Cloudflare TV

Silicon Valley Squares

Presented by Dan Hollinger
Originally aired on 

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).

English

Transcript (Beta)

Hello, hello. Welcome everyone to Silicon Valley Squares episode. I've lost count. Is it like 32, 33?

31. 31. At least the spreadsheet said 31. Spreadsheet has to be right.

I live and die by the spreadsheet. So everyone jumping in, thank you for catching us live, catching what we're recording.

Welcome to the number one television show on Cloudflare TV.

And that says a lot for what that's worth. So I'm your host, Dan Hollinger, dialing in from the Bavarian coast, all the way from Munich, Germany, where we have some blistering cold enjoying the winter here in February.

And welcome to the product and design edition of Silicon Valley Squares.

We are pleasured to be joined by Jen Taylor, our chief product officer and Christina Hamlin, our VP of product design.

And with me, the regular cadre of Cloudflare employees, eager to entertain and delight by answering trivia questions.

Are you guys ready?

Bring it. No. I got some odds. I got some lag. All right. And with that, I'll give a brief introduction.

The way this show works is we've got nine squares listed on the board.

We've got two guests, Melissa and Jason.

Melissa, would you mind giving a quick introduction for all of our viewers? I would love to.

My name is Melissa Stroop and I'm in IT planning and governance. Awesome.

And how long have you been here with Cloudflare? Just a couple of months. I started in November.

A couple of months. Awesome. Welcome to the company and the squares.

Thank you. And Jason, how about yourself? Would you mind giving a quick introduction?

I'd love to, Dan. Hey, folks, my name's Jason. I work on Cloudflare TV and a few other things.

I'm on the strategic programs team here and I've been here for about four years now.

So I'm really thrilled to be back here on the number one show on Cloudflare TV.

I don't know about number one show. Number one game show.

Number one game show. Thank you for that correction. I was going to get some real angry emails.

I mean, I'm guessing like me and JGC are neck to neck. I don't know what the analytics look like, but I think the number one game show, let's leave it at that.

I'm trying to stay humble. All right. And with that, Melissa, you're welcome to kick off game one.

Where would you like to start first? I'm going to start in the center.

Let's start with Jen. All right, Jen, welcome back to the squares.

Thank you. Thank you. It's been way too long, Dan Hollinger. It has. I mean, part of it is, you know, trying to get this show together, get the wardrobe and the trailer set up.

It's a mess. Well, and I had to work with my stylist to get this in perfection.

And that's months on end right there. We can ship features quickly, but you can't ship me to squares quickly.

Although I have to ask, Jen, you're famous for, in all of your presentations, talking about your shoes.

What's the shoe situation right now?

I will confess it is a very staid and conservative polka.

I'm standing at my standing desk right now. And so I'm going for arch support and strengthening.

So that's my strategy for today. And besides, I got to stay nimble because I'm in the squares.

You never know what you're going to have to kind of spring into action.

And Jen, would you mind giving a quick introduction for those that might not know you at Cloudflare or on Cloudflare TV?

Hi, I'm Jen Taylor.

I am privileged and honored to lead the product team. And I've been here for about five and a half years.

Awesome. And your question to kick off game one, one of the oldest viral Internet sensations was an animated picture of a dancing what?

Off, right?

Because if it's old, you kind of want to go dinosaur, right? Because it's like, you know, prehistoric Internet, you're going to need prehistoric kind of dancing means.

Yeah, I think everybody but I'm also kind of going with probably wasn't a T-Rex then.

Yeah, exactly. The T -Rex. I guess one more sneakers. You know, I might have to go with could be a kitten, but I'm gonna go with baby.

All right, dancing baby, Melissa, do you agree or disagree?

You know, man, she's selling it. And I also was a big Ally McBeal fan.

And I remember the dancing baby on Ally McBeal.

And that was a really big deal. So I'm gonna have to say that I agree. All right, dancing baby is correct.

And if you think about the first viral sensations that left the Internet and went to like pop culture and end up on TV.

And now we just take that for granted.

That's history. And look at Jen, she's got it down.

She's got it going on. All right, here's the state of the board. Jason, your turn.

