Monetery Keynote Speaker Matthew Prince
One day. That’s the length of Matthew Prince’s career as a lawyer.
After gaining employment as an attorney, Prince worked in the field for one day before joining a Chicago-based tech startup. The world lost a lawyer — but gained a revolutionary thinker as Prince would go on to co-found CloudFlare in 2009; 10 years later Cloudflare announced a fundraising round of $150 million, reportedly valuing the company at more than $3.5 billion in February of 2019.
Cloudflare is “building a better internet,” protecting and accelerating any website that is part of the Cloudflare community. Web traffic is routed through the Cloudflare global network, which automatically optimizes web pages and provides visitors with the fastest page load times.
Powering more than 10 trillion requests per month — for more than 2.8 billion people worldwide — Prince is one of the people responsible for the growth of Cloudflare and is the keynote presenter at Monetery. Prince will share his insights into scaling Cloudflare and take questions from the audience about building a world-class tech company.
Earlier this year, Prince was the subject of an article discussing the role Cloudflare plays as “content cop” for the internet after deciding to drop a controversial website from the Cloudflare network. Prince was featured in publications like Wired, Bloomberg and Geekwire for his handling of that situation and comes to Monetery prepared to share actionable advice to entrepreneurs making tough decisions.
“Entrepreneurs need to hear from Matthew,” says Stephanie Atkin, Dwolla’s VP of Marketing. “He’s literally building the internet and bringing insight on things we can do today to help build a better technology ecosystem.”
Prince’s interesting and varied background makes him a must-see speaker. Prince wrote his first computer program at age seven after sneaking into computer science courses at a local university. He received degrees in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College in 1996 before attending law school at the University of Chicago in 2000; he received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2009.
Prince has been an adjunct professor of law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago and he is the creator of the Honey Pot Project, the largest open source community tracking online fraud and abuse.
Prince headlines an impressive list of speakers at Monetery that includes Lindsay Knight, Director of Platform at Chicago Ventures, Martina Lauchengco, Operating Partner at Costanoa Ventures and Harper Reed, former CTO of the Obama Presidential Campaign in 2012 and former senior director of the software development team at PayPal.
