Hi, James. Ben, how are you? I'm good. I mean, I've been sitting here waiting to podcast,

pestering you, saying, when can we get back on? Everyone thinks it's my fault or not podcasting,

and it is completely 100% your fault. Yes, that's actually kind of true. I mean, so we took the usual

summer break, but I've been working on an IPO for Cloudflare, which has been an amazing experience and we might get into it. But one of the things about working on an IPO is there such a thing as a quiet period. And I had this horrible vision of me being the story whereby something I said on this podcast resulted in

the IPO getting delayed and it's not really the kind of publicity that I wanted. So you very

graciously agreed to extend the summer a little longer. That's not totally right. It's always

nice to take a break. Absin makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. Hopefully that's the case

for our listeners as well. But yeah, you've also been extremely busy. I'm actually very interested to hear more about this. I think that IPOs are obviously a strong topic of interest, generally speaking, but particularly in the last sort of month or so with some of the perhaps less successful attempts at IPOing. And I don't know,

I mean, like, I kind of like to give the floor to you. So just so everyone has context,

I think everyone here knows you are a public officer for Cloudflare. Cloudflare successfully

IPOed earlier this month. So that's great. You can talk about it a little bit now. You can't

get forward-looking statements, which probably gets some sort of disclosure here. But what's it like? Oh, well, here's a good question.

When did the process start? Like, how long does this sort of take to do?

So, great question. The process is roughly around six months. And I guess the way that I would frame

this. I mean, obviously, the purpose of an IPO is to take

the company from being a private company to being a public company, trading on the public

markets, you pick a stock exchange, and then people can buy and sell the shares. But the way I would

actually frame this whole process, it reminded me of something else that I have both done, and you've done as well, and also I've helped people with, which is going through the process of applying for grad school.

There's a surprising amount of similarity. The process of applying for grad school is basically like finding a narrative, which is you're

explaining to someone why you've done what you've done, where you're at right now, and what the

plans are for the future. And you want to create a thread that maps through those various

things. And whether you're applying for grad school or creating an S1 document, which is the IPO

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