've got the African print and obviously we shared this with the company. So, everyone could join in and share that background. And it was really awesome to see that spread across the company. And that shows really the support that people gave us when taking part. We also looked at social media and we created profile picture overlays. So, if you visit my profile on LinkedIn, for example, you will see the overlay that we had over my profile picture. So, we got quite innovative with it and we tried to think of new and exciting ways to share our culture and experience. As someone participating in the events, it was really fun and engaging. And perhaps in some ways, even more kind of fun and engaging than some of the things that we might do in real life. And so, one, thank you, Chad, for helping organize that. And thank you for sharing about that. Thank you. In talking about community, Justyna, you've worked in the, you're currently in the Lisbon office, but you've worked in London and you've worked in Singapore. So, you have quite a broad experience across Cloudflare. Do you want to talk a little bit about your engagement with ERGs in each of those offices? Yeah. Like I said, actually, I was introduced to Cloudflare when I was in San Francisco. So, it all started with the American experience. And everything is actually so different in different offices because of the cultural difference and because of how the country or the region already are and how they are towards certain topics. So, with Cloudflare specifically, in US, there's already a lot of ERG in different companies. So, like a lot of tech companies, they actually have the ERG events and like they are connected in different ways and we invite each other to our events. I think I haven't been to any of the events yet, but hopefully in the future. And when I go back to London, I found out that we already have a Cloudflare division in London office, which is great. So, I joined as a participant and in the beginning, it was like more for us to learn more about what is happening in London or like in UK, like how are the support that we have like as a company and for the employees that are in the European offices, for example. So, that was like a good learning curve for us to understand individual needs and to match against like the different laws and like there is not a lot of like cultural challenges per se because Europe is very open-minded towards the LGBT topic and it is already a big thing for years and we just have to continue to promote it and make sure that we have like things that are aligned in the office and we keep being respectful for this safe space that we want to create for everybody who is in this community. So, London was like really just like a place for like fun and celebrate, like we just want to be make sure that like we keep going this way that we want. Where going to Singapore is a very interesting experience even for myself. Singapore is very new to me and it is relatively conservative as a country on this topic. So, it is more like a taboo and you don't want to talk about it in public and with this setup like naturally people are not exposed to this as we would in the rest of the world or in the rest of the offices we have. So, when I first moved to Singapore, it was very interesting that when I was promoting the ProudFlair idea, we have people that come to me and ask me what exactly it is, like they actually don't know what it is and they want to learn more about. So, when it comes to promoting ProudFlair in Singapore, it is more about sharing the education and like raising awareness within the office space that we have because like people do not understand what it is and they don't understand what is the need of having such a ERG in the office. So, it is a lot of sharing the basic concepts from there and we do have like other leaders there that they may fund events which is like they have a movie night. So, and then we can all watch a movie and then we can learn more about the topic and like from there you can learn about like the challenges that people are facing. So, yeah, Singapore is definitely one of the most interesting experience I have within ProudFlair for now. And now that I'm back to Europe, I would imagine that, oh, okay, it's like similar to UK again. So, I just need to make sure that we have lunch event and we have different things going on and we could get people engaged. But actually, it's not the same. So, it is great that ProudFlair has a different leadership around different offices because every city has the different needs. Here in Lisbon so far, what I learned is there is no such discrimination towards LGBT community. So, similar to Singapore, they still don't understand what is the need of it but not because it's a taboo but more of, oh, it's normal. Why do we need to have a group of it? So, it's a very two different direction but it's fun to learn more about like how people feel and like how we could gear towards like future opportunities and future events that we could have for the employee. To be honest with you, we have not been able to do any events in the Lisbon office yet. We started the office pretty much post -pandemic, not post-pandemic, during pandemic. So, hopefully, we could merge with our other ERGs and have more opportunities to have events with our local employees. Thanks so much for sharing, Justyna. On the topic of ProudFlair, Yasmina, could you tell us more about some of the big issues that