The Only Thing That Matters

To put it charitably, Almquist is an unlikely a savior of the overloaded Internet. His head features a squarish shape and his face bears the exhausted look of someone who's spent the night being chased by angry villagers bearing torches -- only the neck bolts are missing. He is also what every startup desperately needs, the madman who lives on the lunatic fringe, who sees things in a way no one else can, who provides the energy, vision, and daredevil impulse to drive-this-thing-as-fast-and-hard-as-we-can-drive-it that is the combustible essence of every startup.

Almquist lives on doughnuts, Wendy's bacon cheeseburgers, Taco Time carryout, pizza, massive doses of Cherry Coke, and - on health-conscious days - Kickass Chicken Chili from Seattle's Art Bar, a tavern located a few blocks' walk from F5 headquarters. Between meals, Almquist carries a Gatorade squeeze bottle wherever he goes. He likes to pour Cherry Coke into it, sucking on the bottle until it's drained, then neurotically chewing on the mouthpiece until he gets around to a refill.

Short, stout, and uncontrollably mischievous, Almquist comes across as a techie John Belushi. It's an impression he feeds by his tendency to lapse into wisecrack mode, whatever the circumstances. Standing one day in one of F5's back rooms -- a sparse, L-shaped room where five developers share space with a set of steel racks and a jumble of cords, hard drives, motherboards, and assorted other computer parts -- Almquist is discussing the arrangement of routers, switches, and computers that will comprise F5's interface with its Web site across town. "Why haven't you installed this shit on the racks yet?" he asks.

"I'm waiting for the rack-mountable boxes," comes the answer.

Almquist gestures at the empty racks. "I'm waiting for the rack-mountable cage dancers."

This seems to be Almquist's way of keeping a serious business from getting too serious. It also relieves the unbearable stress of launching a startup -- particularly one that's taking on established multibillion-dollar companies as both competitors and strategic partners. A good chunk of Almquist's time goes into meetings with people from AT&T, Sprint, Japan's Trans Cosmos, and a host of other substantial companies that are placing big bets on the Internet.

Almquist's presentations at these meetings consist of a completely logical, totally mesmerizing, and uniquely self-absorbed description of the future of global Internet-based commerce. It starts with a careful outline of the present structure of the Internet; proceeds to an explanation of where its bottlenecks are, why they exist, how they can be unclogged; segues to a description of who F5's potential competitors are; then dives into a product-by-product review of F5's line, ending with a breathtaking glimpse of the future: an F5-built world of trouble-free, efficient Internet communication. It is a grandiose vision -- and one that only begins to register as, perhaps, a little weird when you step back and realize that the man who's spinning it is wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and addressing an audience of conservative Japanese businessmen in traditional blue suits, white shirts, and dark ties.

One of the visitors, Masa Okuda, Trans Cosmos's marketing director, grills Almquist for nearly an hour. "Can you support FTP? Who is interested in acquiring you? How can I serve 10,000 simultaneous connections with a BIG/ip?"

The questions are Almquist's opening to another vision. He nonchalantly lays out his plans for F5's growth: within a year the company will easily blow past its first multimillion-dollar target.

"And how many people work here now?" asks Okuda.

"Uuuhhh, let me think." Almquist looks up at the ceiling, counts for a minute on his fingers. "Twelve."

Okuda shakes his head in wonderment. "Just twelve people right now. Great adventure!"

The Refugee

Avi Bar-Zeev is sitting on the rubber floor at F5 Labs with his back against the wall. Tall, impossibly thin, gaunt, goateed, he looks like he's wandered in from a long fast in the desert, put on an "I Flew the Magic Carpet" T-shirt, and plopped himself down in the midst of civilization. Right now Bar-Zeev is holding his head in his hands, pounding his feet on the floor, and throwing a mock tantrum. "I wanna do VR!" he screams. "When do I get to do VR?"

Back in September Bar-Zeev was hired to do programming for virtual-reality tools and operating systems. Instead, he has found himself designing the graphical user interface for BIG/ip -- supposedly a temporary assignment until F5's cash-generating product can get out the door, giving F5 time and money to work on its real passion, virtual-reality programming. But BIG/ip's ship date has slipped -- of course -- and Bar-Zeev's dream is on hold.