Just to clarify on point 4, directly from the link;
> Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that any particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions will be made by the venture capital firms that participate in the program. Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or other similar intermediary.
So it’s not a fund. Cloudflare just has an agreement that a set of venture funds will set aside capital for companies that leverage workers and in return Cloudflare will provide deals / resources to said startups.
The reason I bring this up is because this is significantly less helpful to founders building on their platform than simply having a strategic fund of their own. The tl;dr on why is because it’s an additional hoop to jump through to get to an investment decision.
As a founder that has raised a significant amount of strategic capital and operates in the same space as CF Workers, if you want companies built on your platform funded, optimize for fast process. I worry the dealflow will actually work in the wrong direction here, with these firms simply telling startups, “we’ll give you some CF credits if you build stuff using workers — helps us hit our promised allocation with Cloudflare.” Which might be the intent, but running a strategic fund is probably more founder-friendly and may create better outcomes.
> Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that any particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions will be made by the venture capital firms that participate in the program. Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or other similar intermediary.
So it’s not a fund. Cloudflare just has an agreement that a set of venture funds will set aside capital for companies that leverage workers and in return Cloudflare will provide deals / resources to said startups.
The reason I bring this up is because this is significantly less helpful to founders building on their platform than simply having a strategic fund of their own. The tl;dr on why is because it’s an additional hoop to jump through to get to an investment decision.
As a founder that has raised a significant amount of strategic capital and operates in the same space as CF Workers, if you want companies built on your platform funded, optimize for fast process. I worry the dealflow will actually work in the wrong direction here, with these firms simply telling startups, “we’ll give you some CF credits if you build stuff using workers — helps us hit our promised allocation with Cloudflare.” Which might be the intent, but running a strategic fund is probably more founder-friendly and may create better outcomes.