Everyone at the Table

Good afternoon and welcome to everyone at the table. I am Hady Mendez, your host and the global lead for Cloudflare's Latinx employee resource group or ERG.

Employee resource groups are formed by employees of underrepresented groups who share common characteristics such as ethnicity, gender or religious affiliation.

ERGs provide support to employees, increase community at work and enhance career development.

Everyone at the table is a series that brings together members of different ERGs and allows us to explore everyday topics from the perspective of people with different perspectives.

There are some ground rules for everyone at the table and they are D and S.

The D is for being direct in providing your point of view.

N is for being nonjudgmental when what other people share might be different from how you may feel.

And then S is that by being direct and being nonjudgmental, we hope everyone at the table can be a safe space for sharing, learning and exploring different perspectives.

To make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to speak and have their voice heard, I will be serving as the moderator.

I ask that you please wait to be called on to share with the group.

As a reminder to all of our viewers, we will be taking your questions at live studio at Cloudflare.tv.

So today on our show, we, and by the way, everyone, this is our first show.

So today on our very first show, on our inaugural show, we are having, we have the leading representatives from various ERGs at Cloudflare.

We invited them here today to share a little bit about who they are, what projects they're working on, and how their ERG is helping to support employees across the company.

Before we get started with today's show, we want to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight for racial justice happening in our country and across the world.

We see you, we stand with you, and we will be working alongside you for racial justice.

We hope to dedicate next week's segment entirely to this topic.

To kick things off today, I'd like all of our guests to share your name, which ERG you represent, and how your ERG got started.

Devin, let's start with you.

Hello, my name is Devin Davis, and I'm part of, co-lead of Afroflare. Essentially how we got started is kind of funny in a way.

Whenever one of us, when I mean us, I mean Black people, would walk down, walk in a hallway, we would randomly say, hey, Black person, nice to see you, glad you're here.

We're extremely welcome you're here.

But then like over time, more and more Black people started to join Cloudflare, thankfully.

And we essentially said, hey, we actually kind of need a space, pretty much.

And it happened to also happen right around the time where the events in Charlottesville were going on with the group that managed to show arms.

And when that happened, we kind of were hurt. And we kind of were, well, not kind of, we were definitely devastated.

But we all needed some place to like share those specific feelings.

And so pretty much from there, it started from a small chat room to an actual growing group to be something, one of the great ERGs here at Cloudflare.

Amen. Amen. A lot. You guys are, you guys have a full plate and you're showing, demonstrating and showing us a lot of leadership right now.

So thank you, Devin, appreciate that.

Jade, do you want to go next? Tell us about Asian Flare? Sure.

Hi, I'm Jade. I started, I and some other folks started Asian Flare, basically since the pandemic began.

So we haven't really been around for very long. And Asian Flare, or Asian ERGs are fairly rare at tech companies, because we're not exactly underrepresented.

But during this time of great anxiety, some of us just really needed a space where we could talk about the, the anxieties that we felt around the hate crimes that were rising, people getting attacked because they were wearing masks, and all these sort of issues that had sort of been sitting underneath the surface that we needed to talk about.

And as a result of creating this chat group, it's really blossomed into a community with a greater range of topics, everything from, you know, cooking, and K dramas, and pop music, and newly translated books, to podcast recommendations, it's really become a blossoming community.

That's wonderful. I'm so happy you found community in one another.

That's so nice to hear. Thanks, Jade. Next up is Watson. Hello, I'm Watson.

I'm part of the Cloudflare Disability ERG. We started a few weeks ago when I realized there wasn't a single space for connecting members of disability community at Cloudflare, despite the very real need for community.

We're still small and hoping to grow across offices and expand.

Thank you, Watson.

That's great to hear. Welcome to the Cloudflare ERG community. Let's see, Rosie.

Hi, I'm Rosie. So I would say I co lead the group with Andrea Jones. She actually started it back in summer of 2018.

Hey, Rosie. I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Can you tell us what group you're talking about? I'm sorry about that. We're with Cloudflare, the parent support group.

So she started the group in 2018, where a bunch of parents just got together over team lunch and started talking about, you know, trials and tribulations of parenting, funny stories about their kids, and it just evolved into a monthly lunch.

And now that we started in San Francisco, we've got about 100 people in San Francisco, there's about 200 people throughout our global offices are starting new chapters and reaching out.

And we have a really strong chat room.

And so it's going really well. That's amazing. That's awesome.

Rosie, are you guys keeping busy the last few months? A little bit. A little bit, I guess.

But thank you. I'm sure we'll hear a little bit more about that later.

Next, I'd like to invite Spencer to the conversation. Everyone, I'm Spencer.

I'm here representing Green Cloud, which a little bit different from your standard employee resource group.

