Silicon Valley Squares
Presented by: Dan Hollinger
Originally aired on March 10, 2021 @ 8:00 PM - 8:30 PM EST
A send up of Hollywood Squares where Cloudflare experts fill the celebrity squares and answer high and low-level Cloudflare questions to help two guest stars (customers, AEs or new hires) get a a tic-tac-toe, or possibly the Silicon Valley equivalent - a TCP handshake (SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK)
Original Airdate: July 23, 2020
English
Game Shows
Transcript (Beta)
Hello, hello, welcome everyone to yet another episode of Silicon Valley Squares. I'm your host, Dan Hollinger, and we have not been canceled yet on Cloudflare TV.
We try.
We try. Amongst our core demographic of Cloudflare employees, we're just doing very well.
So for those of you unfamiliar with the show, we have two contestants here, Stephen and Rachel.
Each of them is trying to get a tic-tac-toe across the board.
So that means three across, three down, or three diagonal. Alternatively, the first to five would win the round.
So with that in mind, I'll hand this over to our contestants.
And Stephen, would you mind introducing yourself to our viewers and the squares?
Yeah, sounds good. My name is Stephen. I am a product designer here at Cloudflare.
I've been here for all of, I think I just calculated today, around four months.
So still a little bit fresh, but going. And yeah, super excited to be a contestant on the show.
Awesome. Glad to have you. And Rachel, would you mind introducing yourself?
Hi, my name is Rachel, and I'm an EA here at Cloudflare. I support our CEO, Matthew Prince, and I have been at Cloudflare for a little bit over four years.
So I'm excited to be on the show as well. Awesome. So are we sorry that you've survived four years with Matthew?
I mean, that's a good thing, right?
It's been four years, and I've still gone strong. The events we've watched.
Awesome. Well, glad to have both of you here as contestants. And with that, Stephen, the board is yours.
Where would you like to begin? Excellent. I think I'm going to start with Amy.
All right, Amy, for your Silicon Valley Squares debut, would you mind introducing yourself?
Wow, that was fast when it came to me. I'm Amy Bebo, and I work on our office and places team in San Francisco.
So now I don't really do a lot of front desk coordination, but, you know, I'm still tracking what's going on in that office.
I was there two weeks ago. It was pretty sad to enter an empty office.
So I missed seeing you all. All righty.
Yeah, everyone misses the office. Your question, Amy. In 1995, Broadcom wanted to demonstrate how powerful their Ethernet technology was.
So at an industry conference, they successfully sent data at about 100 megabits per second over A, barbed wire, B, a thousand tin cans, or C, a human body.
Anyone got the Jeopardy music?
I mean, I don't know where anybody would find a thousand tin cans these days.
So I don't think it could possibly be that. Tin cans went out in like the 50s.
And it's not appropriate to do that to a human. I don't think.
So I'm going to try. I'm going to say barbed wire. Barbed wire. All right, Stephen, do you agree or disagree?
I'm going to agree with that one, though. I wish it was the human.
All right, barbed wire is correct. Let me get an X on the board with the, you know, awesome, amazing production values.
All right, Rachel, board is yours.
Where would you like to play? Well, I have to go with my favorite deskmate, which is Thomas.
Thank you. All right, Thomas, it's center square. Would you mind introducing yourself to our viewers?
We should be square mates. I'm Thomas Seifert, the chief financial officer of Cloudflare, with Cloudflare now since 2017, a little bit more than three years.
Excited to be here, but I still think it's a bad idea to invite a CFO to something that should be fun and entertaining.
So I'll do my best. I didn't do that in order to get us canceled. Hey, we survived the legal team and we've survived Matthew.
So we're just talking a lot.
I mean, the show is free, so you can't really cut our funding. I mean, really.
All righty, Thomas, your question.
This is a nice softball. How many Cloudflare offices do we have around the globe?
There's people in them. There are no people in them, but they exist.
That's a trick question, right, for me, just to make sure that my math is in order.
In a COVID world where we work all from home, everybody has an office. So I would say 1382.
1382.
Is that your final answer? That's my final answer. All right, Rachel, do you agree with that or do you disagree with that?
You know, I'm going to have to disagree because I don't think that's what you meant.
That is a fair conclusion.
That is not what I meant. Cloudflare is up to 14 offices.
I know we recently launched the Tokyo office as well, which brought us up to 14.
And Paris, yeah. Did Paris bring us to 15? No, 13, just a week before Paris and then Tokyo.
Awesome. So Rachel gets the center square and here's the state of the board.
Stephen, the board is yours. Where would you like to play? I think I'm going to throw it to Carrie.
She's on my team. She's in product design. Oh, you think that now?
