Silicon Valley Squares

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

And with me today are a handful of Cloudflare employees hoping to entertain you for 30 minutes over a game of tic-tac-toe.

First of all, thank you for joining us. If you're catching us on the live stream or recording, we're glad to have you.

And hopefully you can laugh along with us for a little bit.

On the board, you can see that I have two contestants, Bethany and Marshall.

They'll each be trying to get a tic-tac-toe. That means either three across, three down, or three diagonal.

And with that, I'll kick things off.

Bethany, the non-Cloudflare -ian of the team, would you mind introducing yourself?

Thanks. Hi, I'm Bethany McClave. And I work at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

I manage communications and outreach for our Small Business Innovation Research Program.

And I am very good friends and former housemates with Wendy McDowell from the San Francisco office.

Awesome.

We're glad to have you. I hope it was a good parting. Yes. Well, I'm here. All right.

That speaks enough volumes. All right. And our other contestant, Marshall, would you mind giving yourself an introduction?

Oh, sure. Marshall Alexander.

Not such a cool job as working at NASA, although I did start off in Mountain View in the mid-90s as a programmer.

So yeah, I'm at Cloudflare. One of the engineering directors, I have half of the SRE organization.

And super happy to be here, finally.

Awesome. So NASA versus Cloudflare. This will be an interesting game.

Rocket Scientist versus Rocket Scientist. Rocket Scientist Throwdown.

All right. As a prize, if you win the game, Dan is going to name his next kid after yourself.

Dan! The Zuckerberg tactic. I'll have to have that conversation with my wife, but we'll definitely see.

All right, Bethany, the board is yours.

Where would you like to kick off game one? Well, you know, I'm going to start with the center square, Jen.

All right, center square, Jen. Although you are a Cloudflare TV celebrity, I know you've put in a lot of hours so far.

Would you mind introducing yourself to our viewers? Sure. I'm Jen Taylor.

I'm the Chief Product Officer at Cloudflare. All right, so let me look up all my feature requests.

Not a bug.

Not a bug. It's a feature. It's not a bug. It's a feature. Okay. All right.

Your question to kick off game one is, what year was Cloudflare founded? Hasn't Cloudflare been around forever?

It only feels that way. Fabric of the Internet.

Let's see. Let's see. How old is Al Gore? Which calendar are you hoping? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's Al Gore, because I think he founded the Internet, right? Carry the one.

Yeah, carry the one. I am going to go with 2010. All right, 2010.

Bethany, do you agree or disagree? Okay, I feel like Jen should know the answer and she would not do me wrong.

So I'm going to agree. All right, that's a fair assessment.

2010 is correct. All right. So as you can see, with these production values, X gets the square.

I'll put the X there in the center. And Marshall, the board is yours.

All right, I'm gonna have to go with my buddy Liam, fellow swimmer.

All right, Liam, would you mind introducing yourself to all your Cloudflare TV fans?

Sure. Hello. My name is Liam. I work on the infrastructure team at Cloudflare.

And for anybody who's interested, I know a lot of fonts. That's almost like a pickup line.

What's your favorite? What's your favorite one? You know, different fonts have different purposes.

Very politically correct. Which is featured heavily on this particular publication is great for things like spreadsheets and for presentations.

Things like D-Dope are really wonderful for like Vogue magazine, for example.

The only wrong answer is Comic Sans. Yeah, that's the only wrong answer.

All right, Liam, your question. Within the technology world, what is the most important thing to do?

What does the term PDA stand for? I feel like public displays of affection aren't a lot that work.

And probably not in the technology world.

Probably not in the tech world. So I'm going to go with particle-driven accelerator.

Particle-driven accelerator.

Marshall, do you agree or disagree? As much as I'd like to agree with you, I was unfortunately already in the Valley before the pilot was created.

So I remember what the personal digital assistant was the acronym that came after the Palm Pilot.

So I'm going to have to disagree with you, buddy. All right.

Personal digital assistant it is. So Marshall gets Liam Square. All right. If anyone wants to pull up the sound effects.

