From the dot-com boom to AI security: F5 at 30, with CEO François Locoh-Donou
GeekWire
GeekWire
4.8 • 128 Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: 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.
Locoh-Donou discusses F5's expansion into AI security, including its acquisition of SurePath AI this week, and the company's broader M&A strategy. 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.
With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop. Edited by Curt Milton.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How would you grade yourself on integrating acquisitions? |
| 0:03.6 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 0:04.4 | There have been some acquisitions that have been more successful than others, of course. |
| 0:07.8 | They have definitely significantly contributed to changing who we are at F5 and what we can offer our customers, the markets we play in, and really truly building F5 into a platform company. |
| 0:21.8 | So I am pretty proud of what the teams have done overall. |
| 0:25.9 | B-plus. |
| 0:30.9 | Hi, and welcome to Geekwire. |
| 0:35.2 | I'm Geekwire co-founder Todd Bishop. |
| 0:37.0 | And I'm Geekwire co-founder John Cook. And I'm Keekwire co-founder John Cook. |
| 0:38.6 | We are coming to you on location this week at the F5 Tower in downtown Seattle. |
| 0:44.1 | And I'm pleased to welcome our guest, Francois, Locod Danu, who is F5's chairman, president, and CEO. |
| 0:51.5 | It's great to have you here, Francois. |
| 0:53.1 | Thank you, Todd. |
| 0:53.7 | Thanks for having me. |
| 0:54.9 | Francois, we are here in part because it's F5's 30th anniversary. And it's really one of the most |
| 1:02.6 | remarkable business and technology stories of the past three decades in Seattle. And you might not |
| 1:07.9 | hear about it as much as some of the other big tech companies. |
| 1:11.6 | F5 helps keep the world's apps running and secure, and it's really reinvented itself again and again, from the early web to the cloud to the AI, |
| 1:21.6 | and you're still standing 30 years later. So that's part of what we want to talk to you about today. |
| 1:26.6 | We also want to talk about the new era of AI and where F5 is headed. And also, we want to talk a little bit about the |
| 1:34.0 | World Cup. We should. We could do the whole podcast on the World Cup if you wanted to. You know |
| 1:39.9 | my interests would be there. And also at the end, we do have a geekwire trivia challenge, which is a tradition on the show, |
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