the London office is focused on when it comes to LGBT issues because as Justyna shared, for each location, there are sort of different frontiers of issues that we're dealing with. Yeah, it was really interesting, Justyna, to learn about that because that was relatively new to me. Obviously, I started at ProudFlair when you were in London, right? And it was just like, well, five or six of us back then and now we have 175 members globally. So, it's really cool to see your experience from, you know, San Francisco starting all the way to Asia, all the way down to the UK and Portugal again. So, definitely down Justyna to look at how we can improve events in Portugal as well because it's obviously important to have these groups like Malavika asked. It's important to give a voice to a community and for people to feel part of a community. And there's different reasons for that and I won't go into why ERG is important but I'll cover a little bit of sort of what we're trying to achieve with ProudFlair. And, you know, if you look at what ProudFlair is and what we're trying to achieve and who we're trying to support and the way we are doing it, there's different ways that we make an impact, right? We make an impact by making people feel like they belong somewhere, to be a good version of themselves and to feel like they can express themselves. And ultimately that helps to provide a happier workspace and we feel like we can collaborate more. And then the second point I would say, the collaboration, is really you have a workforce that is diverse and we have a product that is very diverse and for everybody. So, I think the, you know, the importance is that we have a voice to say, hey, this is our community and this is important to us and maybe we should reflect that in some of the products that we launch or in the marketing that we put in. And I'm sure that's across all of the ERG groups at Cloudflare, the importance of having that voice for products. WomenFlair, for example, I'm not, I'm just active in it so I can't speak up as a leader, but I'm just saying that products should be women-friendly and especially in the IT world that is traditionally male -dominated. It's important for women to have a platform and speak up. And in a community, it's a much more safer place to do that. Now, circling it back to your question, Malavika, to how are we supporting them. So, some of the people watching this might have heard the really cool launch that Cloudflare released called 1.1.1. And that is a DNS filtering service where people can actually control what is accessed, which categories and which websites can be accessed. We launched this for families so people can implement this at home to make it a safe space for people accessing the worldwide Internet. And you can read about it from the blog post. But actually, sort of what happened is we made a really big mistake as Cloudflare whilst implementing this solution. And we accidentally blocked categories that had LGBTQIA plus content. So, we obviously got numerous reports from people saying, hey, you know, I can't reach certain websites or content is blocked. And sort of forced us to speak up about it and say we made a mistake. And Matsi speaks about it very openly and very bluntly. And I really respect that in a blog post that we can maybe share later on. Explaining how that mistake happened, right? It was never intentional. It was an honest mistake and a mistake that we fixed straight away. But these are just an example of, okay, we can mess up as a company. And then the rapid response of it and the openness from our CEO being very apologetic towards us as a community but also towards, you know, everyone that, you know, we've caused this issue for. And I think that's important to have a group like that looking at stuff and making sure that we have representation. In terms of going back to sort of the groups that we formed and what we're trying to achieve within Cloudflare as well is we have proud fair lunches every month. Pre-Corona, obviously. So, when we're all in the office, we organized lunches. We talked about topics that people feel felt heavy about or maybe even topics within not taken away from HR. Just disclosure. But if people feel uncomfortable with something, we can talk about it. We can brainstorm about it and not advise them but just have an open conversation. We also have an internal chat room that is used to share uplifting wins in the community. So, when something really positive happens, we highlight this. And this can be from the U.S. I saw a really cool topic as well that was launched the first non-binary black Muslim woman, you know, as I think in law somewhere. I need to check this again. But again, amazing news. And yes, this is U.S. But in EMEA, we really pride ourselves for being, yeah, uplifting in that sense. Sorry. And also the last one. I don't want to forget this. Very importantly. As a community, we're trying to give back also externally. So, we're looking at how can we help our community, not just within Cloudflare, but extend this towards, you know, more vulnerable groups. And so, we had a volunteering program, Malavika, that you helped us with as well, which is really fun because it's really good to talk about topics. But this was something we actually could give back. And we ordered in lunch and we sat for two, three hours across several weeks, really making sure that we could help. It was diversity role models, actually, to help them with some