Where would you like to play next? Let's go with Mr. David Belson. Right. All right, David Belson, welcome to the squares.

Would you mind giving a quick introduction?

I'm head of data inside of Cloudflare. And I work closely with the radar team.

Awesome. Keeping the data flowing, right? That's right. So are you able to explain the difference between like a data lake, a data puddle, a data pond?

Like, is that all common vernacular? Not really internally, no. I don't know. What is big data?

You used like a really big word. I consider big data to be like five and a quarter inch drives, as opposed to small data with two and a half inch SSD or something.

So like, it's like, it's like mini data, right?

We had really big data on like nine track tape back in the day. Right, the tape drives.

I was going to say, like, you can't forget that. All right.

David, your question, your question, but keep going on to game one. The first spam email was sent in 1978.

What was it selling? Remember, this is a kid's show.

The second spam email came in 1879. It was, if I remember correctly, it was selling, it was from a deck sales person.

So it was selling some sort of digital equipment corporation software or hardware, I think.

Can you be more specific?

Software or hardware, I think. I'm trying to help Jason out.

It was selling digital equipment corporation software to run on the deck line of microcomputers.

All right, Jason, do you agree or disagree? I'm not hearing a lot of confidence from David, although maybe this is an act of misdirection.

But, you know, once again, I think of all the things that I could be spammed with.

Do I think that David is right, that this was the particular thing? I'm going to go with disagree, and I'll cross my fingers.

We'll see. All right, disagree is correct.

It was selling computers. It was what? Selling computers. Oh, all right.

I mean, the wrong way then. Yeah, so the only people accessing computers back then were the ones you had to sell computers to.

It didn't work out. Total flop.

All right, Melissa. Did somebody say floppy disk? All right, Melissa, here's the state of the board.

Where would you like to play next?

You know, I think I'm going to go to Piper. All right, Piper, welcome to the squares.

Yeah, hi, I'm Piper. I work on, I'm a systems engineer for the waiting room and the health checks products.

Nice. Awesome. And where are you dialing in from today?

I'm in a small town called Brenham in Texas. It's about halfway between Austin and Houston.

Awesome, so you're only half frozen? Famous for what, Piper? Yeah.

Oh, famous for, yeah, so we, if you're in like the southern half of the US, you're probably familiar with Blue Bell Ice Cream, and they're headquartered in right in our small town.

And yes, we are presently half frozen, and that half frozen is the Blue Bell Ice Cream factory.

Yeah. All right, your question.

This song is still the most viewed YouTube video of all time.

Which song? So I remember a few years back, there was all this, all this ruckus about like, you know, Despacito was this big thing.

And so I'm going to assume it was like a really big thing, because, you know, if it's a song, let's go with Despacito.

Going for Despacito. All right, Melissa, do you agree or disagree? Oh, not my strong suit.

I'm gonna say I disagree.

Before you say the answer, Dan, just know that now Baby Shark is stuck in my head, because that would have been my answer.

You should have, you should have asked to square, like phone to square.

So Baby Shark. Yeah, so Baby Shark is correct.

Baby Shark, at the time I was getting trivia questions, had 12 billion views.

Despacito was at 8 billion. So very large difference in view count there.

But if you subtract those two videos, you get the differences like Numa Numa Dance.

If you subtract the two, right? I don't even know what Numa Numa is up to.

Let's hit our research head up here while we still have a chance, Dan.

All right, Jason.

Dan, you needed to give a trigger warning to any parents on the call before pulling that.

Oh yeah, we phrased, we said Baby Shark. The CTSD involved there. I have avoided that song.

I've never heard it. A kid's video makes more sense, because you're going to play that thing over and over and over.

Kids have no concept of changing videos.

They just open up YouTube Kids, that thing's on loop, and the character's insane.

Yeah, you have the tick. You never need the talk. You just play the tick over and over again.

I thought it was going to be like, Never Gonna Give You Up by Robert Casley.

I thought it was going to be like Rick Roll, right?

Because it gets so embedded in so many things. But maybe it's distributed across multiple YouTube accounts.

I'd like to contest that. I don't want to get all technical on you here, but to count as a view, it has to, you have to view 30 seconds of it.

No one's ever viewed more than four seconds of that video.

