PLEASE HELP WITH THIS; "Which of the first four resignations discussed in the last section of the case is most alarming to you, and why? [Choose only one]. What are the main reasons for the employee's departure? What do these reasons imply about the need to change organizational structure, culture, and processes at CloudFlare?"

Five Resignations Five emplovees had resigned from CloudFlare over the past three months. They came from different parts of the company and gave a variety of reasons for leaving. Dale Kiefling Dale Kiefling had worked with Sri Rao on the technical operations team. They alternated weeks on call, which required a response within 20 minutes to technical issues ranging from DDoS attacks to hardware failures to serious software bugs. Kiefling recounted his frustrations with the role: When I was on call, it was 24/7. We had automated systems with alerts and dashboards, and at the beginning, the work was manageable; we learned to adjust the thresholds and we designed automated responses for different issues. But eventually, we were growing too fast to do that. My pager was going off every 8 minutes on average, for the entire 24 hours, which is far beyond any normal Ops job and certainly not what I signed up for. With our volume of traffic, most companies would have a network operations center with a big team, and probably another NOC in Asia to cover all time zones. Sri had been trying to hire someone, but he set a very high bar; he wanted an absolute superstar. They are really hard to find, especially for a job that requires these hours. So the position was open for months, and all that time it was just the two of us. I raised my concerns with Sri, Matthew, Lee, and Michelle and backed them up with metrics. They wanted to fix things, but they just kept saying that we needed to automate more, and the time we had to automate kept shrinking as traftic ramped. Then my wite and I had our first baby and I realized that working at this level of intensity was just not sustainable. I could see that plans were in place to fix things, but I couldn't wait for that. Prince agreed that this was a difficult role: Dale was right; we run the team hot. He is a great, hard-working guy, but his pager was going oft way too much. We've been growing like crazy, and we have plans to automate, but Dale resigned before we got the automation done. Dale was our first employee to resign, and he did so just short of one year's tenure. If he had stayed a few more weeks, he would have vested some valuable stock options, which shows just how much workload pressure he was under. David Conrad The second departure was David Conrad, one of CloudFlare's opportunity hires. Like Dale, Conrad had quit just before his one-vear anniversary, forfeiting stock options that otherwise would soon vest. He previously had been cofounder and CTO of Nominum, which built advanced network technology, and had held senior roles at four nonprofits that coordinated Internet policy and techmology standards: Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, American Registry for Internet Numbers, the Internet Systems Consortium, and ICANN. Conrad recalled: Before I joined, Matthew and I were really excited about what I could offer CloudFlare. ButI realize now that it wasn't clear what role I'd be filling. In my previous jobs, I'd worked on standardizing development processes and stabilizing infrastructure. I assumed that was what CloudFlare wanted me to do, but every time I brought up a suggestion, they said \"No, we don't want any structure.\" For example, they program in several different languages with hardly any documentation. They choose to live with a growing problem, rather than slowing down to rationalize things. Conrad also had concerns about CloudFlare's lack of organizational structure and HR processes. He continued: The company has no org chart, no reporting lines. It's just engineering, support, and \"everyone else.\" But at a certain size, you need a middle level. Hiring Dane was a step in the right direction, but the company needs the same layer in other functions. For example, the support team hates the software they are using, but they have no one senior to fight for a change. Also, the company lacks an office IT function to take care of stuff like setting up printers. For now, most everyone on staff is technically sophisticated and they can do those things themselves, but as we bring onboard more nontechnical people, we are going to need more support. New hires expect certain things from a company this size, like a staff handbook that explains vacation and sick-day policies, or how expenses get handled. When you are tiny, you can sort these things out ad hoc, but as you grow you need some structure. I could have helped with these issues, but the cofounders weren't ready to address them. I ended up coding, but that's not really what I'm best at and not how I thoughtI should contribute. Prince felt that Conrad had a valuable role to play but acknowledged the integration challenges that had troubled Conrad. Prince elaborated: David added huge value because he knows evervone who matters in the world of Internet policy and technology, and he made introductions to those people. Over time, his role would have become even more important. If we ever wanted to send someone to Washington to lobby, he'd be the perfect guy. David was also adult supervision to some extent. He would tight with our engineering guys, saying we needed more redundancy and process. He won some of those battles, but he lost most of them. We gave him a technical project to get started, because this is a place that values engineering, but his progress was slow. It's hard to go to the