Why I joined Cloudflare - Rick Congdon

by Rick Congdon

I'm excited to have joined Cloudflare as the Vice President of Americas Sales. I'm genuinely passionate about our mission, and I'm eager to bring my expertise to expand our reach and deliver innovative solutions to customers across the Americas.

This new chapter follows 11 impactful years at Palo Alto Networks, where I served as President of North America Sales and then President of Global Sales. I've also held leadership positions at EMC and NetApp, consistently focusing on building high-performing teams and driving transformational change. In my past roles, I had the privilege of leading a multi-billion-dollar organization through sustained growth and significant market share gains. I currently serve as an Executive Advisor to several high-growth cybersecurity companies, which has kept me deeply connected to industry innovation and emerging trends.

These experiences have set me up well to step into my new role at Cloudflare. We're going to double down on driving growth in our best-of-breed solutions and capturing more than our fair share of the emerging technologies. And I have a framework on how we're going to do it.

Customers are the priority

When I think about what matters most in any company, it starts with the customers. Cloudflare’s customers are building, securing, and accelerating some of the most important digital experiences in the world. Organizations of every size rely on Cloudflare to keep their applications and infrastructure fast, available, and secure. Whether it’s a global retailer serving millions of shoppers, a major government agency protecting sensitive data, or a startup scaling its API traffic, Cloudflare plays a critical role in helping them run their businesses more reliably and securely. This is one big reason that made joining Cloudflare such an easy decision and why I am so energized about what’s ahead. 

Building a strong ecosystem

A strong ecosystem is essential to supporting customers, and Cloudflare’s approach to partnerships is another reason I chose to join the company. Cloudflare has made clear, intentional investments, from integrations with leading cloud providers and security platforms to go-to-market collaboration with global systems integrators and managed service providers. These relationships are critical to how we serve customers, help extend reach, simplify deployment, and accelerate time to value.

Operating with purpose

That kind of reach and impact only works when there’s a strong foundation behind it. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. You can see it in the product roadmap, in how the team approaches innovation and open standards, and in the choices the company makes about security, privacy, and performance. This is a company that thinks globally and operates with purpose.

Equally important to me are the people and the culture. Cloudflare is full of smart, principled operators who are focused on execution. There’s a strong sense of curiosity, accountability, and urgency - and a real desire to build the right way, not just the fast way.

This is the fourth company I’ve chosen to join in a long career, and I took the decision seriously. I joined Cloudflare because of the mission, the strength of the product, and the caliber of the people. The alignment across all of those things made it clear this was the right place to be.

I’m fired up to be here and looking forward to what’s ahead!