All righty. Carrie, welcome back to Silicon Valley Squares. Would you mind introducing yourself to the Cloudflare employees who haven't met you yet?
Hello, I am Carrie. I'm on the design team, usually in San Francisco, but now in my bedroom.
Awesome.
Carrie, your question. What does LAN stand for? LAN. I know this from all the LAN parties that I haven't been invited to.
It is local area network. All right, Stephen.
Agree or disagree? Or is it? You got me now. You got me. How many LAN parties have you been invited to?
Not that many. Maybe we are on the same team. We're both in design.
Carrie, would it surprise you if I told you that I used to throw LAN parties?
Yeah, because that's another one that I haven't been invited to.
Wait, when was the last one? That's the question. Many, many years ago. Very irresponsible.
No, but yeah, local area network is, I would agree with that. All righty, that is correct.
So Stephen gets the square. All right. All right, Rachel, board is yours.
We got two X's and one O. Where would you like to play next? I really should try to block him, but I really want to go to Carly because I miss her so much.
It's really tough. I miss you too. I'm going to take a chance and I'm going to go with Carly.
No, no faith in Stephen. All right, Carly, would you mind introducing yourself for everyone watching?
Yes, I'd love to. I'm Carly. I'm on the finance team, Thomas and Jason.
I've been at Cloudflare for like two and a half years, probably.
And yeah, I'm usually based in our San Francisco office, but I'm coming to you live from South Lake Tahoe, California.
Oh, lovely. I think my office conquest answer was still right.
I think so. Everyone's working from home. This game is being played under protest.
I thought you were counting the number of lacrosse, Thomas.
All right, Carly, your question is over 5 billion what are performed each day on the Internet?
So I was thinking about this and I'm a big cyclist.
I mountain bike a lot. And at first I thought it was probably the number of active miles on Strava each day, like all the users combined.
But that math just didn't really add up.
So I think that the right answer is probably Google searches. All right, Google searches.
Do you agree or disagree? That sounds pretty solid. I'm going to go with Carly.
All right, Google searches is correct. Over 5 billion a day. All right, this is a very agreeable board so far.
Okay, now it's back to Stephen. This is for the win here.
Who are you going to go with? Yeah, I think I probably have to do that.
But at the same time, I think you may have cursed a little bit, Rachel.
It's mind game at the end. I think I'm going to... No, I'm going to have to go to Vaishnavi.
Yeah. All right. Vaishnavi, would you mind introducing yourself to the audience?
Yeah. Hey, everyone. I'm Vaishnavi and I work on the solutions engineering team here at Cloudflare.
I've been here around a year and a half now.
Awesome. Glad to have you here. And you get, of course, one of the most technical questions of this round.
Awesome. What is the name of Snapchat's ghost mascot?
Let me think. So the ghost is white, looks friendly. I'm going to go with Casper, the friendly ghost.
That one might be trademarked. Well, it should.
Okay, serious answer. Ghostface Chilla. That's the serious answer?
It's based in LA. All right. Stephen, do you agree with Ghostface Chilla?
This is one of those things, looking at all the history and names of mascots, especially something like...
Oh, darn it. Forgot the school. But I'm going to disagree.
I'm going to disagree with that one. All right. I'm going to disagree. It actually is Ghostface Chilla.
It's okay. Scott Jones is going to really fail you, Rachel.
All right. Well, Rachel actually gets two options. Two options. And I'll go to Kyle.
Missed question means square goes to Rachel. And Rachel, are you choosing Kyle?
Yeah, I'll choose Kyle. All right, Kyle, would you mind introducing yourself to the crowd?
Yeah. So my name is Kyle Crum. I am a product manager on the newly renamed Emerging Technologies and Incubation Team, formerly Quarantine Strategy.
I own the Warp clients, our iOS and Android clients on the consumer side and soon-to-be desktop side.
Awesome. Glad to have you here. All right. Another kind of softball question.
Jack Ma is the founder of this e-commerce company. Well, so I am in the Seattle office and there's really only one e-commerce company that I think exists, or at least in my sphere, which is Amazon.
So the thing is, is I know who the Amazon person is.
Who is Jack Ma? The only other e-commerce company I think I know of, or at least big one, is Alibaba.
Maybe Alibaba? Alibaba, do you agree or disagree for the win?
I will agree. It is Alibaba. Jack Ma founded Alibaba.
Kyle, you and I started at the same time. We did. Part of the same Cloudflare brood.
Come on. That's right. So Rachel takes game one and technically a thousand points.
Yeah, I often forget the points. That's how much they matter. As a redemption question, do you know the name of the Cloudflare otter mascot?
I didn't realize that was my mascot.
