Lee Holloway
- title
- Lee Holloway
- type
- entity
- summary
- Cloudflare's third co-founder and first lead engineer, who left in 2016 and was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2017
- tags
- cloudflare, person, frontotemporal-dementia
- created
- 2026-09-14
- updated
- 2026-09-14
Lee Holloway co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 with Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn and was its lead engineer and architect in the early years. He built the first prototype and hired the first engineering team. Before Cloudflare he was chief software architect at Prince's anti-spam company Unspam Technologies, where he co-founded Project Honey Pot, the spammer-tracking project whose data Cloudflare was originally conceived to act on.
His behavior began to change around 2011. For years it was taken for burnout or a personality changed by success, and he left Cloudflare in 2016. In 2017 he was diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, a disease that shows first in personality and behavior rather than memory. Cloudflare credited him in its 2019 IPO prospectus and named the IPO project after him. His family's Holloway Fund at the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration supports patients and research.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2004 | Joins Unspam Technologies in Park City, Utah |
| 2009 | Co-founds Cloudflare |
| 2010 | Cloudflare launches at TechCrunch Disrupt |
| 2014 | Free TLS for every Cloudflare customer |
| 2015 | Heart surgery; the change in his behavior becomes marked |
| 2016 | Leaves Cloudflare |
| 2017 | Diagnosed with bvFTD at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center |
| 2019 | Credited in the IPO prospectus; Holloway Fund founded |
| 2020 | Wired feature; first Holloway Summit for FTD researchers |
The dates come from a single secondary biography, which itself draws on Wired, TechCrunch and the AFTD.
Ingested
- lee-holloway-biography — Part 1 of Masakazu Urabe's biography: career, the long-misread illness, and recognition after the IPO