internet-infrastructure
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Jeremy Hitchcock and the $1 request that became a company
A student project, an unexpectedly generous group of users, and a decade of bootstrapping put Jeremy Hitchcock at the heart of the internet. His next chapters reach from home Wi-Fi to national security, with a bookstore along the way.
Avi Freedman would like the internet to explain itself
He built Philadelphia’s first internet provider because he wanted to stay connected. Three decades later, Kentik’s co-founder is still trying to make networks easier for people to understand.
Jim Bidzos and the business of being believed
Before online shopping became ordinary, Jim Bidzos was selling the mathematics that made strangers trust each other. His route from a struggling encryption company to Verisign runs through patent fights, a hotel lobby and the quiet machinery of the internet.
Rob Monster and the business of an address
He built GMI to help companies understand consumers around the world. His next act in domain names brought a different question: who gets to keep a place on the internet?
Anil Varanasi and the art of taking the long way
He went to Shenzhen to learn how to make networking hardware. A decade into Meter, Anil Varanasi is still working toward a deceptively simple ambition: walk into a building, switch on the internet, and get on with your life.
Al Burgio and the trouble with waiting
An Ontario founder made a business out of shortening the distance between networks. His journey from Console Connect to blockchain shows what happens when the same instinct meets a very different market.
Fred Hsu and the Address That Keeps Calling Him Back
He helped turn idle domain names into an advertising business, then built companies in mobile ads and games. With D3, Fred Hsu has returned to a familiar problem: valuable internet addresses that are surprisingly difficult to trade.
Arman Khalili and the internet’s need for more room
From a Bay Area dial-up provider to Evocative’s national data center network, Arman Khalili has spent his career making space for other people’s ambitions. His next chapter returns to the same practical question: where will all the computing go?
Rustam Lalkaka Spent Years Making the Internet Faster. Then AI Moved the Bottleneck.
The Firetiger co-founder grew up wiring broken Macs together under his bed. Three decades later, he is still chasing the same idea: make complex systems behave, then make the feedback loop faster.
Danny Gardner Put Wi-Fi Where the Wires Run Out
A student project, a solar panel and a stubborn question became Mesh++. Danny Gardner’s routers travel lightly because the places that need a signal rarely come with convenient walls, wires or outlets.
Chris Zacharias Made the Web Lighter - Then Built for Its Visual Future
A 98-kilobyte YouTube experiment revealed a world the standard site could barely reach. Chris Zacharias turned that lesson into Imgix - and a career spent making visual media faster, more useful, and easier to control.
Dr. Bunsen (Seth Brown)
Dr. Bunsen is the long-running weblog of Seth Brown, a data scientist who built a cult following among Mac power users by treating productivity as a science experiment. He writes precise, unhurried essays on Mac scripting, Markdown workflows, standing desks, and the art of telling stories with data. By day he studies complex systems and the structure of the internet; by night he ships small, sharp command-line tools and chronicles the obsessive pursuit of a frictionless workspace.
Daniella Vallurupalli
Daniella Vallurupalli is the Vice President and Head of Global Communications at Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure and security company. She joined Cloudflare in 2014 when it had fewer than 80 employees and built its communications organization from the ground up. Today she oversees all internal and external communications across public relations, corporate and employee comms, analyst relations, social media, and visual storytelling for one of the most recognized brands in cloud networking and cybersecurity.
Lara Cohen
Lara Cohen is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Media, Creators & AI at Cloudflare, where she leads efforts to help publishers and creators control, protect, and monetize their content in the age of AI crawlers. A veteran of Twitter (two stints spanning nearly a decade), she orchestrated some of the platform's most iconic cultural moments - including Ellen DeGeneres' record-shattering 2014 Oscars selfie - before serving as SVP at Linktree, championing fair creator compensation at scale. Now at Cloudflare, she sits at the intersection of internet infrastructure and the creator economy, building the policy and partnership frameworks that will define how human-created content interacts with AI systems.
Cardi Prinzi
Cardi Prinzi is the Chief Executive Officer of Sail Internet, a Bay Area fiber and fixed-wireless ISP serving residential and business customers across Silicon Valley and San Francisco. With more than 30 years of senior leadership in telecommunications - spanning Sprint, MCI Worldcom, Equinix, TelePacific, New Edge Networks, EarthLink, Pacnet, Telstra, and Windstream Enterprise - Prinzi brings deep expertise in strategic vision, product development, and revenue growth to one of the region's most customer-focused internet providers. Since joining Sail Internet in 2024, she has overseen a period of significant expansion including the acquisitions of Paxio Residential, Paxio MDU, and Ether Web Network, plus a high-profile partnership with Twist Broadband.
Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison is the Irish-born CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the payments infrastructure company valued at over $90 billion. At 21, he and his brother John built Stripe from a prototype hacked together on holiday into one of the most influential fintech companies in the world. Beyond Stripe, Patrick co-founded the Arc Institute for biomedical research, launched Fast Grants that distributed over $200 million for COVID research, and championed Progress Studies with Tyler Cowen. A former teenage programming prodigy who won Ireland's Young Scientist Exhibition at 16, he dropped out of MIT to pursue entrepreneurship and became one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires at 28.
Daniel Stenberg
Daniel Stenberg is a Swedish software engineer and the creator of curl and libcurl, tools found on an estimated 20-40 billion devices worldwide - from smartphones and smart TVs to spacecraft and every Windows and macOS installation. A self-taught programmer who began on a Commodore 64 at age 14, he has spent over 25 years maintaining one of the internet's most foundational software projects. He currently works at wolfSSL providing commercial curl support, sits as President of the European Open Source Academy, and contributes actively to internet standards through the IETF. His weekly newsletter chronicles his ongoing work simplifying, securing, and extending curl.
Matthew Prince
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant that powers roughly 20% of all web traffic worldwide. A recovering lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, Prince built Cloudflare from a Harvard Business School business plan competition entry into a publicly traded company with a market cap in the tens of billions. Equally at home discussing BGP routing and content moderation philosophy, he is widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures shaping how the internet actually works - for better or for worse, depending on who you ask.