feedback forms that they actually didn't have the resources to do. So, we're trying to do as much as we can with the resources that we have today. Thanks so much for sharing. And just as you said, you know, the IT industry is one that is full of, I would say, I guess, like, legacy discriminatory practices, whether it's in DNS filtering and the filtering of LGBTQ content, or even some of the terminology around whitelisting and blacklisting certain IPs and host names. And, you know, even on that topic, that's something, you know, very consciously, again, through groups like this, we can bring those issues forward and make sure that we use words like allow and block instead of whitelist and blacklist. So, thank you for sharing that. And actually, I want to turn to Omer. On a more somber note, you had spoken about Judeo Flare and some of the activities commemorating the Holocaust. Do you mind sharing a little bit more about what you did around that? Of course. So, earlier this year in January, when we were allowed to be in the office, in order to commemorate the International Holocaust Memorial Day, I gave a team talk in the London office about the Holocaust and shared my grandparents' story on how they escaped Nazi-occupied Poland, leaving their majority of family behind where they were later murdered by, in Nazi extermination camps, along with 6 million other Jews. And I think especially in these times, it's important to continue educating the younger generations about Holocaust and antisemitism as it is on rise. And, you know, as, again, as someone who was able to hear your story that you shared in January, thank you so much for sharing it. It was really powerful to hear about your family's experience. And, you know, and I think team talks, which actually, Omer, do you mind telling us a little bit about what a team talk is? Because I think it's an important part of culture at Cloudflare. Yeah, sure. So, a team talk is basically a talk that is given by someone from our team. And it can be on any topic, any subject, whether it's a hobby, a personal story, something from their professional life, anything at all. And it's usually when we were in the office, it was done in the auditorium and everyone could come in and join and grab a beer, get some snacks, listen in and ask questions. So it's a very nice environment to be able to share and kind of have a discussion as well. Awesome. Yeah, I think, you know, I've really enjoyed the team talks myself as a way of learning about all kinds of things. I think, you know, whether it's some of the more educational team talks that are maybe you can learn about, I don't know, cryptography and how it works, all the way to people's hobbies. Like, I remember we had a colleague who talked about his like flying hobby. He flies airplanes. And I didn't even know people could go do that as enthusiasts, you know, all kinds of things that are, they're fun to, I think, you know, cultural experiences and, and also stories about people's families. So once again, thank you so much for taking the time to share that, Omer. Kind of transitioning. Francisco, you are the one of the leaders for NMEA for Green Cloud. Could you tell us a little bit about Green Cloud? Probably because it's such a unique ERG, since it's more about protecting the earth than a particular group of people. Yeah, that's right. So technically it's not like an ERG per se, but that was the, so employee resource group per se. But that's the way that we were able to find like a way to get into the rest of the, our colleagues here or Cloudflareans, how we call them usually. So yeah, this is quite unique as you were saying, it's more to be, how to be more sustainable on our day-to-day lives, whether it's in the office or our houses. Now, well, with COVID, we are not working from the office much. Most of us are working from home, although there are very, very few people that are actually going to the office. So we are looking, for instance, into products that can be sustainable. And that means that, okay, can we actually recycle these? How can we minimize the use of plastic? We want you to make things better from that perspective. That's why we are talking to different vendors as well to try change that. And something that we are working on as well, for instance, at the moment is we are currently building a list of sustainable product recommendations that anyone can buy for their households. Sometimes you could think of, oh, but plastic is everywhere. Yes, it may be in some cases, but for instance, now there are deodorant bars that they are completely plastic free. And before like, no, but most of the deodorants will have some plastic on. No, actually there are some that they don't have that. The same with the toothpaste. You may think, oh yeah, toothpaste is always with plastic. And now there's a new toothpaste from some brands that can actually be recycled. And some others, it's actually a jar made of glass. There are some peels, you chew the peels and then you brush your teeth. So you get rid of the whole plastic. You don't even need to recycle that. Well, you have to recycle the jar, but it's glass and it's not some kind of plastic. So we're working on getting this kind of list as well together so that people who want to be more sustainable at home, they can do it as well. And for other people to share more tips, for instance, in the UK, it's actually quite easy to change your electricity provider. In some other countries