In the history of that video. But you can get a lot of shark in four.

And if you're on a loop, yeah. So you're saying waiting room can be the ticket to ride.

If we have everyone stuck in Rick Roll for 10 seconds. Yeah, you don't want people to use your site.

Stick a Rick Roll on their app. We'll put Never Gonna Give You Up as an embed on the waiting room.

How have we not done it yet? All right.

Jason, where are you playing next? I think tactics dictate that Christina, I think you would be a reasonable.

You can go to a totally other square.

Let's go with Christina. Either way. I knew I was up next. All right. Dina, welcome to the squares.

Would you mind giving a quick intro? Sure. So I've been with Cloudflare for six months now.

And I do, as you Dan introed at the beginning, I'm the VP of our product experience team, which is design, but also user research as well.

So there we go. All right. So if anyone wanted to email you personally and said, this is what needs to be better.

Oh yeah, please, please. Because I've got a long list.

So let's just keep adding to it. That's what this year is about, right?

All right. Awesome. Well, your question, what is the one of the most expensive keywords on Google AdWords?

Okay. So it's actually looking. It's actually looking into this the other day because I was wondering about it as well.

But like in COVID times, it's changed a lot, right? So a lot of the keywords now, and one of the most expensive ones that I've seen recently is around conference calls, right?

Because like how we do conference calls, how we do remote work is a big deal.

So that's what I'm going with. Conference calls. So Dan, let me make sure I understand the question.

Is it one of the most expensive or the most expensive?

I'm leaving enough room for like buffer when I got the trivia question.

So one of the most expensive. Okay. Did this just turn into family feud? Like name one of the top 10.

That might be the sequel to this show because it's easier to get less people and we can do Cloudflare feud.

We'll see. I don't think that's very Orange Cloud of you to do Cloudflare feud.

Well, we've got to find a positive way to spin it. So they're not like their cooperative feud.

Make it about like philosophy stuff, Cloudflare Freud.

So I'm going to just get my answer in.

I think it's a good guess. I think conference calls is a good guess.

But I still imagine there's some drug or something that's going to cost more.

So I'm going to disagree. And I think this is for the game.

If I get this wrong, do I lose? No, we don't hand off game winners. They still have to answer a question.

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

All right. Well, disagree is safe. The answer I have is insurance. Insurance is one of the top keywords because think about all the people trying to sell it.

Yeah. Surprising it's so non -specific. You know, it seemed like a very general.

I'm surprised it wasn't Google, to be completely honest. I mean, initially it was Google.

Wasn't it paper initially? That's probably up there. Paper towels. All right.

Melissa, here's the state of the board. We're neck and neck. Where would you like to play next?

Well, I believe I'm going to go to Anton. Hello. Anton, welcome to the squares.

Thanks for having me. Where are you dialing in from? I am meeting you all from sunny Madison, Wisconsin today.

Where it is 42 degrees outside and winter's over apparently.

And what kind of work are you doing here at Cloudflare?

I am a director in network strategy.

So we keep the pipes flowing just enough, not too much. Just like the middle bear.

You know, you don't want it too hot. You don't want it too cold. That's right.

And hopefully you never hear about anything because it always works, right?

So you never have to ask about what we're doing in strategy because it's always the right strategy.

See, it's everything and nothing, Dan. It's the best place to be.

So a little bit of inside baseball. We jump on the call before we start.

And Anton was saying that his Internet was clogged before this call. In a fit of irony.

That's terrific. In my defense, the President of the United States is visiting Madison tomorrow.

And so a day before they flood all the Wi-Fi bands with junk for some unknown reason.

So I switched to wired in the last few seconds here.

You can see the connector on there. This is Cloudflare enabled. You call the Internet plumber to come and unclog you?

He just ran right upstairs. Danger in hand, sucking all that useless spammy data out of your systems.

Just snap of the fingers.

All right. Well, your question is actually a non-technical one. What is the stock ticker of Cloudflare?

Oh, that's it.

I think I know that one. I think I know. Can I say it backwards? I mean, you can.

I think it's NET, if I'm not mistaken. I agree.

Nice. All right. It is NET. Awesome. Jason, let me bring up the state of the board.

