---
title: Cloudflare Pursuit 2024–2025
description: Jan Wilmake's 18-month effort to secure a formal partnership or role with Cloudflare, from first contact to Launchpad rejection
category: Events
---

# Cloudflare Pursuit 2024–2025

Between Q4 2024 and mid-2025, [[Jan_Wilmake]] made a sustained effort to formalise his relationship with [[Cloudflare]] — seeking either a DevRel contractor arrangement, a Launchpad accelerator spot, or an IC role within the Developer Relations team. The pursuit involved multiple contacts across the Cloudflare organisation, culminating in a period of stalled negotiations and an application rejection in April 2025.

## Background

Jan had been building on Cloudflare Workers since mid-2024 and by Q4 2024 had identified Cloudflare as both his primary technical platform and his strategic partner target. All of his major products — [[uithub]], [[openapisearch]], [[sponsorflare]] — ran on Workers. Jan wrote explicitly that building Cloudflare-native tools could serve dual purposes: building his own startup while making everything acquisition-friendly for Cloudflare.

## Timeline

### Q4 2024: First Strategic Assessment
Jan documented Cloudflare-specific product ideas and identified the Workers Launchpad (cohort #5, deadline February 28, 2025) as an entry point. He also identified [[Sunil_Pai]] as his highest-leverage Cloudflare contact based on Sunil's role in building the Agents SDK and his proximity to platform decisions.

### Early 2025: Network Activation
Jan prepared meeting notes for a conversation with Sunil, framing questions around IP ownership, IC versus contractor roles, and the feasibility of a "Vercel-style endorsement" for Jan's projects similar to how Vercel had endorsed scira.ai's creator. Jan asked Sunil to refer him directly to [[Ricky_Robinett]] (VP DevRel).

Ricky then introduced Jan to **Peter Saulitis** (Cloudflare, New York), the primary DevRel partnerships contact.

### March 19, 2025: Peter Saulitis Meeting
Jan met with Peter and subsequently sent a detailed follow-up email proposing a **6-month DevRel partnership** with five contribution streams:
1. Cloudflare Sponsorware (monetisation pattern for agent tools)
2. Workers for Platforms experiments and content
3. Durable Objects research and sharing
4. MCP commentary and tutorials
5. forgithub tooling (GitHub tools built on Cloudflare)

### March–April 2025: Negotiations with Kristian Freeman
Jan also engaged [[Kristian_Freeman]] (Engineering Manager, DevRel) with a more ambitious pitch: building a **standalone MCP client** that would showcase Cloudflare's full stack, akin to what T3 Chat had done for Vercel. Jan framed this as a [[Depth_First_DevRel]] approach — creating a real, successful product rather than tutorials.

### April 2025: Launchpad Rejection
Jan applied to the **Cloudflare Launchpad** accelerator program (cohort for 2025). The application was rejected.

### April–May 2025: Stalling and Closure
Peter Saulitis became unresponsive. The DevRel partnership negotiations never closed.

Jan drafted a further email to Peter, noting he had decided to work with Iterate first (the trial week with [[Jonas_Templestein]]) and would follow up with Cloudflare after. That follow-up never materialised into a contract.

## Outcome

No formal agreement with Cloudflare was reached. Jan declined multiple employment offers from other companies during this period specifically to remain available for a potential Cloudflare deal. The [[Parallel_AI]] role that Jan eventually took from August 2025 involved Cloudflare integrations, providing an indirect Cloudflare-adjacent position without the direct partnership.

## Significance

The Cloudflare pursuit is a central professional narrative thread of Jan's 2025. It shaped his networking priorities (Sunil, Ricky, Kristian, Dmitry), his product choices (all on Workers), his content strategy ([[Depth_First_DevRel]]), and his decision-making around other opportunities. The rejection clarified Jan's path toward either independent bootstrapping or finding the partnership through a third party.

## See Also

- [[Cloudflare]]
- [[Sunil_Pai]]
- [[Ricky_Robinett]]
- [[Kristian_Freeman]]
- [[Dmitry_Alexenko]]
- [[Depth_First_DevRel]]
- [[Jan_Wilmake]]