that may not be the case, but in here you actually can get electricity providers, which are 100% renewable. And actually they are slightly cheaper than non-renewable energy providers sometimes. So it's a bit crazy. Going green doesn't mean that you actually need to pay more all the time. Sometimes, yes, I will not deny it for sure. It's a bit crazy how when you go to the supermarkets and you see fruits and vegetables with plastic are sometimes cheaper than the ones without plastic. Why? They have more processes behind. But yeah, unfortunately that's something that I guess the governments will keep on working on. But yeah, we're trying to find ways on how to do that internally. And then another thing we want to get more results from is to interact with other peers from outside Cloudflare that are doing similar things and understand, oh, what are you doing for your company and for the outside to make things better? So we want to learn from them and try to have a benchmark and think, oh, we're not doing this. Why? Is there a barrier that we can tackle? And what can we do to move forward and get better? So yeah, it's still rather new, but we are getting stronger from that perspective. And of course, anybody is more than welcome to join. And similar to what my colleagues here were mentioning earlier, we also share a lot of different articles and documentals, if you like, those kind of things in our internal chats. Yeah, that's about it with Green Cloud. Awesome. Actually, Justyna, if you don't mind me kind of turning it back to you, I'd love to know more about ParentFlare. And especially, I think that particularly for parents working from home is quite difficult because a lot of people right now are sort of seeing their family life kind of fully blended with their work life, especially as in some locations, people's children are still kind of at home with their parents. Can you tell us a little bit more about ParentFlare and some of the activities and programming you've got now for the ERG in light of COVID? Yeah, actually, ParentFlare has been growing, especially after COVID because everybody's working from home and the kids are doing schooling at home as well. So the challenge has increased for parents, not just to drop the kids off anymore. It's like being in the same space and also being able to focus at work, especially for teams like my own, like in the customer support team, you often need to talk to customer, even be on phone with a customer. And if you have a screaming kid at the background, maybe there are things that we could help arrange. So having ParentFlare there is having a space for people to raise their concern or to learn from each other about tips and tricks that they could do. Like, how do you organize your day better? Or how could you organize with your partner or family member that could help you towards in working better? And the other thing is, even though I'm not a parent myself, it's important for us to all know that there is such need because if someone on my team is a parent, it means that there are things that we could do to support our colleagues as well. So maybe instead of having them on the call, we can take the call instead if they're having busy hours. So these are things that the company has implemented, or we are always encouraging check-in on our employees and our parents to make sure that they get the support from their own management. And for ParentFlare, they have a workshop that they would get people to help them to, I wouldn't say help them, but share more ideas about what you could do. So their workshop about how do you work with your kids better at home? Or how do we all work together? And things like that. And everybody can actually sign up and be in the workshop and see what you could learn that fits your needs. And everybody can invite themselves to those calendar events as well, for those who are from Cloudflare already. So please do check our event calendar. And if you're not too sure where to go, talk to your team lead. They will guide you to the correct direction. Thank you so much for sharing, Justyna. I think that raises a really important point too, about the involvement of allies in all of these communities as well. It's not just people who identify as a specific group, but also sort of all of Cloudflare coming together to celebrate that specific interest. Chad, do you mind telling us a little bit about how Afroflare engages allies? Yeah. Cloudflare is the first company that I've joined that actually has ERGs. So for me, when joining Cloudflare and joining the ERG about two years ago, I immediately felt comfortable and welcomed to the company as part of almost a greater family. And when you start thinking about some of the topics and agenda points of the ERG, trying to kind of set up an event, or maybe it's a conversation around career development, or bringing attention to a specific topic, many of us in the ERG might not have a C-level position at the company. So we were lucky enough in our ERG to have Joe Sullivan, our Chief Security Officer, as our ally. And he specifically was able to bridge that gap between how can we organize as an ERG and then give us that platform with the wider company. That allowed us to not only table certain agenda topics so that at Cloudflare they can be considered and taken forward, but also just bringing attention bringing attention to our events especially. So Joe was great in terms of advocating for Afroflare across the