Sam Rhea

Sam Rhea

Austinite in Lisbon. VP & CoS, Emerging Tech at Cloudflare.

at work

I work on the Emerging Technology and Incubation team at Cloudflare. We ship the future that we think our customers will need months and years from now. I get to help solve a fun range of problems as the VP, Strategic Advisor & Chief of Staff.

I previously spent six years launching, building, and leading the Zero Trust product line at Cloudflare as the VP of Product.

I shipped the first prototype in that group into GA as a Product Manager in 2018. We only moved faster after that. A few years later we became the only new vendor in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and then made the biggest leap the year following. From the US Federal Government to Fortune 500 companies to start-ups on our free plan, tens of thousands of teams trust us to keep their organizations safe.

And in June of 2024 I decided to hand over the keys to my team and find a new problem space. The SASE business is now run by the brilliant product leaders that joined me on that journey. They are building something bigger and better than I could have ever imagined. Meanwhile, I’ve been sent back to the lab to help figure out what’s next.

I also launched our Registrar years ago and miss the bizarre dance of domain registration. I apologize — I do not know when we will support the .horse TLD.

Oh, and I killed Railgun. It was me. I’m sorry.

2018 - Product Manager of Access and Registrar

I joined Cloudflare as a Product Manager in our Research & Development wing, what we now call Emerging Technology and Incubation. Launched Cloudflare Access to help teams turn off their legacy VPN. Launched Cloudflare Registrar to provide customers with at-cost domain registration.

2019 - Product Manager of Access, Registrar, and Tunnel

Customers liked Access, but they wanted more. We added workflows that sat outside of a traditional browser by introducing support for SSH, service tokens, command line flows, and RDP.

I also became the Product Manager of Cloudflare Tunnel, our private networking toolkit. We made it free to give more organizations secure ways to connect.

Meanwhile, we realized that DNSSEC is hard but we could make it seamless. We shipped one-click DNSSEC to all Registrar customers at no cost. I handed off Registrar to a Product Manager that we added to the team so that I could focus on what was becoming the Zero Trust portfolio.

2020 - Director of Product for Cloudflare Zero Trust

COVID accelerated the timeline for many of our customers to migrate away from their legacy security and networking models. I ran a free program for teams to onboard. Dozens of employees from all departments signed up to guide organizations.

We also had to ship faster. Teams could bring multiple identity providers, control providers by application, require hard keys, manage the regions in use, deploy long-lived private networks, and send users to an app launcher.

We extended Zero Trust control to SaaS apps, too, and I was part of the team that was awarded the patent for this work. At this point the Zero Trust business had grown from just an access control product to a portfolio and we retooled our dashboard to reflect that.

I also ran out of time in 2020. I started to build a team of Product Managers that could begin to scale our products and capabilities as Cloudflare One became the firm’s next S-Curve.

2021 - Director of Product for Cloudflare Zero Trust

The problems our customers had in this space began to evolve and so did we. We launched a comprehensive Data Loss Prevention (DLP) suite. The Secure Web Gateway (SWG) became more mature while the Access and Tunnel products began to replace entire corporate networks.

Customers responded. CISA, the US Government’s national cybersecurity risk advisor, selected Cloudflare Zero Trust to offer Internet security to all civilian agencies.

2022 - VP of Product for Cloudflare Zero Trust

As much as we love to build at Cloudflare, sometimes we need to bring in experts from outside the firm. One challenge that our customers kept running into was the security of data-at-rest and posture controls in their SaaS applications. We jumped ahead to solve this problem by acquiring Vectrix.

2023 - VP of Product for Cloudflare Zero Trust

The team only shipped faster. We became the only new vendor in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

2024 - VP, Strategic Advisor & Chief of Staff - Emerging Technology and Incubation

More enterprises adopted Cloudflare Zero Trust - and they loved it - Gartner named us a Customers’ Choice vendor based on that feedback and we kept moving up the Magic Quadrant.

I also had a moment to survey the business and realize “hey, I think my team can do this - and do this really well - without me.” The team I had assembled could thrive on their own and it probably made more sense to tackle new problems at Cloudflare. I volunteered to handover leadership of Cloudflare Zero Trust to my direct reports and I jumped back into our Emerging Technology and Incubation division in June.

When I handed off the keys to the Zero Trust team, the products in my group included: