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.

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Anthropic takes its most powerful models offline after a U.S. order, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly contributing to the concerns that helped trigger it. Todd and John dig into the Amazon-Anthropic dynamic, how agentic AI is upending Amazon's "working backwards" tradition, an AI-driven school arriving soon in the Seattle area, and the sensor-packed World Cup ball.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton.

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In February, Seattle angel investor Charles Fitzgerald warned the region not to become the next Cleveland, prompting Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb to join the podcast and make the case for his city's comeback. This week we close the loop: Fitzgerald and GeekWire co-founder John Cook call in from an abandoned Westinghouse factory in Cleveland, where days of meeting entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine left them struck by a city hustling and aligned around jobs in ways Seattle no longer is.

Back home, we dig into Seattle's unanimous one-year moratorium on new large data centers, which Fitzgerald calls political theater, and he explains why he's sitting out the SpaceX IPO.

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Microsoft's Build conference was a firehose: in-house AI models, agent-first devices, new coding tools, and a Copilot "super app" that got teased but never shown. Todd Bishop and Mary Jo Foley sort through what's real and what's not quite fully baked, from Project Solara and the Scout agentic assistant to Microsoft's push for AI self-sufficiency and the mounting pressure on GitHub.

Related Stories:

• Inside Microsoft’s Project Solara: A new platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps
• Microsoft unveils seven homegrown AI models in new bid for ‘long term self-sufficiency’
• Mary Jo Foley: No Copilot ‘Super App’ at Microsoft Build, but plenty of agentic fodder
• Microsoft’s OpenClaw team takes on the personal assistant challenge

Edited by Curt Milton.

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This week on the show: Mark Zuckerberg's superyacht arrives in Seattle the same day Meta discloses nearly 1,400 local layoffs, robot pizza startup Picnic flames out and sells to a mystery buyer, and corporate America confronts the rising cost of AI, including the leaderboard-gaming practice known as "tokenmaxxing." And we return to the theme of billionaire yachts for our trivia challenge.

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook.

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On this special episode, Eric Ries, author of the 2011 bestseller "The Lean Startup," discusses his new book, "Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great."

Ries explains why he's redefining profit as the maximization of human flourishing, reveals his role advising Anthropic's founders on their corporate structure, and makes the case that the era of shareholder primacy is already over. He also discusses the fall of Whole Foods, the Musk v. OpenAI trial, and why he believes mission-controlled companies dramatically outperform.

GeekWire's Todd Bishop recorded this conversation with Ries after interviewing him on stage at Seattle Flow Startup Day on May 15.

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This week on a supersized Memorial Day Weekend edition of the GeekWire Podcast: A massive IPO filing from SpaceX includes new details about Elon Musk's Starlink business and its satellite factory in Redmond. Jeff Bezos talks about wealth, inequality and eventually tech in an hour-long CNBC appearance. John goes to World Cup ticketing hell and turns to ChatGPT and Gemini when FIFA's support falls short. And a special Sam Altman/Seattle startup edition of GeekWire Trivia.

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook.

Related Links:

• SpaceX is churning out 70 Starlink satellites a week in Redmond, and other tidbits from its IPO filing
• From the archives: SpaceX founder Elon Musk reveals new $10B 'Space Internet' plan at private Seattle event
• CNBC: Jeff Bezos blasts New York City school spending: It doesn’t get better outcomes
• Jeff Bezos describes his $38B startup Prometheus for the first time: ‘Nothing to do with robotics’
• Expedia at 30, the inside story: Online travel giant navigates its third tech disruption
• Seattle, we've got an image problem
• The view from Bellevue: Seattle has the foundation for future growth — if it can fix its taxes
• Former Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has a new gig — startup CEO
• Why this Seattle-area startup is putting its name on the front of an English Premier League soccer team
• CEO of Paul Allen’s $3.1B science and tech fund steps down less than a year after launch
• Award-winning Business Journal photographer Anthony Bolante dies at 58
• 'Soma' Somasegar, 1966-2026: Microsoft and Madrona leader was a champion of developers and startups

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Brian Evergreen worked in AI at Microsoft from 2016 to 2023, including a role helping Fortune 500 executives develop their AI strategies. He kept seeing the same pattern: most of those projects were failing. He set out to figure out why, and the answer became his book, Autonomous Transformation. In this live recording for GeekWire's Agents of Transformation series, presented by Accenture, Evergreen explains what companies keep getting wrong, and why vision matters more than technology.

With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. Edited by Curt Milton.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.