company. And he also took part in Black History Month interviewing one of our guest speakers. So I think the purpose of an ally, it's really important because it not only kind of solves a lot of the challenges in the ERG, but it really bridges that gap between just being a group within a larger organization to that group actually being part of the large organization. Awesome. Yasmina, would you like to share a little bit about the role of allies in Cloudflare? I'll share actually, you know, I remember going to a Cloudflare event and there was someone else who had come. It was his first Cloudflare meeting and everyone was kind of saying why the issue is important to him. And I remember him saying he was a very senior policy executive. He used to be our head of public policy. And this is someone like who I deeply respect and admire. And he was like, I'm here because my daughter recently came out and I want to support her. And so I thought that was like a really lovely moment to show that, you know, a community is more than just the stories of the people who are necessarily identifying as that, but it's also for people to kind of support those around them as well who identifies that. But if you could talk a little bit, Yasmina, about the role of allies in Cloudflare, like I'd love to hear more about that. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, you know, the story that you just shared, it's one of those perfect examples of why having allies is so important to any ERG group. So it's always great to feel supported, not just by your community, but by, you know, allies and everybody from different communities as well. So I think, you know, that's great. It's great to hear different perspectives and maybe even throw in a little topic or perspective that we haven't thought about. And that's, again, diversity is so important to give us a good perspective of, you know, topics that we might not think about, but outsiders are thinking about and how can we then bridge gaps to make sure that people are feeling a bit more comfortable or if people have questions around it that they can have a platform to ask them. And I think that's very important. What Shad said as well is it's important to have members from all teams, right? Cloudflare is a company, I think, close to 2,000 people. We have numerous different teams and we don't have a representative in every single team. So that's why it's really cool that people join as allies and that we can have insight in different teams. So I think, yeah, it's very, very important for us. Awesome. And just as a reminder to the audience, if you've got any questions, please feel free to ask them. We'll definitely save time to go through any audience questions. But, you know, kind of turning back to the conversation, you know, one of the things that's great about Cloudflare and the community is also, I think there's a lot of opportunities for career development, whether it's mentorship or in general, just like support through the communities. Yasmina and Justyna, I think both CSUP and the BDR organization. So CSUP is our customer support team. And then BDR team, which if you tuned in earlier today, you may have learned as a part of our sales team. And both of these are positions where people who might not have a technology background or like a traditional technology background can come into entry-level positions and learn about Cloudflare, learn about the industry and eventually transition into other roles, whether that's technical roles, people in the CSUP team have transitioned into many parts of the company and same with the BDR organization. People who've come in as BDRs have gone on to become, you know, salespeople or work in our corporate strategy team or even possibly move into product. So could you tell us a little bit about your own career paths and and those programs, maybe starting with Yasmina to talk about the BDR program? Yeah, absolutely. I think I can't really talk about the BDR program as such. I'll definitely have the recruitment team talk about it. I can talk about my experience starting at Cloudflare and, you know, and one of the couple of things that really attracted me to join Cloudflare is the career progression, right? I always knew I wanted to be an account executive from the first interview I had. And so that was very clear to me. There was a path where I had to learn a lot. This is a new technology. It's the way the Internet works. And I only knew it from, you know, being on my phone, being on a computer. I didn't really know too much about technology. And so the BDR role gave me a lot of insights into and a lot of training sessions on technologies, right? So I think that was amazing. It also taught me a little bit about who the customers are and sort of how to position Cloudflare in a good way. So I think that was a very good learning curve. Now, in terms of wanting to work for Cloudflare and actually, you know, sticking it out and then to the next role, circling back to the ERG group, circling back to Project Galileo, which was a very big part of why I chose Cloudflare over other companies, is the sense of community that Cloudflare puts in. And this goes down to the BDR role, which is an entry-level position. But you never feel like you're an entry person, you know, that it doesn't belong on the table. And I think in the ERG group, again, highlighting how important it is to sit next to a C-level person, to sit next to someone like you, Malavika, who, you