So we're called a working group. And basically, you know, first off, we're really honored to be included in this conversation with the other ERGs.

I think that the spirit of Green Cloud has always been alive and well at Cloudflare.

But now we're starting to get organized. We're in the new stage.

And we're planning a lot of different initiatives to help impact the environment and how sustainable Cloudflare is.

So I think the cool thing about our group is that ultimately, it does really involve everyone at the company.

And we have a great group that's pushing things forward.

And we're excited for everyone to be involved as well.

So thank you so much. Thanks, Spencer. Are you wearing green for a specific reason today?

Well, I have to say that the answer to that question is a hard yes.

I went in my closet, there were two options, a dark green sweater and this one and I felt like this one was happier.

Nice. I love it. All right. Next up is Zachary.

Hi, I'm Zach. And I'm one of the co-leads of JudeoFlare. How I got started is I was onboarding with Cloudflare and learning about the ERG groups and said, Oh, Afroflare, that sounds cool.

Like maybe I could start JudeoFlare. And, you know, a few conversations on the rooftop later, Andrew had set me up as the co-lead for the group.

Much like the Jewish people, we're very spread out. So it's mostly a group for us to just kind of talk Jewish culture, a little faith, and just kind of, you know, network with fellow Jews.

That's awesome. Great. Thanks, Zach. Congrats on getting the group started.

That's wonderful. That's a good story. Thank you.

Cool. Kevin, you're up next. Hi, everyone. So I started MindFlare at the beginning of this year, and it kind of just kind of sat there for a bit.

And then as stuff started getting a little more hectic and a little more chaos in the world, we wanted to push this out as quickly as possible.

Myself, I've dealt with mental health and depression for about two thirds of my life.

And one thing that I'm very keenly aware is people that do suffer from mental health, it's very common for you to think that you're alone in this.

And I wanted just to create a space to know that, like, hey, you might not know me, but like, we do share some similar experiences, and we can help each other through this kind of stuff.

So that's the reason for starting it.

Thanks, Kevin. That's such an amazing gift that you're giving to Cloudflare.

Thanks. I think our next guest is not with us yet, and I'm not sure if he's going to be coming today.

But I do want to just give a little special shout out to NativeFlare.

And the founder of NativeFlare is someone by the name, and it's an employee named Eddie Palmer.

He's not here today, but I do want to share that NativeFlare is here for our Cloudflare employees that resonate or identify as being Native American.

And Eddie started that ERG on his, like, pretty much since the first day he started at Cloudflare.

He was really interested in promoting community within the Native American community, and he worked diligently with Andrew to get that ERG started.

So I just want to give him a quick shout out.

We miss you today. Hopefully, we're going to see NativeFlare on some of our future segments.

So why don't we go ahead and move on to Omer with Cloudflare, please?

Hi. So I'm Omer, based here in London in the Cloudflare office. I'm representing Cloudflare.

It's Cloudflare's LGBTQIA plus community. It was established in 2017 in San Francisco.

Pretty much began with a few co-workers and allies of the group, of the community that wanted a place where they could discuss things on their minds and think of what activities or education or how can we celebrate and educate on these topics.

And that rapidly expanded across all of our offices, and we now have presence in Singapore, Austin, London, New York, Lisbon, and the list goes on.

That's right. For everyone who's watching, and everyone's going to nod when they hear me say this, but Cloudflare is the ERG that we all want to be when we grow up.

So congratulations to Cloudflare for being an amazing, I guess, trendsetter and just opening the path for all of us.

So thank you.

Thanks, Omer. Next, I'd like to invite Jason to talk about SoberFlare. Hi, everyone.

My name is Jason Jenkins. I'm the global head of SoberFlare, and we are an employee resource group that is geared towards those who want to defeat the stigma that is associated with sobriety.

How we came to be is in training in San Francisco.

They were talking about ERGs, and so I pulled the Kelly aside and asked her about it.

She linked me up with Andrew Fitch, and literally, that's when SoberFlare started.

And since its inception, Cloudflare has embraced it. I think that there was a lot of people who choose not to drink or use drugs or alcohol for a variety of reasons, and that's not what's important.

The important fact is that they have an avenue where they can find support and help in it, and so we're excited to be here.

Thanks, Jason. We're excited to have you. I loved the Mocktail event that you guys held a couple weeks ago, so I'm looking forward to hearing more about your activities for the future.

I am being told that I skipped someone, and I apologize profusely to Arva for skipping past her, so I'm going to backpedal a little bit and ask Arva to please talk about Desi Flare.

No problem at all, Hadi.

