F5 at 30: From Gaming to AI Security with CEO Locoh-Donou

F5, a Seattle company, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. It began as a group of University of Washington students trying to build online video games. Today, F5 is a publicly traded company with about 6,500 employees and over $3 billion in annual revenue. More than 80% of the Fortune 500 are its customers. The company is now expanding into AI security and recently acquired SurePath AI. CEO François Locoh-Donou explains that F5 helps keep many of the world's biggest apps running and secure. He notes that as enterprises adopt more AI, they often lose visibility into its activity. F5 is building an AI security platform to address this, offering discovery, governance, testing, and protective guardrails for AI models and agents. Locoh-Donou emphasizes that successful companies often make substantial pivots, like F5 did from video games to load balancing. He believes in attracting top talent and instilling self-belief to create high-performance teams. This evolution matters because it shows how companies adapt to new technologies to stay relevant.