From the dot-com era to the age of AI

F5 Newsroom Staff

As we celebrate F5’s 30^th anniversary, we’re shining the spotlight on employees from around the globe who’ve spent their careers shaping F5’s growth as a company. This third installment of our “F5ers behind our 30 years” series features Truls Hofvind, Principal Solutions Marketing Manager, based in Asker, Norway.

In August 2000, the cloud was just a weather term. Nokia phones didn’t have emojis. Maps were printed on paper, computers were backed up on CDs, and the Internet was riding the peak of the dot-com boom.

That was the world when Truls Hofvind joined F5.

At the time, F5 had fewer than 240 employees worldwide and was just beginning its international expansion. More than 26 years later, Truls is one of 17 employees from those early days among the more than 6,500 F5ers who now work for the company.

“If someone had told me on my first day that I’d still be here today, I would have reminded them that startup lifespans back then were measured in months, not decades,” he says.

A lot has changed since then. But for Truls, many of the things that made F5 special in 2000 are the same things that keep him here today.

From U.S. startup to international expansion

Truls’ F5 story actually began before his first day.

While working at networking vendor 3Com in Munich, he was introduced to F5 technology through a partnership designed to run F5 BIG-IP software on a 3Com CoreBuilder switch. The project itself never materialized, but Truls and several of his colleagues saw enormous potential in the emerging market for Internet traffic and content management. Following a major restructuring at 3Com, they decided to join F5.

His first day was August 1, 2000, and fittingly, it began with an international adventure. Truls traveled to Seattle for new-hire training, the first session to include attendees from outside the United States. With no corporate travel agency yet in place, F5’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Director personally booked the flights, sending the group across five different airlines to get there.

Back in Europe, Truls quickly got to work. His first project was turning F5’s EMEA price list from a Word document into an Excel spreadsheet and creating a new discount structure.

F5’s corporate division adopted it soon after. More than two decades later, the model still serves as a foundation for F5’s partner pricing and discount structure.

It was an early lesson in something Truls would experience repeatedly throughout his career: at F5, a good idea can have an impact, regardless of where it comes from.

The freedom to shape your own career

A few months into his new role, Truls experienced another moment that showed him F5 was different. He had been hired with the title “Channel Liaison Manager.” The only problem? Even he wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. So, he asked the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Director if he could change it to “Product Marketing Manager.”

“Sure, go ahead,” was the response.

That flexibility became even more meaningful in 2005, when Truls and his family decided to move from Munich back to Norway. He assumed the relocation would mean leaving F5. He didn’t have to. Truls became a remote employee and has worked from Norway ever since, continuing in international, EMEA-wide roles.

Technology changes. The foundation stays.

Over 26 years, Truls has watched F5 navigate enormous shifts in technology, from the early days of the commercial Internet to cloud, multicloud, application security, and now AI.

But looking through presentations and documents from more than 20 years ago, he is often struck by what hasn’t changed.

BIG-IP was already a foundational technology. F5 was already solving complex challenges around how applications were delivered, managed, and protected. Even an early 2001 tagline, “Intelligent Building Blocks for a Smarter Web,” feels surprisingly familiar today.

Technology has evolved dramatically, but the focus on solving tough customer problems has remained the same.

One customer moment Truls still remembers happened at Interop Las Vegas ahead of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) needed to rapidly scale its network capacity to prepare for the massive increase in demand.

F5 had recently introduced VIPRION, its first chassis-based application delivery controller. After Truls helped arrange a briefing with F5 Product Management and walked the show floor with the NRK team, the customer made its decision.

NRK became the first VIPRION customer in EMEA.

For Truls, moments like that illustrate what has made being part of F5’s growth so rewarding.

“I take pride in having helped scale F5 from a $100 million business to a $3 billion industry leader,” Truls says. “Over the years, that meant driving countless launches, product guides, newsletters, campaigns, webinars, presentations, briefings, roadshows, and events.”

A career built across borders

Ask Truls about his favorite F5 memories, and many of them involve the people he has met along the way.

His career has taken him from customer visits in Japan to F5 summits in Singapore, Jakarta, and Edinburgh, global marketing meetings in the U.S., and countless annual sales conferences.

Those experiences built relationships that stretched far beyond individual projects.

One close colleague, Keiichiro Nozaki, even stopped in Oslo on his way from Tokyo to an F5 event in Edinburgh so the two could celebrate Norwegian Constitution Day. For years, they also made annual trips to Seattle and San Jose together to meet with product and marketing teams.

That global collaboration remains one of the things Truls values most about F5 today.

“Our EMEA Marketing team is deeply diverse, spanning regions, cultures, and languages,” Truls says. “Learning from each other daily is what drives our success, from Norway to South Africa, from Ireland to the Emirates.”

And through it all, his family has been part of the journey.

His daughter, Maren, who once told her dad he couldn’t leave F5, practically grew up alongside the company. Earlier this year, she joined him at the Platinum Club celebration in Hawaii.

For Truls, it was a full-circle moment more than two decades in the making.

Still shaping what comes next

After more than 26 years, Truls has seen F5 grow from a startup into a global technology leader. He has watched new technologies emerge, markets transform, acquisitions bring new talent and capabilities into the company, and F5 continually reinvent itself.

Today, AI represents another major shift. “With the rise of AI, we are entering an unprecedented technological shift where F5 will play a critical role in securing and delivering high-performance applications and data,” Truls says. “As someone with both an engineering and marketing mindset, contributing to this next chapter is an opportunity I wouldn’t trade for anything.”

Despite everything that has changed since August 2000, the qualities that have kept Truls at F5 sound remarkably similar to the ones he discovered in his first few months: trust, flexibility, collaboration, independence, and the ability for anyone to make an impact.

“At F5, you don’t need a VP or Director title to drive meaningful change,” he says. ‘We are all empowered to act as mentors, take initiative, and shape the business.”

So, what advice does someone with more than a quarter-century at F5 have for a new F5er? “Be prepared to stay far longer than you planned. Working at F5 is truly the gift that keeps on giving.”

And if Truls could go back to August 1, 2000, and tell his younger self just one thing? “You just made the single best career decision of your life.”

Every F5er has a unique story to tell. Dive into our past "F5ers behind our 30 years" blogs, featuring Jack Wang and Laura Hendrickson.

Interested in working at F5? Explore open roles today.

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