Hello, everyone. Sorry about that. No worries. This is Arva Janwala. I am representing the ERG named Desi Flare, and for everyone who doesn't know what desi means, it's basically a slang term used to describe a local or a national from a South Asian origin, and Desi Flare is focused on basically networking and building a sense of community amongst Cloudflare employees using the rich South Asian culture as a platform to bring people together, and of course, we welcome all those who identify and associate with the South Asian culture and look forward to welcoming everyone who wants to learn more about the Desi culture.

So I think just because we have so much vibrancy and so many festivals and so much to celebrate, we recognized last year, 2019, that we need to come together and celebrate one of the biggest festivals in South Asia, which is Diwali, Festival of Lights, and that's when we met in a small group of 25 people for a vegetarian meal in our San Francisco office, and then we realized there's a need for community building.

There were so many topics that we needed to talk on, had common interests, immigration, financial planning, so on and so forth, and that's how we came up with the formal ERG, now known as Desi Flare.

Awesome. Congratulations, by the way, Arva, on your one-year anniversary.

For those of you who don't know, Arva and I started together at Cloudflare June 3rd, 2019.

We just had our one-year anniversary, so yeah, exactly.

Thanks, Arva. Next, I would like to introduce Neil, who's going to talk a little bit about VetFlare.

Yes, hi. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone.

Neil Sanchez from the San Francisco office. I represent VetFlare, one of our ERGs, one of our many ERGs at Cloudflare.

One of the reasons why we created VetFlare, I think it was just a conversation.

We realized that, and I think we can all attest to this, that Cloudflare is a great place to create communities and maintain those communities, either that be through Cloudflare-sponsored events or through these amazing ERGs.

We realized we did not have a VetFlare that represents ex -military members, spouses, partners, just anyone that wants to support the ERG, so we decided to do it.

Unfortunately, we did it towards the end of last year with big plans for this year, but I think we all know where we stand with this year.

It's kind of erased, but we're all going to continue to work together to support our community and to support the world and see how we can make a difference.

Hopefully, towards the end of this year, we'll start making plans for next year to see how we can better support everyone.

Awesome. Thanks, Neil.

Next, I'd like to invite Nisha to introduce herself. Hi, everyone. Really excited to be here.

My name is Nisha Yelavarthi, and I represent the Women in Engineering ERG group at Cloudflare.

The group was started by one of my teammates, Anita, back in early 2019, end of 2018, as a way to build and support a healthy community for women in engineering roles within Cloudflare.

Our mission is specifically focused on empowering those who identify as women in technical or engineering roles so they can network, learn technical skills from each other, and discuss ideas on how to advocate for positive changes within the tech industry.

That's amazing. Awesome. Thank you so much, Nisha. Annie, why don't you tell us next about Women in Sales?

Of course. I'm Annie. I'm here to represent Women in Sales.

I lead our sales strategy and operations, and I, for sure, look at numbers.

Two years ago, when I look at a number, we have about 50 women across the globe in the sales organization, but only represent 20% of the sales organization.

I have heard different voices bubbled at that time, but not kind of consolidated in the way that fostered change.

With a few collaborators, I was like, why not do something about it?

We started informal luncheons, and then that evolved into this ERG group.

Our goal is to create a venue for the women in sales, particularly Cloudflare being a very technical product to sell, and to be able to voice their experiences and have a place for them to bond and connect.

We are very distributed, particularly in the sales organization, and also to have a more consolidated voice to the other part of the organization to advocate for changes, address things that we're seeing.

Awesome. Thanks, Annie. Next is Talia. Hi. I'm Talia representing Womenflare today.

Our ERG is a resource for all those who identify as women at Cloudflare.

We started because earlier this year, we realized that there wasn't an overarching group for women.

We formally launched Womenflare at Cloudflare's International Women's Day celebrations in March.

Our focus is to support women at Cloudflare, foster a sense of community, and represent their interests.

Amazing. That's great. I love that women have so many different ways ERGs advocating for them.

That's awesome. Thank you to all of you for those efforts. Lastly, I will share, again, that I am Jari Mendez, and I am the global lead for LatinFlare.

We are Cloudflare's ERG for Latinx employees. Our group is comprised of Latinx from all over Latin America.

Our mission is to celebrate Latinidad, to lift and support our Latinx employees, to assist with diversity recruiting efforts, and to otherwise really just be an integral part of the communities where we work.

LatinFlare got started last year in 2019 when I joined the company, and I was looking to meet and network and build community with other Latinx employees.

At that time, we had a chat room, but we were not really focused on events and activities, and our purpose was unclear.

I knew I wanted to change that. I reached out to other people that were part of the chat room, and with their help, we were able to make LatinFlare an official ERG just in time for Latino Heritage Month last year.

It's been an exciting time and ride ever since, so great. Well, now we have a word from our sponsors.

Cloudflare is our internal employee resource group dedicated to supporting and providing resources for the LGBTQIA plus community and making Cloudflare a more welcoming and inclusive place for everyone.

