In 2021, Cloudflare was already protecting millions of websites. What it didn't have was a story a CFO could explain to a board. AJ Herrera walked in to fix that.
There's a particular kind of marketing problem that only exists at infrastructure companies. Your product is invisible by design. It works best when nobody notices it. The challenge isn't explaining what you do - it's making people understand why they should care before something breaks. AJ Herrera has spent his career at exactly this intersection.
When he joined Cloudflare as VP of Corporate Marketing in December 2021, the company was known by engineers as the world's fastest DNS resolver, a DDoS shield, a content delivery network. That's accurate. It's also the kind of description that ends conversations at the C-suite level. Herrera's job was to find a frame that could hold all of it - the security, the speed, the developer tools, the zero-trust network, the emerging AI infrastructure play - and make it coherent enough to travel from a developer's terminal to an enterprise procurement meeting.
The answer was "connectivity cloud." Two words that recast Cloudflare not as a point solution but as the fabric underlying how businesses move data, secure access, and deliver experiences at scale. It wasn't a rebrand in the traditional sense - no new logo, no new colors. It was a narrative upgrade, a shift in the altitude at which Cloudflare talked about itself. The kind of work that's invisible when it's done right, and obviously missing when it's not.
The context for that quote matters. Cloudflare sits at a traffic choke point for a significant portion of internet activity. As AI agents, scrapers, and automated pipelines began flooding that infrastructure, the question was how to respond - block them, charge them, partner with them? Herrera framed it as a business model question, not just a security one. "A turning point," he said, "from blocking bots to designing new revenue models around them." That's not a defensive posture. It's an offensive one, and it signals where Cloudflare intends to go.
Before Cloudflare, there was VMware - seven years as VP of Brand and Advertising at a company that had a similar visibility problem. VMware was virtualization infrastructure; it ran underneath everything and was credited with nothing. Herrera built out a brand OS from scratch: visual identity, messaging architecture, global campaign frameworks, and an internal creative agency that could execute across TV, OOH, and digital simultaneously. The campaigns ran worldwide. The internal agency kept quality consistent. When he arrived, VMware was a product company. When he left in December 2021, it had a brand.
The VMware chapter, impressive as it was, understates the full arc. Go back further. In March 1995, Herrera founded Bravo! Marketing, an interactive agency serving B2B clients across technology, life sciences, and professional services. He ran it for eleven years. That's not a stint - that's a whole career compressed into a parenthesis. Founders who later become corporate operators bring something that pure-corporate careers rarely produce: an understanding of what it costs to build something from zero, and what clients actually need versus what they say they need.
Before Bravo! Marketing, he was at Kelly Micro Systems as Marketing Director. And before that - December 1989 - he was at Silicon Graphics, working in developer communications at the company that, in many ways, invented the modern relationship between tech companies and creative professionals. SGI was where Pixar rendered Toy Story, where the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were brought to life. It was the moment when computing became visual, and Herrera was there for it. His degree was in Computer Science from UC Berkeley - which, in 1989, meant he was talking to engineers in their own language while thinking about how to reach audiences they didn't know how to reach.