There we go. All right. Both on the board.

Bethany, where do you like to play next? Let's go with Shane. Shane, a Silicon Valley Squares veteran.

Would you mind introducing yourself? Hi, I'm Shane Nosa.

I'm the technical training program manager for the support team at Cloudflare.

And I've been here for three and a half years, which is about 30 years in Cloudflare time.

He knew Al Gore. He worked with Al Gore. Yeah, me and Al Gore go way back.

I mean, someone's actually got to calculate that one of these days. Mike, what is the legitimate Cloudflare time dilation?

Let's just put it this way. I'm before we had rate limiting old.

All right, Shane, your question.

On March 10th, 2000, the stock market experienced the burst of this bubble.

Oh, definitely wrap bubble wrap. Someone stepped on bubble wrap on the floor.

Um, no, the real answer is, it's...

Yeah, be careful with bubble wrap. The real answer is the tulip market, the Dutch tulip market burst.

There was an extreme surge in demand for tulips.

And then all of a sudden, more tulips and it nailed the stock market.

All right, the tulip bubble. Bethany, do you agree or disagree? Yeah, that's definitely not right.

That is a real thing, though. It is a real thing. All right, that is a correct assessment.

It was the dot com bubble. So with that, X gets the square and we got we got a game winning situation going.

Marshall, where would you like to play?

I'm just feeling bad because I feel like all your questions are made to make me feel old because I still have my web van box that I use to store the animal food.

Do you have your AOL email address? I mean, do you have like, do you have the...

Definitely not. What was it, Dell with the cows? Who had the cow box?

Oh, yeah. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. I do have a Silicon Graphics mechanical keyboard.

But anyways, I got to go with Wendy because apparently we're playing tic-tac-toe, which I hadn't realized.

I was excited that I like new people.

This is more complicated than chess. Keep that in mind. Sure. All right, Wendy, would you mind introducing yourself?

Hi, I'm Wendy McDowell. I work for Jen Taylor and Usman Musafir as their executive assistant.

I basically just keep their lives in check and, you know, make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to do, I guess, and make sure they're fed when we're in the office.

But now that they're not in the office, I feel like they might be starving to death.

So I'm a little worried.

All right. We can see Jen is at least eating well. But the house could be a mess behind her.

Never know. She would never know. All right, Wendy, your question.

True or false? Email was invented before the World Wide Web. This is like a chicken and egg question, right?

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

I mean, no. Email or WWW? I mean, I'm going to say you have to have WWW to have email.

So I'm going to say that's false, right? She says false. Do you agree or disagree?

I really want to agree with you, Wendy, because I know that Bethany may be your best friend outside of Cloudflare, but I know that I'm your best friend at Cloudflare.

But again, my age is going to show and I have to disagree with you. I'm very disagreeable today.

All right. That is correct. So email was invented before the World Wide Web.

And I don't have any fun facts for that question, but sometimes I do.

OK, so the block went through and Marshall gets the square. All right, where are my sound effects at?

All right, Bethany, board is yours.

Got a competitive game won. Yeah, let's go for Jason.

Oh, for the double win set up. Jason, would you mind introducing yourself?

It'd be a pleasure. My name is Jason Kincaid. I'm on the marketing team. I've gotten to work on a variety of things.

And right now, if something's going wrong with Cloudflare TV, I'm I'm desperately trying to fix it.

And it may well have been my fault.

So how do you explain this show? Is this also your fault?

No, this is this is the dream. This is what we were hoping Cloudflare TV would be.

All right. Awesome. Good to hear. They still let me do it. So your question. The first computer mouse was made of this material.

So my understanding is that the first prototypes of the computer, personal computing were developed just as the Cold War was picking up.

And the government was encouraging researchers to make sure everything was as highly combustible as possible in case the spies rushed in.

You want to light a match and make sure everything was up in smoke and they'd be stuck with the vacuum tubes.

So I'm going to say the first mouse was made of wood.

All right. First mouse made of wood. Do you agree or disagree?