This year, Pride is happening in this protest calling for reform to end systemic racism.

We are dedicating our Pride event to our queer, black...

I'm actually really grateful we started AsianFlare during shelter-in-place.

A lot of companies don't have anything for Asians.

There's so much diversity, no languages. K-dramas and the recommendations of podcasts.

All the food, how do you cook those food? That helps me a lot during this quarantine life.

It's really become a blossoming community. This is a great group.

Awesome. Thank you to AsianFlare. I think personally that it is super encouraging to see your ERG thriving during what is arguably, or not arguably, it's a difficult time.

It's one of the hardest times that we face as Americans, as people, and in particular, we know how much the Asian community has been targeted.

I'm so happy that you guys have found a way not only to thrive, but to find community.

Congratulations. Big heart back to you. Going back to our panel here today, our next set of questions for you are around exploring a little bit more about what stage of development your ERG is in.

Then I'd like to encourage you to tell the audience a little bit about what initiatives you currently have going on within your ERG.

When I talk about stage of development, just to be abundantly clear, did you just start?

I think I heard a couple of people say they just started.

Have you been around for a few months? Have you been around for a really long time, over a year?

We know that there's some ERGs that fall under that category as well.

I also want to remind the audience, if you do have questions for our panelists, the email for your questions is livestudio at Cloudflare.tv.

I'm going to go ahead and start. I will share with you a little bit about LatinFlare.

I would consider that we're in the middle, in terms of our stage of development.

We're still less than a year old, and yet we've really accomplished a lot.

A couple things we've accomplished, I'll go through the laundry list.

We launched our ERG in five global offices. We secured two executive sponsors, so a big shout out to Alonso and Juan for being our sponsors.

We've held several Latino Heritage Month celebrations during the month of October last year.

We've had two spotlight on Latino excellence events.

One was in January, one was just last week in May.

We hosted cafecitos, or what we call them cafecitos. They're actually coffee breaks for employees.

We've been hosting two a week, every week, almost since the start of COVID-19.

We collaborated with Afroflare to host a curly hair workshop just last month, and that was really fun.

We were able to invite family and friends to that one, and it was a really good time.

We are now, just now, starting to work with the recruiting team to identify some concrete ways that we can assist with diversity recruiting efforts.

We're definitely still just getting started, but we've made a lot of inroads.

Really excited about our progress, and I'm really looking forward to see what happens next.

That's where LatinFlare is.

Curious to hear where everyone else is. Devin, can you speak next about where Afroflare, where do you find yourselves, and what you're currently working on?

Sure thing. We've been around for more than a year, more than two years, really.

We've pretty much grown off of three principles, grow, represent, and build.

From that foundation, we've been able to secure two executive sponsors ourselves with Joe Sullivan and Dan Connect.

Shout out to those guys. Then we, as Hattie mentioned, we partnered with LatinFlare for the curly hair event because during COVID, people have to get their hair did.

Then also, during Black History Month, we hosted four Netflix parties showcasing various little-known filmmakers, films and series, I guess you want to call it like that.

We're still planning for UK Black History Month, and we're planning to attend a virtual hiring event called Afrotech.

It was supposed to be in Oakland, but you know, hashtag COVID -19.

That's how things are going around here, but that's it for me. So far, I can't explain to the fact that all of our co-leads are pretty much working together in such a cohesive unit.

We couldn't do this without our community, period. That just goes to show you that once a few folks start gathering together and actually come together and say, change or make a difference somewhere, it's only meant to get better.

Amen. Thanks, Devin. Jade, you're up next. Thanks. Well, AsianFlare just got started basically a couple of months ago, and we've mostly just been building the community in our chat space and hosting a meet and greet every other week.

So yeah, we're just watching our, we're just blossoming our community from here.

Awesome. So, and I hear there's a lot of good cooks in that ERG.

Yes, a lot of us have been sharing photos of the foods that we cook, and for some people who aren't cooking as much, we also totally welcome and celebrate photos of food that you ordered, and as long as it gets everyone salivating.

That's awesome.

We are, LatinFlare is about to our, redesign our wiki page, and we're going to have a section called Recetas de Abuelita, which translates to Grandma's Recipes.

So you guys should come into our wiki page and post some of your recipes in there.

Sounds good. All right, next up is Watson. So right now we are recently started.

We started a few weeks ago, so it's mainly growing and hopefully having an introductory event sometime, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the passage with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and explaining the ways in which society still fails disabled people.

Even in Berkeley, where the disability rights movement started in the 50s, there's often an attitude that people with disabilities don't belong in society.

In very recent, the educational opportunities I had as a child weren't available a few years earlier.

We're hoping to raise awareness that there are members of disability communities at Cloudflare, and there are barriers to participation.

