
The Devastating Decline of Cloudflare's co-founder - jgrahamc
https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/
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viralpoetry
What an ignorant I was. March last year (2019), I wrote an email to Lee
Holloway asking him how he could bootstrap such a great company. Now I know
why I haven’t received the answer.

EDIT: I found an email:

 _Dear Lee Holloway,

Excuse my curiosity, as an Engineer I am not writing this kind of emails a
lot, but I have read the blog series by John Graham-Cumming about the company,
and it would really help me if you can answer my question about the constant
flow of engineering innovations from your company.

I am a security engineer from Europe and would like to know how is it
possible, that security team will start producing such a stream of innovative
things like Keyless SSL, CFSSL, SIDH implementation, Red October key
management server and many more your company already published?

When the "lift and shift" from the open source or vendor stops and internal
building start to happen within an organization? Is it a cultural thing where
only a small startup can succeed and scale later? Is it about the budget or is
it a cultural shift that is non forcible upon them? Is a prerequisite to the
innovation, that almost everything is developed in house? That came to me as a
contra productive strategy. I have read Skunk Works and other books, but I am
still impressed how that happens regarding to the modern leading IT/infra
companies.

Thank you for your time,

..._

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NKosmatos
Sad and real story :-( Very well written article worth the read. I won't spoil
it with what happened to Lee.