OK, I actually love that answer and the story that went with it, but I'm going to disagree.

Oh, it was actually wood. I can't I can't I can't vouch for the story.

That seemed made up from like cereal boxes. I read it. What kind of wood was it?

Was it mahogany? Was it cherry? You know, I think it might have been plywood.

Something that was just like a ball sack. Highly flammable, you know, balsa, balsa wood.

Critical board from Ikea. All right. So since that was not a game winning play, the square actually goes to Marshall on the miss.

And Marshall, it is your turn.

Nice. You saved me. I thought I was I was doomed to lose to NASA.

Let's see. Well, how about Amy? All right, Amy, would you mind giving yourself an introduction?

Yeah, I'm Amy. I work on the office team, places team in San Francisco.

So I I do the front desk from my bed now. It's pretty great. I don't get a lot of visitors like I used to.

You need people to like randomly zoom you and just like have a hangout.

So people are like, hi. And then and then walk past.

Yeah, exactly. Be like, hey, Woody. And I can compliment their shoes. You know, I'm sure Jen has nice shoes on right now.

I just can't see them. I can't quite get the foot.

So that's all right. I believe in you. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, Amy, your question, which of these was considered the first personal computer?

Good multiple choice. Yep. The Commodore PET, the Ken back one or the Apple one?

To do that, I don't have any idea.

So, you know, unless the person who's going to choose this is going to know.

I don't I'm going to go with the Commodore, the Commodore one, the Commodore PET.

Marshall, do you agree or disagree? Well, I have to give up my streak of disagreeing with everybody.

But I am wondering if Amy is keeping up her boba drinking since since I'm not there to make sure I have not had enough boba at all.

See, I'm feeling I'm feeling the whole company by not ordering boba for everyone.

So sweet a little went down. That was my favorite boba.

Yeah. So the stock moment of silence, moment of silence. You have to pour one out, but we can't get them anymore.

So I'm going to disagree again. All right.

That disagree is correct. It is the Ken back one. So introduced in 1971, the Ken back one is generally considered to be the world's first personal computer.

It included two hundred and fifty six bytes of memory.

Yeah. And ran at an operating speed.

I have to scroll down. Of about one megahertz. Sold for seven hundred and fifty dollars.

That was that was prime machinery back then. Did it have a wood mouse?

Exactly with standard a standard wooden mouse. How big was it? I don't have that data.

Yeah. All right. So Marshall gets the square. All right, let me bring it back up.

And Bethany, your choice. Competitive game. I got to go for the block with key.

All right. Gee, fellow solutions engineer, would you mind introducing yourself?

Yeah, I'm yelling car. I have been classless since 2017. So a little bit after Shane, but not that old.

And then currently I am a partner solution engineer.

And then I get to talk with our partners and talk back with with the team of Jen and all the other engineers.

So first off, and I work very closely with Dan.

So I'm sorry. Yeah. She's. All right. I actually gave you a math question.

So how many bytes are in four kilobytes of memory? Wow. Is there four kilos or four kilobytes?

I don't get it. Bytes, bytes. OK. And who is the person in Bethany?

OK, Bethany, I think according to my mathematical calculation here, my dog also is telling me the same thing, too.

He's not going to comment on that on the on the camera yet.

But I think it's four zero ninety six. Four thousand ninety six bytes.

Do you agree or disagree? Disagree.

Oh, it was actually four thousand ninety six. See, I knew you were going to do it.

I knew you were going to do it pretty solid there, Gee. Appreciate it.

All right. All right. So, Marshall, I can't give you the win since I was off of a miss.

But the game one is yours. Where are you going to play? No wonder we can't get to Mars.

All right. So you can't win on a miss. So do I have to go back to Gee? Is that possible?

Yeah. So if you want to win, you have to go back to Gee. But I feel like we need to spread the love.

But we got another whole nother game. All right.

All right. All right. Then that's all right. Gee's my brother anyway, so let's go.

All right, Gee, here's for the win. I'll go down. All right. The popular verification website was named after a particularly questionable character in a trilogy of novels by William Faulkner.