We should do more to erase. We're also trying to form more of a community inside the company for talking about our experiences.

When we talk about making the Internet a better place, that means making it a better place for everyone.

Thank you, Watson. I couldn't have said it better myself.

That's awesome. Thank you. So important. That's really important work, so I appreciate it.

Rosie, how about you? So, as I mentioned before, it was started around, you know, 2018, summer of 2018, so we're about two years old.

We didn't come up with Cloudflare as a tag until, I want to say, late last year, early this year, and we're still working on the logo.

But, you know, one of the big events that we did last year was Bring Your Kids to Work Day, and we had a huge agenda set for this year, and then again, as Devin said, hashtag COVID-19, so we ended up doing a virtual event, which was well attended.

We had a lot of our executives reading books to the kids, and it was more on the, like, smaller children's side, but it was well received.

We're also doing our monthly lunches still virtually, which is nice, and Andrew's working on helping us come up with some better ideas on how to, you know, again, everyone needs their haircut.

My kids have some great haircuts by me, which is not great haircuts.

So, yeah, I mean, our team's still really collaborative, and, you know, working together to get through parenting, and working from home, and homeschooling, and all that stuff, so.

Yep, a lot going on for parents these days. Yeah. Arva, how about you?

Yeah, I would say DesiFlare is definitely in its early phase. We did have a big launch with Lunch and Learn during January 2020, but of course, and we had big plans of getting together, having more events, but of course, similar to every other ERG, because of COVID-19, things have been on hold.

However, we now have ERG leads across five global offices.

We have 125 members part of this group now, globally, of course, and even though it's a lot, this lockdown came into being, we've not stopped communicating, being there for each other.

We have virtual lunches.

We recently had a celebration for Eid, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

We are currently even getting involved into a lot of charity work during these difficult times.

So overall, we are trying to do as much as we can virtually, but we plan to collaborate more with broader parts of the company, help retain and recruit South Asian talent.

We want to be there for our Black community during these difficult times through various internal events.

And lastly, I would like to say that although we are all bound by a common fabric of identifying as being South Asians, we also appreciate the broad cultural diversity amongst us.

So we understand that we are different in many ways, right, from the food we eat to movies we watch, sports teams we support.

So the whole point of this group is to aspire to embrace, learn, and practice all cultures and make this forum a platform for expression of true South Asian flair.

Awesome. That sounds great. Thank you, Arva.

Spencer, tell us about what Green Flair has going on. Sure. So kind of like I mentioned before, I think the spirit of being environmentally friendly and all that has been alive and well at Cloudflare throughout.

But now over the last couple months, we've really been starting to get organized and planning various initiatives that we can do.

So right now we're working with the People in Places team to make certain changes in the office and add, for instance, we would love to see maybe once a month do a Meatless Wednesday.

We'd love to see snacks in the market area that don't have palm oil.

So there are a number of things that we're working on. But again, I think that everyone there has such a strong spirit towards doing what's right and what's sustainable.

And we've even seen on, you know, with a lot of our enterprise clients, they want to work with vendors that are also environmentally friendly and doing their part to be responsible.

Awesome. Thanks, Spencer. Let's see.

I think, Zach, you're up next. Yeah. So we're definitely a budding group right now.

We're continuing to grow. You know, we've been doing a lot of we recently celebrated Passover together in sharing our own ways that we were doing Zoom Seders, which was a total trip.

And, you know, right now we're looking forward to getting back in the office, hopefully doing some Shabbat type activities as a way to introduce other folks to the Jewish traditions.

But right now, you know, we're really focused on supporting, you know, the black community and our friends at Afro Flare.

We don't want to really steal the spotlight when they really need it the most.

That's awesome. Thanks. Appreciate that. Kevin? So, yeah, we're pretty early on, too.

But like other groups, we've kind of done quite a bit, actually, in the last couple months.

We have weekly syncs where we can just kind of chat and just kind of see what's going on.

If anyone wants to vent, like there's a lot of stuff going on in the world right now.

So we have those throughout the week. Sorry, excuse me. Uma, our colleague from the UK office in London, she does, she's like, what do you call it?

Sorry, I'm drawing a blank. She's like a licensed meditation person. Yes, close enough.

And so she does that with us every Thursday. And we just kind of get like a nice relaxation kind of for the US people before we start our day and for the AMIA people before they go to bed, I guess, before they end their night.

And then something that like I got really inspired from the Afro Flare team is I wanted to do something for Mental Health Awareness Month in May.

The Afro Flare team did the Black History Month and they had events all throughout February.

So I kind of would like to do something in the future around that and just kind of get more involvement through the community.

That's great. I actually attended one of those meditation sessions, kind of had one eye open because customer emails were coming in, but you know, I tried.

Thanks, I appreciate that, Kevin. Next up, I think Eddie joined us.

