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.
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.
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.
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.
Jan met with Peter and subsequently sent a detailed follow-up email proposing a 6-month DevRel partnership with five contribution streams:
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.
Jan applied to the Cloudflare Launchpad accelerator program (cohort for 2025). The application was rejected.
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.
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.
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.