The Only Thing That Matters

The rain continues to fall outside, the evening moves along, and the mood at the table grows schizier by the hour, simultaneously more glum and more exuberant. For all of the risk and high failure rate in the startup world, its young inhabitants are having the time of their lives. One minute Almquist declares, "Failure is death!" The next he pronounces, "We're either going to be incredibly successful or the shit's going to hit the fan and we'll go start another company." "I don't really care what happens," answers Bar-Zeev. "I can hold out for six months even if I don't get paid."

The noise builds, the night grows darker, rain caresses the windowpanes, and Seattle parties on. But this moment belongs to the techno-preneurs, the men and women whose birthright of personal freedom and individual destiny marks a fundamentally new way of being in business, finding the future, and making a difference. In all the startups in all the industries in all the cities around the world, you'll run into people with different names and companies with different fates. But you'll always find the same cast of characters -- and the same animal spirits at work: freedom, risk, and teamwork.

The Mad Bomber

The Seattle Tower is an old, brown-brick, vaguely Art Deco building that looks like something out of Ghostbusters. A creaky elevator takes you to the fifth floor where a corner office suite with "F5 Labs" lettered on the window next to its weathered wooden door waits across a dim hallway.

Inside, the first thing that grabs your eye is a conference. Telephone message slips litter the conference table, along with assorted papers, a few books, an open bag of pretzels, a Wendy's Biggie soft-drink cup, a laptop computer, a speakerphone. At the head of the table sits a clean-cut and stern young man wearing glasses, dark slacks, and a dress shirt that -- judging by its telltale grid of creases -- he's just purchased, taken out of its package, and put on. A woman in a business suit sits at the laptop. Across from her, resting his elbows on the table and talking into the speakerphone, is Mike Almquist. He's wearing grimy jeans, a T-shirt, a tattered sweatshirt tied around his waist, and he sports holes in the both the uppers and soles of his shoes.

Almquist's doing his best to remain patient and polite as he talks the people on the phone through their endless series of techie questions. They can hear the steady refrain of answers. What they can't see is his steady stream of facial contortions -- rolling eyes, exasperated hair-grasping, and an occasional exaggerated widening of his mouth into a silent scream.

When the call is finally finished after 20 agonizing minutes, Almquist gets up from the chair with a piratical, "Arrrrgggghhhhh! That company is IQ-bound!" He stomps out of the room, down a narrow hallway, and into a cluttered office, where he sits down at a terminal labeled Bungholio, and starts working. After typing a few lines, he puts on a huge set of headphones -- probably to block out the dialogue going on behind him:

"I want this box to handle 100-megabit ?"

"Oooohhh ? much goat's blood."

Someone emits a fiendish laugh, followed by a low, zombified growl: "Must. Drink. Goat's. Blood ? "

It seems that every conversation at F5 is punctuated by references to the ritual sacrifice of goats -- a custom that no one at the company admits having started, but that no one seems able to resist.

Almquist cofounded F5 labs in February 1996 with Jeff Hussey, the man in the brand-new shirt. Now just one year into the game, the company and its rock 'n roll crew is in an enviable -- and excruciating -- position. Most startups work their way toward the shipment of a first product, then pound the streets looking for a customer, hoping to bring in money before exhausting their investors' cash and patience. F5 finds itself besieged with orders from customers and having to fend them off while working around the clock to ship its first product, dubbed BIG/ip.

The product is a PC box outfitted with two Ethernet cards and F5 software. What it delivers is a dramatic improvement in the speed, throughput, response time, efficiency, and scalability of Web sites. It also enables Web site owners to replace their expensive Sun or SGI Web servers with immensely cheaper and faster PC boxes. It is literally the Web made faster, cheaper, better. And BIG/ip is only the beginning. Almquist envisions a full line of F5 products that will so improve Internet performance that a whole new era of Net-mediated communication and applications will come rushing to F5's door, including networked virtual-reality gaming.