Eddie, are you with us? I thought I saw you here.

Yeah, I'm right here. Eddie, tell us a little bit about what's happening with Native Flare.

Um, not a whole lot, you know, considering we've all been locked away.

But Native Flare, you know, my best effort was always just to bring education and advocacy.

And in talking with friends and other members of the Native community, there's been a lot of, as you've probably seen in the Native Flare post, you know, there's been a lot of COVID, especially on the reservations.

I've lost a couple family members and friends to COVID. Sorry. Yeah, so it's, you know, and then we see what's going on with the Black Lives Matters, you know, Native American history, and I won't go too long, because I can go for a while.

Native American history, especially legal history, a lot of the legislation, and even the Civil Rights Act, a lot of that has been tested on Native people.

So the Native community, a lot of how we're seeing police action and everything else happening in this country has already been, we've seen it for decades as well.

And there's been a very strong movement within our communities, various tribal communities, to help the Black Lives Matter and the advocacy for Black Lives Matter and to address the issues with policing.

And I, you know, I was just online last night, and during the protests here in San Francisco, and of course, as you've seen all across the world, there were marches on reservations as well.

And there was Native people.

It's emotional. It's emotional. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that's the goal of Native Flare, isn't so much to, you know, shoving, you know, my culture down anybody's throat, but just to show that Native American people from first contact till now, we've, you know, we've experienced, we're kind of like the test tube, we're the litmus test for the government to see what they can get away with.

And we're still fighting to this day. But in light of what happened, you know, recently, and the protests and everything, it's bringing our youth out.

Yeah. And it's, it's been incredibly exciting. Yeah. Thanks, Eddie. I really, I appreciate that.

And that is like, a lot of honesty and candor in your response, but I appreciate it.

Because that's like, that's the nature of like the difficult conversations is to speak truth.

So thank you, Eddie. You're welcome. Next, we have Omar.

Yes, thanks, Eddie. So Proud Flare's mission is to educate and celebrate.

We've been doing this globally since 2017. We've significantly grown, and we found ways to support and provide resources for the LGBTQIA plus community.

Proud Flare is a welcoming and inclusive place for all.

Additionally, we, we do volunteer work, we host and participate in internal and external events.

And now we have Pride Month that we're planning and have a lot of fun activities waiting.

Awesome.

That's, I'm so excited about, to learn about what you guys are doing this year.

I think we're going to get a little hint about it later. And shout out to Chase and Andrew for, for leading this effort, of course.

Always. Thanks, Omar. How about you, Jason?

Well, hi, everyone. Again, I just want to express my solidarity, first and foremost, with what the Black Lives Matter movement, but especially what Afro Flare has done.

You have been a shining example of what an ERG should be, which is focused on the core foundation of that ERG, but also on, you know, helping others in general.

And so I tip my hat, Devin, to what you guys are doing.

And I also wanted to mention Jade. Of course, with COVID, you know, people from that area have experienced some start or rekindling of, you know, hate.

And it's wrong.

And so I want to express that with you. And then also Eddie, with the Native population.

I know that this country has been brutal to Native people for many, many years.

And I think that the conversations we're having now, the discussions that are being had will advocate for a long lasting, different way we approach diversity within this country.

So what we're doing at Sober Flare is we just had a mocktail event, which, Hadi, you were able to make yours.

And what a mocktail is, is a non-alcoholic drink.

And so we did that. That was a great success. We're going to be doing another one coming up.

And instead of just one cocktail, we'll do two.

We're in our infancy, of course, you know, we're seeding. We started in March.

We were the first ERG to launch remotely. And that was not planned, but we, of course, adapt.

And our, you know, initiatives will, you know, continue to be to take suggestions from those who may not be sober, but identify as having friends who are sober and things that you, you know, find that we can do to embrace and kind of bring into the Cloudflare community so that we can just not only be a resource for those battling addiction, but just a time to go out and have sober fun.

Yep. Yep. And as, and I might, as my, if my serve is my, if my memory serves me well, I think we had some people on that call that were not looking for just a virgin cocktail, but it was kind of set up for everyone.

So it was a I accidentally walked into doing a toast somehow in that, but it was fun.

Thank you for doing that. Since you mentioned it, you, you, you got walked into it.

Yeah, it was fun. Thanks, Jason.

Appreciate it. All right, next Neil, tell us about that flare and what you guys have going on.

Thanks, honey. So yeah, everyone, as you, as I mentioned before, we have been around for too long.

We have some high hopes and plans, but that came to a screeching halt.

We did, I think the only event we really did was just our launch.

And I hope that if you were in San Francisco, you had a chance to have some of the cupcakes and enjoy the camouflage balloons.

But we did have plans to do a margarita competition for this Cinco, this past Cinco de Mayo.