It's your choice. I really thought Anton was going to have this huge, complicated answer based on all the preamble.

I was caught off guard. I was like, oh, he just said the answer. I will go with the...

Squares keep it tricky. Let's go with Nick. All right. Nick, welcome to the Squares.

First time, if I recall. Yeah. First time. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Excited to be here. First time Square, long time watcher. Definitely.

Yeah. Well, I've seen a few spread out over the years, let's say. Nick and I enjoy being Squares at the research team.

Well, it's hip to be Square these days.

Absolutely. It's cool. It's back in fashion. All right. Nick, for those that don't know you and your Cloudflare TV fame, would you mind giving a quick introduction?

Yeah. So I've been at Cloudflare for coming up on a decade. It'll be my 10-year anniversary this year.

And I lead the research team. I'm based out of New York.

And you can see some of my segments on Cloudflare TV. One is called Master of Computer Science.

And also check out the research team stream. We have a lot of really great content.

Awesome. I love plugs on Cloudflare TV because we don't have celebrities that are writing books yet.

So we'll get there. And then I need the plugs.

Like, that's just got to be part of the show. Didn't one of the engineers just publish a book?

Product manager or somebody? There we go. Matt Boyle just published a book.

Shout out, Matt Boyle. Yeah. And if you want to know about Makefiles, GDC has a great book on it.

I need the affiliate links. Come on, guys.

All right. This production value does not pay for itself. All right. So with that, Nick Sullivan, your question.

In what year was the term Internet of Things coined?

All right. Internet of Things, IOT. Well, there were things on the Internet since the Internet's been around.

But the term's relatively recent. And it happened after 2000.

So 2002, that's my guess or my statement. 2002. What do you think, Jason?

First, I'm going to stall a little bit by saying you can find the research videos on Cloudflare TV by going to Cloudflare.tv slash research.

And this is tricky because my tendency is to disagree because that's a safer choice.

But Nick seems like the sort of person who would have this stored in some, you know, he just knows it.

He doesn't know why he knows it. And he's known it for the last 20 years.

So I'm going to agree. And I don't think the odds are high. But I think it's possible he's right in this case.

So let's find out. All right. Good guess. But that was incorrect.

It was actually in 1999. It was coined by Kevin Ashen, a British engineer, in 1999.

So pretty close, right? It was only a few years off. I mean, I don't know if you're going to play the statistical game and be like, well, like mathematically different here.

I play the force. And sometimes it just says go with what he said.

Oh, all right. Melissa, who do you think is going to give you the game win?

Yeah, let's see. I'm going to go with Daniel.

All right, Daniel, welcome to the Squares. Thank you, thank you.

Would you mind giving a quick introduction? Yeah, my name is Daniel Tansel.

I am on the account team out here in Arizona. So I'm in the Phoenix area and get to work with all of our customers every day.

So love it. I know I've been here a little bit over a year.

Awesome. Glad to have you. Your question. A teenager in Brazil has the world record for fastest.

Ooh, all right, Brazil.

So I know soccer is obviously a strong suit in Brazil. Salsa dancing.

It's also another one. But when we're talking about teenagers here, I feel like it has to be.

Good show, good show. Phone related. Yeah, Baby Shark was already taken.

I know we can't repeat here. That might be a little younger. I'm going to go with texting.

I think texting would be a strong suit for a teenager. All right, fastest texter in the world.

Do you agree or disagree? This is tough.

I don't know.

You look reputable. I'm confident. But I don't know.

I disagree. Texting was correct.

Not that reputable. All right. So we're still in game one. This is going to be a busy game.

So Marcel Fernandes Filho, a 16-year-old in Brazil, broke the Guinness World Record for speed texting.

So I didn't know there was a contest for that.

I mean, I want to know if he was using like, you know, T9 Word. Or is this just like the swipey one?

Like, what technology has been used here? All right, Jason, where are we playing next?

Kat, I know you're not going to lead me astray.

Hope not. Welcome to the squares. Where are you dialing in from? So I am based out of Denver, Colorado.

I am on the product marketing team. So I focus on our network services portfolio.

