Jamila Conley ensures a smooth transition for companies acquired by F5

Jamila Conley knows the importance of culture.

Conley, vice president at F5 Networks’ business transformation office, has a resume that boasts some of the biggest names in the Seattle area, including T-Mobile, Amazon and Moss Adams. Having spent the past nine-plus years at Seattle-based F5, a publicly traded app security and delivery company, Conley is now charged with making sure companies F5 acquires are connected with its new parent.

“As we were moving through a lot of our acquisitions, we were finding that we still have a gap in how do we truly connect a lot of the processes,” Conley said. “So my charter extended to help pull those pieces together and bring teams together and start thinking about what can our transformation look like.”

The role has been a busy one. F5 acquired Boston-based cloud security company Threat Stack for $68 million cash in October. Roughly 100 employees from Threat Stack joined F5 through the acquisition. In January, F5 acquired California-based cloud company Volterra for $500 million. In 2019, F5 acquired Nginx, an open-source web server company based in San Francisco, for about $670 million.

With Volterra, Conley said F5 aimed to become a leader in the software and edge security spaces. Edge computing, designed to improve latency and help with bandwidth issues, moves data storage closer to end users rather than using a centralized cloud. The acquisition helped F5 gain key talent and get ahead of an emerging market, according to Conley.

Threat Stack, meanwhile, advances F5’s efforts in the cloud security space. Conley said Threat Stack now sits within F5’s security product group.

Companies that acquire multiple startups, however, face challenges as they add new technologies and team members. According to Michael Kauffman, principal and chief legal officer at Seattle-based tech due diligence and software assessment firm Tech DNA, large acquiring companies adopt a sort of “polyglot” existence where they must adapt to multiple types of code in their tech stacks.

“It’s just not worth rewriting everything you buy into your own code base,” Kauffman said. “The cost of what we would call ‘boiling the ocean’ by rewriting everything is enormous, so you simply have to learn to live with a polyglot existence.”

Tech DNA, which was founded in 2009, performs due diligence to make sure a company’s technology actually does what the company says it does. Kauffman added that there are challenges around cultural fits with acquisitions. Some employees at an acquired startup, for example, might have chosen to work at a smaller company because they didn’t want all the red tape of working for a larger corporation.

Conley said making sure an acquired company is both a technological and cultural fit is a priority for any deal at F5. The company is deliberate when it comes to what product group an acquired company will join. According to Conley, F5 also spends time before the deal even closes to understand an acquired company’s culture and figure out the best way to onboard the team with minimal disruption. F5 even makes it a point to connect new talent with existing company employees to help team members learn from one another.

“Aligning cultures is never easy, but the nice thing about F5 and something that (CEO François Locoh-Donou) always reinforces is that we are a human-first company,” Conley said. “We don’t let our performance metrics or our performance targets outweigh what it means to be a human-first company.”

Conley has a background in accounting and an MBA in management information systems. She spent about three years at the Seattle-based accounting and consulting firm Moss Adams, where she did IT consulting. After Moss Adams, she spent about five years at T-Mobile, where she worked in IT managing business projects and served as a liaison between technology and business. When she landed at F5 and started developing new processes, she was expecting to have to argue her case to fellow employees.

“But I was surprised. I would have conversations, and people were more like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is awesome. We’re so glad someone is here who can help us. We haven’t had this before,’” Conley said.

About Jamila Conley