Yeah. Very cute. Very cute. I'm interested in the backstory, unless it's a future question.
Well, no, in that case, yes, I'm interested in the backstory.
So what is the name of the otter? It's Packet. Packet, named by Matthew Prince's wife.
That's clever. It's a great name. We had our retreat in Monterey and we made some otters for the retreat.
And the otter found its way into somehow every piece of Cloudflare material that was internal.
So Packet the otter.
Awesome. Fun fact for game one. Game one was actually brought to you by Magic Transit.
DDoS protection for layer three, providing a non-scrubbing center, non-hardware-based solution for your DDoS needs.
And it tastes great. It does.
When you don't want no scrub. Okay, so now we're on to game two. Rachel, it's your choice and you got a free board.
Where would you like to play? All right. Well, let's go to Jason.
Jason, all right. Very good friends with finance, apparently.
How did that happen? Would you mind introducing yourself to the crowd? Sure, Dan.
So Jason Noland, head of investor relations. I've been with the company for two years and I work in the San Francisco office when it's open.
Awesome.
Glad to have you. Your game two question is regarding the Internet. What does DNS stand for?
Oh, that's a famous, I wasn't a hairband guy, but that's a famous rock band that was on the Internet.
Dee Snider from Twisted Sister is known as DNS.
That's my head. DNS stands for domain name system, for sure. 100%. All right, Rachel, do you agree or disagree?
I agree. All right, Rachel gets Jason Square. All right, Stephen, keeping the game going along, where would you like to choose next?
I think I'm going to go for Patrick. All right, Patrick, would you mind introducing yourself to all of our rabid fans watching at home?
Do we have any audience numbers yet?
Do we know how many people are watching at home? That's way too many to count.
Yeah, numbers don't go that high. Too many. Patrick Donahue on the product management team, which is a glorified translation between engineering, sales, and the rest of the business.
Been at Cloudflare for five years. Predominantly San Francisco office, London office, now I'm in Austin, and from the city of champions, Boston, Massachusetts.
So did the offices just continue kicking you out?
Is that how that's been working? I kind of ate all the food in the office and the bills were going up and they said it's too big.
It's okay because his mail still comes to San Francisco.
Amy tracks me down once a quarter or so. Signa's trying to find you, bruh.
All right, your question is, what is layer one, the very bottom of the OSI layer model?
Very bottom of the OSI layer model.
Usually that's, you know, dirty socks that are at the bottom of the pile when I check.
But I think I'd say that's the physical layer. If I get that wrong, that'd be really bad.
I used to be in network. All right, the physical layer. Stephen, do you agree or disagree?
Trying to think back to my cyber security class. I do believe the bottom of the stack would be physical layer.
So I agree. It is the physical layer.
You got to start somewhere. All right, X gets the square and both are on the board.
So we're back to you, Rachel. Where would you like to play?
All right, let's see. Let's see. I am going to go with Thomas again and try to get that diagonal so I can get to Kerry.
That is a good strategy. Yeah, I mean, this is deeper than chess here.
This is what we're working with. All right, Thomas, your question.
942 gigabits per second is the largest what that Cloudflare has ever seen.
Well, if it weren't for the gigabits, I would have said it's like the magic number.
It's the upgrade requests I've had to decline for business class flights last year.
But I spent too much time with Patrick over the last weeks talking about his nice blocks.
I would go with the largest DDoS attack. All right, largest DDoS attack Cloudflare has ever seen.
Do you agree or disagree? Last time I disagreed with him. So I'm going to agree with him.
Good strategy. It worked. It worked this time around.
So that is correct. It is the largest DDoS attack and O gets the square. All right, Stephen.
Here's the state of the board. Where would you like to go? It's not in a good state, but I'll go back to reliable Kerry.
All right, Kerry. Old, old reliable.
Thank you for calling me old reliable. All right, Kerry.
Which organization is responsible for the 802.3 standard? I know this one, because it has the best name in the world.
It's IEEE. IEEE. Nerds will call it IEEE, but it's just IEEE.
I like that. All right.
Do you agree or disagree? I'm trying to think of what that acronym is. And you have to actually say it the way she did in order to get the point.
That's now a rule.
I think we all should. Never heard it pronounced that way. I've only heard it pronounced that way.
You must be in the nerd class, Jason. He went to the LAN parties.
No one else did. Insulting the wound. Unbelievable. I'm going to lead you astray for that one.
Be nice to Jason. All right. Okay, the consortium address. I'm trying to also, because the other thing that sticks in my hand, and I can't remember its whole name, or sticks in my head is ICANN, but I'm going to go with IEEE and agree.