Most notably, you might recognize me from DDoS Trends, which, by the way, shameless plug, DDoS Trends is happening tomorrow live.

So definitely tune in.

Awesome. Well, we have no shame. We're with a Cloudflare TV superstar.

Well, debatable. I don't know. Awesome. Well, Kat, your question. What did Project Honeypot track online?

Oh, I'm a big fan of Project Honeypot. So I am going to go with spammers.

All right, Project Honeypot tracked spammers. Jason, do you agree or disagree?

I agree, because this is a part of Cloudflare's history. And if I get this wrong, I will be a little upset with myself.

All right, Project Honeypot did track spammers online.

So game one goes to Jason. Let me bring the board.

And very, very close game one. So here we are. And game one, if I recall, was brought to you by Cloudflare Magic Transit.

When you do not want no scrub Bing centers.

So get rid of your network perimeter hardware. Use Magic Transit.

Moving on. I love it. By the way, I'm going to steal that for my next campaign.

Awesome. See, the beauty of this is I have no pre-approval on any of my advertisements.

So I'll just keep rocking. All right, Jason, we've got a few minutes left for game two.

We have one lonely square.

Where would you like to kick off game two? For sure. I just went, didn't I? So maybe Melissa?

No, you start game two as contestant. Of course. I'll let the host host.

Well, Andre, I think maybe you can help us out. Probably not, but we'll try.

All right, Andre, would you like to give an introduction? I would like to give an introduction.

And then I would like to talk about just a little bit for a second, how we are in the presence of other Silicon Valley style royalty.

Hi, I'm Andre.

I am a engineering manager. And despite my hat and my accent, I am based in London.

And I am in the WAF org, firewall org. And I've been a Cloudflare for coming up on five years now, four and a half, five years.

And so I would like to give a quick introduction of Jason about how a real life actual show he's been on.

Oh.

Oh, that's it.

I'm going to tease everyone. I'm not going to say what it is. OK.

I was a talking head on G4 many years ago, and that was fun. He's probably referring to Silicon Valley, which was I did a little cameo on that.

So thank you. You're welcome.

All the way from HBO to Cloudflare TV, man. You're just going up and to the right.

So with that preamble, I'm going to do my best to give you the right answer.

Although this time I didn't actually cheat and then look at the questions.

So we'll see how it goes.

All right. Andre, your question. Let's see if I can find a better question.

Yeah, there we go. Well, that's so dated now. Oh, man, that was like the largest DDoS attack question.

And it's like too old. Can't do that, man. It gets updated so frequently.

That one's too easy. Oh, I always like this question. All right, Andre, your question to kick off game two.

The Internet weighs as much as one of this fruit.

Which fruit? So I actually had some fun discussions this week about whether this particular thing is a fruit or a vegetable.

And I was right.

It weighs as much as a jalapeno, which is a fruit. Because it comes from the flower and it has seeds inside.

You're welcome, everyone. Put it in your next fruit salad.

All right, jalapeno.

Do you agree or disagree? Well, it's definitely a spicy take.

And I'll just sit with that for a moment. Let it marinate. Yeah, let it really seep in.

Maybe get the milk ready. You know, I'm torn. I can't think of a better.

I'm like, banana seems the obvious choice just because. For scale, yeah. But at the same time, Andre's done this show.

I wouldn't be surprised if he's come across this information before.

Not only have I done the show before, I have gotten this question before.

Oh, wow. All right. Well, I'm going to put my faith in your knowledge of spices and peppers and fruits.

So let's all agree. That's dumb. All right.

Andre led you astray. The answer I was looking for is a strawberry. Strawberry.

Russell cites a physicist to crush some numbers. It's got the seeds on the outside.

Yeah, based off the amount of electrons. He measured the weight and said it was about the size of a strawberry.

It's probably bigger now. Might be a holocaust, but.

So with that, we're at the end of time. So we had a very brief game, too.

But I'd like to thank my Squares. Jen, Christina, everyone else. Andre, of course.

Thank everyone for catching the show, whether you're catching us live or one of the recordings.

You know, welcome to Silicon Valley Squares. Thank you again for hosting us, Dan.

Thank you, Dan. Thanks, everyone.

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Silicon Valley Squares
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...
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