Growing Community One Slice at a Time

Over the last couple years, Cloudflare has sponsored over $20,000 of pizza for 80+ tech meetups around the world, reaching over 4500 people. That’s a lot of slices!

Here’s how it works:

1. Present a few slides about Cloudflare at your event.
2. Share a photo and shoutout on social media.
3. Submit the receipt to the Cloudflare Collective.
4. Get paid for the pizza!

Cloudflare supports all kinds of different meetups this way, focusing on "serverless, languages that our serverless platform supports (like JavaScript or any language that supports WASM), and technical diversity & inclusion meetups".

One example is the Madeira Tech Meetup on a small island southwest of Portugal. The organizer, Hugo Romano, has become a Cloudflare champion. How cool is it that pizza has enabled a company to connect with this niche community, who they are now partnering with?

Another great example is Dev Day 4 Women, an event that combines technical conferences, sessions on professional development, talks about experiences of women in the industry, and networking activities.

I spoke to Connor Peshek, developer advocate at Cloudflare, about the program.

Why pizza?

I was actually a pizza delivery guy when I started learning to code!

Developer communities are pretty allergic to marketing. They don’t have patience if you’re not genuine. As a company, it can be hard to find a way in. So we take a very organic approach—we want to make people feel comfortable interacting with us. Doing something nice for someone is a way to open a relationship, and giving pizza is good starting point.

Plus, our culture at Cloudflare is a bit wacky, different, and fun. Pizza fits.

Why Open Collective?

We save so much time. Meetup organizers can submit their receipts and all we need to do is press the "approve" button. Open Collective handles payment processing, accounting, and notifications. It’s very efficient and we're definitely happy with it.

Sometimes it’s just way easier to outsource. Why try to justify hiring another person to do a thing when you can just pay a little bit of money and have it handled for you by experts in that niche? Leaving it to Open Collective lets us focus on engaging with people.

Where to from here?

I’d like the program to keep expanding. We want to support as many meetups as possible, and we'd love to get to know some new people.

I want the relationships to grow. With some groups, we started with pizza and now we're sending speakers to their meetups and they're sending speakers to our meetups. People have come up to us at conferences saying they know about us through a pizza meetup. I want to see more of that.

Want to get your pizza sponsored by Cloudflare? Find out how!