So this popular website, which which popular verification website was named after these questionable characters?

OK, just to not be biased, I know Marshall for a long time as well.

My dog, Cowboy, is telling me here that is Google.com.

All right, Google .com, Marshall, do you agree or disagree? Well, I'd have to be consistent because consistency matters, so I will continue to disagree.

All right. Disagree is correct. It is actually Snopes.com. Oh, I didn't know that one.

And the Snopes trilogy is a series of three novels written by William Faulkner regarding the Snopes family in a fictional.

I'm not even going to try to say that word.

Mississippi, fictional county in Mississippi. Fun facts. We learn everything new, something new every day here on Silicon Valley Squares.

All right. So Marshall takes game one with three across the bottom.

Cloudflare. There's no one to verify if that was true or not.

All right. And game one was brought to you by Magic Transit.

Get rid of your network perimeter hardware. Layer three DDoS protection from Cloudflare.

Would anybody else rather read just code than Faulkner, though?

Some people, definitely some people.

All right. Game two, Marshall, it's your turn to kick us off.

Where would you like to start? So sorry, it's taking so long, Carly. I'll go to the upper right.

All right, Carly. Welcome to Silicon Valley Squares. What would would you mind introducing yourself?

Sure. My name's Carly. I'm on the finance team.

Got to work with a lot of people on this call on various things and was on Cloudflare TV with Amy earlier this week.

So it's fun to see everyone. Awesome.

Your question. Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens infamously described the Internet as this phrase.

Well.

Marshall's grinning, he looks like he knows. I want to say something about magic, like a path of magic, but I think it might actually be a series of tubes.

Series of tubes.

Marshall, do you agree or disagree? So since the new game, I think I can start a new trend.

I'm going to have to agree with this, like the only time I'm going to agree with anything I can do and probably feel so honored.

Yeah. Yeah. Series of tubes gets caught with those those horses you gamble on.

Series of tubes is correct.

So so Guy, as the technical resource here, would you agree with that assessment?

A series of tubes accurate? Is that legally allowed? Hey, Jen, can you help me with that?

I'm going to say I'm going to say neither yes or neither.

I need to know. All right. Bethany, the board is yours.

Where would you like to play? Let's go with Alex. All right, Alex, welcome to Silicon Valley Squares.

Would you mind introducing yourself?

Yeah. Hey, my name is Alex and I am the product manager for the cash team here in San Francisco and excited to be here.

Awesome. I think I have some optimization product requests for you later.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Send a feature request for sure.

I'll make the Jira. I'll make it. Yeah, for sure. Thank you.

All right. Which of these companies did not start in a garage? Google, Amazon, Apple, eBay or Hewlett Packard?

Ooh, that's a good one. They even have garages when HP was around.

Cars have been around for a while. But garages? I don't know. And you needed somewhere to park your horse.

Barnes?

I'm going to say, I don't know, I'll say eBay. eBay. Do you agree or disagree?

Disagree.

Oh, it was actually eBay. All the rest...

I need to be more agreeable. You're being too martial right now, Bethany, come on.

All right. Be agreeable and remember to smile. All right.

This could be a really quick game too. Marshall, the board is yours. Where would you like to play?

Oh, this made me feel bad here. Well, you know, I think I'm going to take Jen because then I still feel like I'm set up well.

Yeah. Going for the double?

Yeah. Yeah. I want the options. All right. Jen, where are you dialing in from today?

I am dialing in from Sonoma, California today. It's hot outside.

Sounds pleasant. Yeah, it's it is. It's very pleasant. It's warm and sunny.

Me and the cows. I got a barn. I don't have a garage out here. I got a barn.

I love the cows in Sonoma. I'm clearly not starting my own company. Because I can't.

I don't have a garage. You got to put your dishes away because it's not like this company was started in a barn.

We all have to do our part. All right.

Your question. Every second Cloudflare serves roughly 22 million of this.

Or these. Twenty two million.

Is it like McDonald's?

Do we serve 22 million like Happy Meals? We get fries with the web traffic.

