From dot-com boom to AI security: F5 at 30, with CEO François Locoh-Donou
F5 turns 30 years old this year, and the Seattle company has reinvented itself time and time again to get here — starting, presumably, as a group of University of Washington students trying to build online video games.
In this week’s GeekWire Podcast, recorded on location at the F5 Tower, the company’s chairman, president and CEO François Locoh-Donou joins us to follow that journey, from an early 1990s Internet load balancing startup to a company that helps keep many of the world’s largest applications running and secure.
Today F5 is a publicly traded company with approximately 6,500 employees and annual revenues of more than $3 billion, and counts more than 80% of the Fortune 500 among its clients.
The company is now in the midst of its latest renaissance, expanding further into the area of AI security. Locoh-Donou discusses that strategy, including F5’s acquisition of SurePath AI this week, and the company’s broader approach to acquisitions.
In a personal letter, he reflects on his journey from Togo to Seattle, his leadership philosophy, and his message to high school students from underrepresented backgrounds who visited the F5 Tower before the company took them to a World Cup game.
Also: his World Cup predictions, and a GeekWire trivia question that trips the room.
Listen below, or subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Read on for the highlights, edited for brevity and clarity.
On reboot: “It’s not uncommon for tech companies to make a great pivot in the early days. It’s a tough decision, but many of the successful companies we look at today had to make big pivots. In the case of F5, it was video games to load the equation – which isn’t obvious, but it paid off in big ways.”
On the problem of AI visibility: “The more a company adopts AI, the less visibility it has in how AI is creeping into the organization. It uses more agents, and these agents call tools; it uses more models, and those models integrate with applications and download data from different places. Understanding which employee is using AI, and which agent is using which tool, is very complex.”
@media (max-width: 600px) { aside.callout { float: none !important; max-width:100% !important; margin-left:0 !important; margin-right:0 !important; } aside.callout .callout-img { display:none !important; }}
On the F5 platform strategy: “Having four, five, six different tools to detect, test and protect your AI is a nightmare. So we’re building an AI security platform that combines all these capabilities – detection of AI models or agents, governance and visibility around them, testing of these models, and guard lines to protect them.”
In leadership: “I don’t really believe in what I call north-south pressure, the idea that you create a team that works well with a manager who puts pressure on his subordinates. I believe that you create a team that works well first by attracting the best talent, then instilling confidence in each of these people, and letting the pressure come from them and their peers.”
On his debut: “When I started in the tech industry, I didn’t think I belonged, let alone be a CEO, because I looked at the people around me and there was no one like me. In the first few months of my first job, my hope was not to get fired. That’s the dream. And I was really lonely.”
In his message to the students: “It was important to me that they hear from a Black executive in this tech industry that the tech industry is theirs too, and that they have a place here — even if they don’t code on computers every day, even if they don’t have a parent or sibling or someone in the family who’s ever been in a tech company. And that their voice matters.”