Friday meeting every week and see none of your stickies come down. He didn't teel like he was being well utilized, and there's nothing more demotivating than that. David turned in his resignation just before vesting his first tranche of options. He's a Silicon Valley veteran, so unlike some of our younger employees, he knew that he was leaving a lot of value on the table. But he felt like he wasn't contributing, and that he didn't earn his options. This speaks volumes about how strongly great engineers feel about doing important work. We definitely want to keep David as a consultant. David Zakur The next resignation, in July, was David Zakur's. Zakur had previously worked at a company that sold domain names and provided web advertising services. He was persuaded by Prince to join CloudFlare in spring of 2011 to evaluate monetization opportunities in targeted advertising. Age 36, married with two young children, and with both his and his wife's families living on the East Coast, Zakur had some personal issues that contributed to his decision to resign. However, he also found aspects of his role at CloudFlare frustrating. He said: As a fast-paced startup which is literally defining a new market, CloudFlare has a very dynamic strategy. It's been hard to get the buy-in to focus on monetization at this stage of the company. I'm perfectly comfortable ramping up and building a business line, but the opportunity I was hired to pursue never really took off. In all fairness, Matthew had warned me that my role might be premature. During the interview process, he said, \"We want to hire you, so we'll figure out how to make it work. But vou have to be comfortable not launching anything for a year.\" I don't think we'll make a big shift into monetization until our burn rate gets higher or the market demands these services. Right now, we haven't got a pressing need for revenue, given the fact that the subscriptions business is so strong and growing consistently. I wouldn't say that I'm impatient, butI think we could be more aggressive on monetization. When Ijoined, Matthew said, \"The stuff you're going to build will disrupt huge markets. If you're going to poke the giant in the eve, make sure that you're as big as possible.\" I understand that if you move too soon, it could be a company killer. But that doesn't make it ideal for me from a job satisfaction standpoint. Ultimately, in what proved to be an extremely ditficult decision, Zakur found that he wasn't getting enough satisfaction from his work to make up for the challenges that long hours posed to his family life. He said: Matthew lives across the street from the oftice. Michelle does, too. They each literally cross a street or two, and they're at work. Matthew is at the office morning, noon, and night. Lots of others are, too: people here are really engaged by their work. But the hours can take a toll. We have a status meeting every Friday at five o'clock, which lasts for 1 to 1.5 hours on average. The intention is fantastic, but the timing is brutal. I have a long commute, and this means I can't get home to even see my kids betore bed. Changing the timing has been raised by multiple people, but it has been emphatically rejected every time. Most of the rest of the staft is single, and they live nearby in San Francisco, so this is less of an issue for them. Two More Resignations Two other employees had resigned over the past two months. One had been an early hire who had been deeply involved in developing all of the company's key systems. Prince elaborated: This employee is a brilliant jack-of-all-trades engineer, so work just kept piling up on him. He wasn't really passionate about a lot of that work. It took a while for us to clear his backlog, and he finally said, \"I'm burned out, I'm going to quit.\" I said, \"You don't want to quityou'd really be walking away from a lot.\" I wasn't talking about unvested options; this guy doesn't care much about money he cares about working on hard problems. So I told him, \"If you want to work on massively scalable data intrastructure, this is the place to be.\" Prince suggested a two-month travel sabbatical to think things over, and the engineer was surprised and happy to be given this opportunity. He was currently traveling in Europe but in constant contact via e-mail and still working on CloudFlare projects. The cofounders were confident that he would eventually rejoin the full-time staff. The last resignation was by an engineer who disagreed with Prince about strategy and staffing plans. When he realized that he wouldn't get the larger team and management responsibility he wanted, he resigned. What Now? Prince called his cofounders to discuss the implications of these resignations. With 35 emplovees, did the recent loss of five team members simply represent natural attrition? Were employees' reasons for leaving idiosyncratic, or were there patterns in their departures that signaled a need for corrective actions? Specifically, were changes required in the CloudFlare's culture, organizational structure, and management processes? Could CloudFlare make such changes without undermining its commitment to innovation by brilliant, self-directed, mission-driven staff? Was CloudFlare hiring the wrong types of people? And how did Prince's own management style fit with any changes that might be required? Prince said, \"We're not taking these resignations lightly. We need to think about how and whom we hire. T have a sense that a couple of other people are at risk; they just feel worn out. The question is: What, if anything, should we do to address burnout? And, as CEO, how should I make these decisions, and how should I communicate them to our team?\