Jeff Hussey gave retirement a poor performance review

Jeff Hussey tried retirement. It appears to have been an awkward fit. Having helped start F5 and stepped away from its daily command, he eventually found himself financing another network company and taking the chief executive’s job. “I bought myself my next job,” he said in 2020. There are cheaper ways to spoil a quiet afternoon, but few that come with such an agreeable explanation.

The joke contains a fair amount of his biography. Hussey moves between the person supplying the money and the person responsible for making the business work. His education was in finance. His early career included investment banking. His reputation came from computer networks. Across those occupations, he kept encountering the same commercial invitation: a useful connection that could be made to work better.

A financier finds the traffic jam

Hussey graduated from Seattle Pacific University in 1983 and earned his University of Washington MBA in 1991. By September 1993, he had founded Pacific Comlink, providing frame relay and internet access services to the Pacific Rim. A spell as vice president at Alexander Hutton Capital followed. In February 1996, he co-founded F5 and became its chairman, president and CEO. His path into the internet business had passed through both the financing of companies and the operation of a network.

An earlier job selling remote trading systems had put connectivity in front of him as a practical expense. Small groups of traders needed financial information without the resources of a large trading room. The internet suggested a different economic arrangement. As connections became more accessible, the strain moved elsewhere: servers had to cope with the traffic arriving through those connections. The pipes could deliver more than the machines at the end could comfortably handle.

F5’s proposition was wonderfully free of romance. Distribute the work among servers so that a busy website could keep answering requests. A visitor looking for a record, a map or a page would have little reason to think about the equipment behind it. That was rather the point. Infrastructure earns its keep by making an experience uneventful.

The customers came before the applause

F5’s early story also belongs to Michael Almquist, whose background included virtual reality research at the University of Washington. By 1997, the company’s BIG/ip device was handling the less speculative business of keeping websites available. Customers included Mapquest and Tower Records. An early university account recorded more than 40 devices sold at $20,000 apiece. Online commerce still had the air of an experiment; its traffic jams were already quite real.

Investor Sonja Perkins later recalled Hussey’s interest in multiplayer games and the irritation of latency. Her response to the opportunity was refreshingly practical: call customers. She spoke with six and established that the problem mattered. The founder’s enthusiasm received a useful examination from people who might actually pay. A business can survive many indignities; discovering that nobody needs its product is among the less negotiable ones.

In August 1998, Hussey took the F5 pitch to Menlo Ventures. Menlo remembered early customers including Microsoft, Exodus, Real Networks and Alaska Airlines. It invested $5.5 million in a $7.7 million round for roughly a tenth of the company. Those figures belong to that particular moment, when the proposition was still being assessed as a young business rather than remembered as an established name.

F5 went public on Nasdaq in June 1999. The public-company chapter soon demanded a different arrangement of responsibilities. In July 2000, Hussey moved from president and CEO to chief strategist, with John McAdam taking the operating leadership. Hussey remained chairman at that point and left the board in 2004. The founding chapter and the long subsequent history belong together, with room for the people who carried each one.

Retirement acquires a competitor

After F5, Hussey’s work included chairing Lockdown Networks, which McAfee acquired in 2008. He also traveled and spent time on social enterprise. The prospect of another full-time executive position nevertheless retained its charm. When his appointment at Tempered was announced in November 2014, the company raised $2 million and emerged under a new name from Asguard Networks.

The technology had roots at Boeing, where David Mattes had worked on protecting industrial systems. Mattes continued as CTO. Hussey brought commercial experience and an ambition he expressed with a small joke at his former company’s expense: “My goal is to make it F6.” More than half of the new venture’s 15 employees had previously worked at F5. Whatever else the next company required, introductions would not consume much of the morning.

The setting had changed. F5 had addressed traffic around applications and websites; Tempered was dealing with connected industrial equipment. Pumps, utilities and manufacturing systems needed to communicate without offering every other participant an invitation. Equipment designed for a particular physical task could have limited resources for defending itself. Adding connectivity expanded its usefulness and complicated its surroundings.