All right, so that agree is correct. IEEE, as the nerds call it, is responsible for the 802.3 standard.
That's what they used to call it. We're all calling it IEEE.
All right. You're behind the times. We got a very competitive board.
Rachel, where would you like to play? Well, I am going to go with Scott. Let's hear from Scott.
All right, Scott Jones. I think you were the phantom square.
Would you mind introducing yourself? Sure. I'm Scott. I'm an Aries. I like long walks on the beach.
I work at CSUP. I build e-learning and take care of the LMS there.
Awesome. Well, welcome back to Silicon Valley Square. It's always good to have return squares.
Your question. Oh, here's a nice one. One in six marriages occur because the couple did this activity.
They forgot to block the other one's number after a hookup?
Oh, no. It feels like it'd be higher. That'd be a higher number.
Probably so. Since this is online, I would say they accepted a friend request.
They accepted a friend request.
All right. Do you agree or disagree? I'm going to disagree.
All right. That is correct. They met online. One in six marriages occur because the couple met online.
And that might be old data. I'd almost assume that's probably more common these days.
These days, yeah. I guess they're meeting only online.
All right. So, we got the block. Stephen, the board is yours. Where do you like to play?
I could do what Rachel did and hope that she doesn't get Carly and kind of curse that.
Worked out fine. Now you're playing the mind games. But no, I think I'm... No, I'm going to hope you don't get an X.
I'm going to go back to Vaishnavi. Wow. You're brave.
All right. Vaishnavi, your game two question. What does the acronym BIOS stand for?
I got a lot of acronym questions this game. You do. Went from food questions to acronym questions.
And I think it's BIOS. That's something else altogether.
Trying to keep it clean here, guys.
Come on. I feel like there's only two types of systems, one which operate and one which don't operate, like which is broken down.
So, I feel it would be... And we are talking about the Internet.
So, it's Busy Internet Operating System. All right. Busy Internet Operating System.
Or is it maybe Basic Input Operating System. All right.
Basic Input Operating System. Do you agree or disagree? I do believe I disagree with that.
And you didn't call it BIOS. I can't trust you.
All right. That disagree is correct. It's just Basic Input Output System.
All right. So, it's state of the board. Rachel, you can go for the win.
It almost seems like a race. All right. Carly, you're my girl. Let's do this.
Just remember what I said. You need to be correct. Let's do this together. We can do this together.
All right. Here's a numerical question. YouTube's copyright checking software scans over how many years of video every day?
This includes all the goat videos?
All of the videos. Playing with goats. I think I'm going to go with 100 years.
Nice and round number. I feel good about that.
All right. 100 years of video every day. Rachel, do you agree or disagree? That's stressful.
For the win.
I mean. Just since we're talking about YouTube. YouTube fainting goats, if you guys really like goats.
You'll never see anything funnier.
Let's see. You know, something tells me to say no, but Carly's so smart.
I'm going to go with agree. Agree.
That's 100 years. And it is. Over 100 years of video in a day. All right. So Rachel takes the board again.
Three in a row. If I'm counting the points, which I am, I'm on top of that this game.
That's 2000 points. All right.
And with that, game two was brought to you by Cloudflare Workers. Cloudflare Workers is Cloudflare's serverless solution, allowing you to provide functions as a service to improve security posture, handle the scale of the Internet of Things, reduce infrastructure costs and increase user personalization.
And with that, we're near end of time.
I want to thank our audience for watching. I want to thank all of our squares and our contestants for joining us today.
And if anyone has any jokes, you guys can wrap us up over the last few minutes.
Do the advertisements generate revenue for the finance department?
How does that work? I don't know.
I don't even get them approved by marketing, so I highly doubt it. He's never seen those before.
Yeah, no. I'd rather not see them. It's fine. You keep them.
Need one of those drop boxes of where'd you hear about us from? Or is Cloudflare TV to be on there?
There we go. Or just Silicon Valley Squares. We need to get more specific.
Cloudflare TV dash Silicon Valley Squares. Cloudflare TV dash et cetera.
Silicon Valley Squares episode two. And we all heard Thomas earlier say he approved of a prize, right?
I did. I heard that. That's what I heard. That's what I heard.
Some goat cheese. Trying to figure out what layer of our infrastructure has the barbed wire now.
Do we have that running through PDX? I mean, that's how we power our WAF.
It's a physical deterrent. It's very pokey. Makes so much sense.
All right.
And with that, thank you for joining us on yet another episode of Silicon Valley Squares.
We look forward to seeing you guys next week. See ya. Bye. Thanks, host.
Do I have send-off music? We'll get some send-off music. There we go.
I think we should say aye. Aye! Silicon Valley Squares