I kind of did my own in my own apartment and I won.

So, but we plan to do a lot more events hopefully soon.

One thing that, that, that can tell you about the, the RERG Vet Flare is that we don't represent a particular religion or culture, but we definitely represent diversity.

So this is a group of men and women that come from different, different backgrounds that just want to be able to support our community the best we can.

And especially with the Black Lives Matter movement, we definitely want to try and be there as much as we can.

So this year, this is not going to end now, as we all know.

So this year, we really want to dedicate our efforts and energies to supporting our communities, all our brothers and sisters.

Awesome. Thank you. Next we have Misha.

Hey, so I would say that the Women in End Group is in a transitional phase right now.

Anita built the foundation by establishing the member base lines of communication and regular lunch discussions.

But with the recent creation of the planning committee, we're really prioritizing maturing the ERG.

So we're working on several different initiatives to get us there.

We're trying to establish an executive advocate.

So we have stronger representation at that level.

We want to start hosting our own and presents so that members have a platform to share their technical accomplishments.

And we really want to improve our collaboration with other ERGs and meet at a more regular cadence.

So some events that we've held in the past include monthly meetups on professional development, like public speaking, how to advocate for promotions, and how to approach conversations around compensation.

So yeah, and the group is intentionally narrowed on the scope, or we intentionally narrowed the scope of our group to internal efforts instead of external, because that focus would allow us to really spend our time and efforts on the women that are already at Cloudflare.

So this specifically means that we want to provide a way to build your network here and advocate for the changes that we want to see internally, so that the engineers that are here want to stay and will contribute to the mission.

And while we're focused on creating opportunities for women in Eng, we're open to people of all gender identities and employees across all departments, and allies are of course always welcome.

Awesome. Thanks, Misha. That's fabulous. Sounds good. Annie, why don't you tell us what's going on with women in sales?

Absolutely. So women in sales has been around for two years, and we have been able to, it started informal, it's a grassroots kind of effort, and we were able to manage 20 events, like mostly through luncheons, monthly luncheons, that the topics cover a wide range.

It can be just collecting feedback, giving the women a voice in the sales organization, and also about experience sharing, right, learning from the women managers.

We need more of them.

And also could be on the professional development topics, like not only like how to advocate for yourself, but also how you gain trust, right, like how do you fight against some of the challenges women will face in being viewed too aggressive when you are trying to have opinion, right.

So I will also say that very similar to Misha, like we are in a reflecting phase, or transition phase, because we have been around for two years, and some of the initial reasons that got us started is being addressed, which is a good progress.

At the same time, in looking ahead, particularly now we have Women in Engineering, and Talia is leading Women Flare, in looking at overall how can we look at the program more programmatically, and to leverage joint forces in leveraging some of the resources that's going to impact all women at Cloudflare, versus also having programs that are going to tailor to the unique needs for women in sales.

So there are different ideas, including also trying to work with other growing companies, particularly ERG and Women in Sales, and to create potential networking opportunities, and the coaching beyond just Cloudflare, but for sure it is the future, and the future activities across the ERG group that I'm most excited about.

Thanks, Annie.

Talia, what about you? Yeah, so we are definitely in a building phase.

We introduced Women in Flare right before Shelter in Place, which was a really interesting time to establish a resource group, and at that point we had created the foundation for Women Flare, ensuring that anyone who was interested had a voice in what we would be, but due to quarantine, we shifted a lot of our initial focus to creating a safe and light environment for members to check in and connect with one another.

We hosted open gatherings, like virtual spa sessions and game nights, and now that quarantine has become the normal way of life for the time being, we're shifting focus again towards current events and educational opportunities, like a lot of the other ERGs have mentioned, and just to mention one that we're doing actually right after this segment, we're hosting an open forum lunch to inspire conversation around the Black Lives Matter movement, and we're hoping to encourage discussion about where everyone is at in terms of processing everything that's happening, and what we can do to support Black women and the Black community right now.

Awesome, that's very necessary and very good. I'm proud of you guys and the work that you're doing.

Well guys, it is now time for another word from our sponsors.

Proud Flare is our internal employee resource group dedicated to supporting and providing resources for the LGBTQIA plus community and making Cloudflare a more welcoming and inclusive place for everyone.

This year, Pride is happening amidst protests calling for reform to end systemic racism.

We are dedicating our Pride event to our queer Black community members and all those that pave the way for our queer rights movement.

Our Pride events are on June 25th, and we invite both our Cloudflare community and everybody else to attend, celebrate, and have a good old time, so be sure to follow our social media for updates and upcoming events.

All right, go Cloudflare! I am really looking forward to the programming Cloudflare is offering this month, and I'm so impressed with the direction that they have taken for Pride Month this year.