What one million served? Yeah. We'd maybe Smell-O-Vision. That's like our enhancement.

Twenty two million TikTok videos. Twenty two million.

I'm going to go with twenty two million. I'm going to go with twenty two million images.

Images. All right. Do you agree or disagree? So forget anything I said about being consistent.

Oh, I see you work at Cloudflare. It's all about pivoting.

And I feel like now's a good time. You want to iterate? You want to iterate on your strategy a little bit?

The next generation is going to be the disagreeable one, I think.

All right. So you disagree with images. I'm going to. All right.

That is the correct choice. Cloudflare serves roughly 22 million HTTP requests every second.

All right. So Marshall gets the double win opportunity. And Bethany, the board is yours.

All right. I'm going to go with Wendy. Wink, wink.

A hoots. Office best friend versus real life best friend. This is for the NASA versus Cloudflare.

Rivalry that will be created from this show. All right. Your question.

A medieval Scandinavian king lends his name to this short range wireless technology.

Which technology? That's interesting. You know, the Scandinavian, they actually put barcodes on the side of their warships so they can be Scandinavian.

Who said we didn't have comedians?

Right into that one. What a day. Scandinavian kings, you said.

All right. I'm going to go with. I'm going to go with Bluetooth.

All right. Bluetooth. Bethany, do you agree or disagree? Disagree. Disagree.

It was Bluetooth. Are you kidding? It was. And I've got a fun fact about this one.

So it was Harold. Harold Bluetooth. King of Denmark. From around 958 to 986.

And king of Norway. So he helped unite the Danish tribes under a single kingdom.

And that's why the name was borrowed for Bluetooth. Stole all the tulips from the Netherlands and created the.

All right. Well, Marshall, I can't give that one to you since it's a winning one.

I was proud of the fact that I think that time, maybe I didn't totally give it away with my facial reaction.

I tried really hard that time.

Oh, you think it's hard on you? I got the answers right in front of me.

Sometimes it's really tricky. All right. The board is literally yours. Where would you like to.

How would you like to end game two? It's only right that we come back full circle and come back to Liam.

All right, Liam. Your question for Marshall.

Is what was the name of the first computer to defeat a world champion chess player?

It's a hundred percent Hal2000. Yeah, that's my answer.

All right. Hal2000. I'm trying to remember which order I'm on.

Disagree, agree. Disagree this time. All right.

Disagree is correct. It was Deep Blue. All right. Good old Deep Blue from IBM.

Learning how to play chess. I've sent an invite. You know, Deep Blue apparently can't be bothered to play Silicon Valley Squares.

I know once they learn comedy, then we're done here as a species.

I still need to learn comedy too.

All right. Game two was brought to you by the Cloudflare Partner Network.

Why? Because I'm on the partner team and I make this show. Feel free to learn more about becoming a partner by learning from our enablement and training material, some of it presented by Guy, as well as joint planning and channel account teams.

Learn more at portal .Cloudflarepartners.com. All right.

With that, I know we're nearing the end of time, so unfortunately, I don't have time for a game three, but I definitely want to thank our viewers who have jumped in either live or via recording.

I want to thank our Squares. Hope you guys all had a blast.

I want to send a kiss to my mom. She's watching us from Brazil.

So, mom. All right.

So if you have any pets, now would be the time to show them.

Oh, I lost all of the squares.

Oh, we got the plants. Yeah, it's very hard with a white background and a white dog.

You gotta work on that. I think a phone could be a pet.

I don't know if I'm legally allowed to say who this is, but it says Ty.

Oh, yeah. We can't afford the rights to that. Come on, man. I might have to get upset with myself in a little bit.

This is Cloudflare.tv. Talk about making me my own dog and bad joke television show on CFTV.

Anybody wish to join, let me know. All right.

Hey, we'll always have a home for you on Silicon Valley Squares for all of your bad jokes.

All right. And with that, thank you very all. Thanks, everyone, for watching and have a great afternoon, evening or morning.

Good to see everyone. Bye.

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