Chris Merritt

I was always a math and science-minded kid (read: not sure I really read a book until after college), so it was no surprise when I chose to study engineering. I had a stroke at the age of 20, and that was a defining event in my life. It helped me realize that life is short and I should take it seriously, while at the same time, not everything is worth worrying about.

All of my children were born in different cities, and picking up and moving was a consistent event for my family. Curiosity and ambition drove me during my operating career, where I was constantly seeking out new challenges and collecting experiences along the way. I was a developer for a relatively short period and then went on to become ‘a human data warehouse’ by the end of my first 10-year block, so I moved from building software to answering questions about data and using data to answer questions. 

Having developed an interest in understanding how companies were really built, I went down a path where I worked closely with customers. So I went from software development to packaging software and taking it to market, then ultimately to leading large teams around the world.

I spent a decade building Cloudflare from $1 million in annual recurring revenue to $1 billion. That’s the hardest and best work I’ve ever done. Once you’ve seen a mission-driven organization, it changes you. You look in the mirror every day and think about all the things you want to do but haven’t yet completed, and it eats at you. On your worst days, you don’t like the person staring back at you, but you keep going. That’s the bulk of the journey, and it’s a crazy and wonderful grind. I have immense respect for entrepreneurs going through that journey. 

I’m fortunate that I get to choose what I work on, with whom I work, and how I spend my time. I think Peak XV’s mission is a wonderful one: to work with the world’s best minds to solve the biggest problems in the world, and then take the downstream benefits of that and fund wonderful non-profits. This is worthy of the limited time that I have.