know, in different teams who are in a much higher position. And it's really cool to, then as a BDR a couple of years ago, to sit next to these people that you admire so much and get that input and see how Cloudflare works. So that enabled me to drive and work even harder towards becoming an account executive, and hopefully, you know, in a couple of years, move to other positions. So the BDR position was a great way to start, and I'm so excited and so grateful that I was able to experience it. I hope that answers your question a little bit. It does. And Justyna, I would love to hear more about your own story and your journey, kind of, not just with the, you know, growth through the CSEP team, but also you've had a chance at global mobility quite a bit. Yeah, for sure. I think, like, similar to BDR, we have presence around the world as well, so to keep our customer being assisted and supported. So the good thing about being in my team is that it's a global team, so we have presence in almost, like, all the offices that we have right now. So, like, we have a new office in Tokyo, and we also have presence there too. So CSEP, in general, is already, by default, somewhere that you could move around and you could still continue to do the same job with the knowledge and the skills that you have. And I think, like, the easiest for you to move around more would be if you have, like, specific language skills. But nowadays, in pandemic, it's not really a thing anymore, because, like, you could work from right now, I'm working from home, and we are supporting customers 24-7 anyways. So it's just, like, a matter of, like, where you want to be, and if we are expanding in that particular region as a company. And as a fun fact, we are expanding in every region right now, so this is the good news, and this allows us to keep going around and, like, keep expanding. And within CSEP ourselves, because we have many different roles within our support organization by default, so, like, a lot of people know that we have technical support engineer, but actually, we have even more roles than is known to the outside, like, we have our own support operation team that help us to build tooling that is used by our team specifically, we have a network security team that is just starting, and we are looking to hire more, we have our training team, we have a product specialist team, so there's many opportunities within the organization itself, and it requires people with different technical background and different skills. So, like you said, right, we have people that are not from traditionally technical background. For me, myself, as well, like, I'm not from a technical background, like, if I would tell you, my first job was a flight attendant, and it came a long way for me to go from, like, someone that is more technical right now, and it's been a very fun journey, and I think, like, the more that we grow as a company, we also need to grow the support team, because we will only have more and more customer that will want us to help answer the questions. So, having successful experiments so far, we noticed that there are a lot of people that might not have a technical experience in their previous job, but they are very interested in technology, they're curious to learn, and they are, I don't know, they're just very willing to learn, and, like, so we try to expand our role to less technical candidate, as well. So, recently, we have started this role called customer support agent. Essentially, it's a more junior role to the technical support engineer. So, with the training we have, and the enthusiasm the candidate have, then we try to build them up to success to train them up to be a technical support engineer. So, for people who might not have a traditional background, please, like, check out, like, what Cloudflare has to offer, and if this is the technology that sparks your interest, as well, like, you could potentially be the next person that is in our team. So, don't limit yourself. I am personally always really amazed by our customer support team. I think they're so unbelievably helpful, and I think, in general, one of the things about Cloudflare, as a company, and as a product, is so engaged with the community around it, and I think we're vibrant. When I say the community, I mean, like, the world who uses Cloudflare, and we're really lucky to have such an engaged community. And on that topic, one of my favorite things about customer success is the ticket jams. Justine, can you tell us a little bit about what a ticket jam is, and how it engages, kind of, Cloudflare, as a company, into the support universe? Of course. There's a few reasons why we have ticket jams, but let's start with the really fun one, because, like, we have so many products that is getting shipped and getting launched, like, on a weekly, even daily basis, and during our birthday week, like, we even have, like, new product being launched out to the market every day. So, we do have a lot of new things that we need to gather our customer feedback and make sure we keep improving. So, having this ticket jam will allow everybody in the company to help answer our customers' questions. So, on a normal day, it is the customer support team that is answering all your questions from the ticket, from the chat, from the phone, or from the community. But on the day when we do ticket jam, we invite everybody that is in the Cloudflare organization, including people who are from product team, people who might be from the DOS team, and you would get to see, like, what are the questions that people are asking. And from there, it's a learning curve for everybody. Maybe this is something we haven't thought about. Like, for example, right, we do have a stream product that allows people to upload videos. And actually, from looking at the tickets, there are a lot more use cases than we have in our initial documentation. So, because people are asking for more details, it allows us to build up more knowledge base, and it allows us to make sure, like, all the things are being shared publicly to our users to help them to help themselves. So, ticket jam is awesome. And for anybody, like, who sometimes see a ticket being replied by even our CTO, John, don't be alarmed. It's real. Like, it is him answering your ticket. It's not Justina pretending to be the CTO. And yeah, I think it's a good experience for the user as well, because, like, it shows them that we actually care, and, like, we want to keep improving. So, like, anybody can help our customer. Those are my favorite, as I mentioned before. Obviously, I also love opportunities to come together around food and ticket. Justina did not mention that ticket jam involves tasty donuts or pizza or something of the sort. You know, I guess we talked about career development. I actually wanted to, on a more serious note, I also wanted to talk a little bit about how ERGs help with mentorship. And Francisco, do you mind talking a little bit more about how LatinFlair mentors or, like, some of the mentorship activities that LatinFlair does? Yeah, sure. So, at the moment, actually, when we moved to more online setup, our global lead for LatinFlair, who is based in New York, she started out what she's calling cafecitos, or little coffees, which are, like, informal chats to get to know each other. And that way people can join. Anybody is, so everybody is welcome to join there. You can meet people from many different roles, seniority levels, and it's like an open floor, so people can get to know each other. And I heard of people that kept in touch later and have had more conversations because, oh, yeah, let's have another coffee ourselves. I want to know more about your role and what are you doing. So that's something that is probably happening as well in other ERGs. But that is from a LatinFlair perspective, that's what has been going on. Then, on the other hand, something that we did was not towards mentorship per se, but something that we really enjoyed as well doing was when we did our Latin Heritage Month celebration, which was in September, we had many different internal and external events. And many of those were, for instance, internal panels to showcase and tear down some stereotypes that there could be. But it was another opportunity as well for people to know how people work in their different environments, positions, what kind of different things and challenges they go through on a day-to -day basis. One of the things that we also did there was to also have some Cloudflare TV segments. And one of those was an interview to an organization from the Project Galileo. That organization is called Unidos Now. And actually, they are doing an amazing job helping students in the U.S. to transition from high school to university. They're looking for mentors. So we were asking internally if anybody would like to be a mentor to these high school students, anybody would be more than welcome. So if anybody listening to this is interested in this, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm more than happy to put you in contact with this organization, which they're doing an amazing job and supporting these children with their education. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. And Latin Flare's mentorship is a huge part of really all the ERGs. We're almost out of time. Otherwise, I'd ask everyone to share a little bit more. But I know Afroflare and Womenflare and Proudflare all are actively engaged in mentorship as well, partly because these are all underrepresented groups in technology. In general, I think the technology industry has come under a lot of scrutiny, given that it is a predominantly straight, white, male -dominated industry. But there is a space for other voices, and it's important. I think one of the big parts of ERGs is to celebrate the other voices, make it a more welcoming place for other voices, and to get everyone to engage with each other, because at the end of the day, we're one community, and we want to support each other. Diversity is what makes our product good, and diversity is also what makes our community and our workplace good. But with that, I guess, thank you all for joining us for this segment, and thank you for joining to hear about all of the sessions across today's Cloudflare Careers Day. I hope that this was an informative session that you got to learn about the community at Cloudflare. I know myself, I found it to be a really warm and welcoming place, and these five colleagues that got to share a little bit are some of my favorite colleagues, really amazing, talented individuals who are really engaged and are leaders in the Cloudflare community. Thanks so much. Thank you all for your time, both the participants today in the panel, and for those of you who've tuned in on Cloudflare TV. Thanks so much, and have a good day. Thank you, everybody. Bye. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye -bye.