So I want to take a minute to send light and love to all of our queer Cloudflare TV followers, but especially to our Black ones.

So hello and welcome to Cloudflare TV, everybody. Welcome. Now back to our show.

We're almost out of time, so I have our last question for today's segment. Please give us one word and one word only that describes how you are feeling about the current state of racism in the world today.

Remember just one word. Devin, we'll start with you.

Unwavering. Jade. Historic. Watson. Optimistic about the world.

One word. Okay. Rosie. Devastated. Arva. Moving forward. Spencer. You're on mute.

Optimistic. Zach. Motivated. Kevin. Unsettled. Eddie. Exposed.

Omer. Defeatable. Jason. I would have to say game-changing. Neil. Encouraged.

Misha. Hard. Annie. Engaged. Talia. Optimistic as well. And I will say encouraged.

So with that, I want to thank everyone for joining us on today's segment.

It's been great hearing how ERGs are providing new and creative ways to make our employees feel supported and heard.

It is such necessary work, guys. You are true gifts to our workplace, for real.

As I stated earlier in the program, I just want to give you kind of a little preview into next week.

Our show will be dedicated to the topic of Black Lives Matter.

We're going to encourage you to join us for a conversation with allies from around the company as they share how they are feeling at this moment, what specific actions they're taking to show support to our black colleagues, and also how we can all be better allies.

Okay? So that's a really important, going to be a really important segment.

We encourage everyone to join us.

So now on to our good news story of the week. Aside from 2020 being the first time the commencement address at Princeton was delivered exclusively over the Internet, Nicholas Johnson's speech made it extra newsworthy because he's the first black valedictorian in Princeton's history.

Way to go, Nicholas.

Speaking from his home in Montreal, he also quoted Michelle Obama from the graduating class of 1985, and I quote, it was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once, to have one's feet planted in reality, but pointed in the direction of progress.

You may live in the world as it is, but you still have to work to create the world as it should be, end quote.

So congratulations to Nicholas. A big thank you to everyone who joined us here today.

I think we have time for maybe one question, Andrew.

Do we have any questions from our audience? Certainly. Yes.

Hello, everybody. Question from our audience is, even though COVID-19 caused many physical events to be canceled, would you say that the current global situation helped us to get to know our coworkers better, and in doing so create a creation, or sorry, create and consolidate new ERGs?

Interesting. So would anyone like to take a stab at that?

I don't know if we'll have time to go around to everyone, but is there anyone who would like to take a stab at that question?

Yeah. I mean, Asian Flare was established during Shelter-in -Place and during the beginning of the pandemic, and I think it really allowed us to get to know people from other offices in a way that's different than if we had everyone in, if we were only getting to know members of the ERG in the same office.

So as a result, I regularly talk to people from the London office and Singapore office and being an international and global company as Klaffler is, it's been really nice to get to talk to people from all different time zones all over the world.

Thank you, Jade. Anyone else want to share?

Yeah, I guess I can go ahead and pretty much say that, yeah, even though there is a special thing about being in a person's presence, being separate like we are has allowed us to think creatively out of the box and how to generally be together.

So whether it was Netflix parties or whether it's just general meetings I've been having or like a Let's Talk session to talk about what's going on today in this world, like it's definitely been a good time to be able to think out of the box.

Yeah. Anyone else want to share? I'll go ahead. I just, I want to say that it's been a wonderful opportunity to get to know on a, I think a more intimate level, your co-workers and people from other departments that was not so much available, especially with the global offices as they were set up prior to COVID.

So I'm definitely grateful for that aspect of it and, you know, of course the rest, I'm ready for things to return to some semblance of normalcy.

Thanks, Jason.

Kevin, did you want to add to the conversation? No, I'm good. I think they've said everything I was going to say.

Okay, great. Can I add just one thing?

It's interesting just getting to see your co-workers' apartments over video chat and has allowed us to really kind of gain a little more insight into what our, you know, colleagues are doing outside of, you know, outside of the confines of our offices.

Yeah. I guess I was just going to add, like, it's kind of a paradox. I feel almost more connected in being isolated from people than before.

It's kind of strange.

That's an amazing observation. I can tell you as someone who has been by herself, I've been quarantining alone.

I'm never alone because I'm with my colleagues and my customers and that's like kind of fascinating and interesting and somehow years from now people will be studying all of us and how we somehow survived all of this.

Well, is there anyone else who wanted to add anything? Because I just want to give a little preview of what's up next.

I just want to thank you, Patti, for putting this together.

Oh, yeah. Everyone else that had us. Andrew, of course, you're always there.

So thank you so much. This is very, very, very beautiful. Great. Well, we're going to be back every single week.

So it is a weekly program. It'll be half hour moving forward unless we have like a special segment.

And we want to thank you again for joining us.

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