“My goal is to make it F6.”

Jeff Hussey, on joining Tempered in 2014

Who is allowed through the door?

Hussey made the case for simpler network security in his writing as well as his sales conversations. In a 2018 article on smart buildings, he examined the collision between connected building systems and devices that could not easily be updated or protect themselves. Facilities teams wanted efficiency and remote control. Those conveniences gave security teams another collection of relationships to manage.

Tempered’s Airwall approached the problem through identity and policy. Its use of Host Identity Protocol separated the question of a device’s identity from its place on an IP network. Authorized participants could communicate through encrypted connections. The network underneath could remain in place while an overlay controlled the permitted relationships above it. For a building operator, that offered a way to change access without beginning with a wholesale replacement of equipment.

In a 2020 conversation with fellow executive Bryan Skene, Hussey argued that the security industry’s collection of separate products had made complexity into a business. His preferred direction was a platform that reduced the burden of managing those pieces. F5 supplied his example of how a product addressing a specific need could grow into a broader platform. He was returning to an old commercial question with a different technical answer: how much difficulty could the customer stop having to manage?

In June 2022, Johnson Controls acquired Tempered. The buyer planned to use Airwall across its OpenBlue deployments and embed the technology in more products and services. Heating, cooling, lighting and other building functions supplied a concrete destination for the work. An encrypted connection is an abstract thing until it determines who may operate something in an actual building.

A bell, a gong, and the people doing the work

For all the talk of invisible networks, Tempered made some of its commercial progress distinctly audible. A 2017 account described a ship’s bell for a sale above $10,000 and a gong for winning a difficult Fortune 500 account. A successful sales team could apparently qualify as a modest percussion section. The same workplace held a day for employees’ parents, with nearly 50 attending.

Seattle Pacific named Hussey its 2017 Alumnus of the Year. Colleagues described intensity, sales ability and loyalty. Hussey described a leadership role built around encouraging the team and rewarding performance through stock options. The familiar faces at Tempered gave those claims some practical context. People who had seen the first company from inside had chosen to spend time on the next one.

His own explanation of management, offered in 2020, put people ahead of departmental diagnoses. A technical or marketing difficulty could begin with the person assigned to solve it. He wanted expertise and problem-solving ability, then enough freedom for people to do their jobs. His account of meetings was equally workmanlike: an agenda, a timely start, decisions and an ending. Even a founder with an appetite for complexity could appreciate an adjournment.

The coffee has another job

Hussey’s business interests also reached Pura Vida Create Good. The coffee company’s catalog identifies him as chairman and describes his involvement in its foundation’s projects, including visiting a coffee production facility in Guatemala. Coffee sales, ownership support and donations helped fund the foundation’s work. Here, too, there were operating decisions behind an appealing idea. Good intentions still needed a place to go and somebody to check what happened when they arrived.

His appetite for demanding situations had appeared elsewhere. An earlier alumni profile described his enjoyment of flight simulator training in which failures accumulated and the pilot still had to land. “I love that,” he said. By 2020, his preferred ways to step away included music and trips in a Sprinter van. Beethoven, Bill Evans and 1980s rock made a suitably varied listening list for someone whose professional life had crossed several occupations.

At that anniversary, F5 reported a business with 6,578 employees around the world and more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 among its customers. Its most recent fiscal year had produced $3.1 billion in revenue. Those were the results of a company developed over decades by successive teams. They also put the early business in perspective: the young firm in its IPO filing had 123 employees and annual revenue of $4.9 million. The distance between those figures spans a great deal more work than a bell-ringing ceremony can accommodate.

In May 2026, F5 marked its thirtieth anniversary by ringing Nasdaq’s opening bell. By then, successive leaders had taken it through the dot-com aftermath, cloud computing and new security markets. Hussey’s part remained specific: he helped start it, brought it to the public market and later went looking for another problem. Retirement had offered an open calendar. The next company offered something he found harder to refuse.