From the 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 repeatedly to get here — starting, improbably, as a group of University of Washington students trying to build online video games.

On this week’s GeekWire Podcast, recorded on location at F5 Tower, the company’s chairman, president and CEO François Locoh-Donou joins us to trace that journey, from a 1990s internet load-balancing startup to a company that helps keep many of the world’s biggest apps running and secure.

Today F5 is a publicly traded company with about 6,500 employees and more than $3 billion in annual revenue, and it counts over 80% of the Fortune 500 among its customers.

The company is now in the midst of its latest reinvention, expanding further into the realm 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.

On a personal note, he reflects on his path from Togo to Seattle, his leadership philosophy, and his message to high school students from underrepresented backgrounds who visited F5 Tower before the company took them to a World Cup match.

Plus: his World Cup predictions, and a GeekWire trivia question that stumps the room.

Listen below, or subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Continue reading for highlights, edited for brevity and clarity.

On reinvention: “It’s not uncommon for technology companies to make a pretty substantial pivot in the early days. It’s a tough decision, but a lot of the successful companies we look at today had to make big pivots. In the case of F5, it was video games to load balancing — which is not an obvious one, but it paid off in big ways.”

On the AI visibility problem: “The more an enterprise adopts AI, the less visibility it has into what AI is crawling in the organization. It deploys more agents, and these agents call on tools; it deploys more models, and those models integrate with applications and fetch data in different places. Understanding which employee is using what AI, and what agent is using what tool, is quite complicated.”

On F5’s platform strategy: “Having four, five, six different tools to discover, test and secure your AI is a nightmare. So we’re building an AI security platform that includes all of these capabilities — discovery of AI models or agents, the governance and visibility around them, testing of these models, and the guardrails to protect them.”

On leadership: “I don’t believe much in what I call north-south pressure, the idea that you create a high-performance team by a boss putting pressure on their subordinates. I believe you create a high-performance team first by attracting the best possible talent, then instilling self-belief in each of these people, and letting the pressure come from themselves and from their peers.”

On his own start: “When I started in the technology industry, I didn’t think I belonged, let alone becoming a CEO, because I looked at the people around me and there was no one who looked like me. In the first few months of my first job, my hope was to not get fired. That was the dream. And it was quite lonely.”

On his message to the students: “It was important for me that they hear from a Black executive in this technology industry that the technology industry is also for them, and that they have a place here — even if they’re not coding on computers every day, even if they have no parent or sibling or anybody in their family who’s ever set foot in a technology company. And also that their voice matters.”