F5 Bets on Culture, Hiring Wayfair's People Chief

Winning the security race, F5 has decided, is as much about who you hire as what you build.

The Seattle company, a Nasdaq-listed leader in delivering and securing apps and APIs, has named Cathy Peterman as EVP and Chief People Officer, poaching her from Wayfair, where she ran people strategy for the retailer's technology arm and led an AI overhaul across its 11,000 staff.

She reports straight to Chairman, President and CEO François Locoh-Donou, which tells you where talent now sits in F5's thinking.

Culture as a competitive weapon

F5 is deepening its push into cybersecurity, from a new security platform to a partnership with data-centre operator Equinix on AI guardrails, in a market it contests with Palo Alto Networks and Cloudflare.

Cathy will own the global people strategy, from talent development to organisational design to culture, for a workforce of roughly 7,500 the company wants moving faster than its rivals. 

François framed the appointment as a cultural hire, not an administrative box to tick.

"Cathy brings a rare combination of strategic depth and genuine humanity that will raise the bar for how we invest in our people," he writes in a company statement. "She and I share a reverence for culture and its impact on driving sustained results."

An Amazon and Wayfair CV

Cathy spent two decades scaling complex technology organisations, most recently as Chief People Officer for Wayfair's technology group, where she drove talent development for its global staff.

Before Wayfair came six years at Amazon, running talent strategy across the company's advertising, devices, Prime Video and physical-stores businesses, which between them employed more than 40,000 people.

Her specialism, in F5's telling, is using AI to make an organisation leaner without losing the human side of it.

Cathy holds degrees from Villanova and the University of Denver. She will be based at F5's Seattle headquarters.

Talent as core strategy, not overhead

For Cathy, the draw was a company that does not file HR under overhead.

"From my very first conversations, I recognised a company that treats talent and culture as a core strategy rather than a support function," she says in a statement, praising a "mature technology company that has continually evolved while maintaining a fierce commitment to putting people first".

F5 is pushing into higher-margin software and recurring revenue while chasing the same scarce AI and security engineers as Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and everyone else. Investors have liked the story so far, with the shares up 64% this year to around US$421 and more than 180% over three years.

The company needs to win and keep the engineers it is fighting for, hold its critical teams together through the change and give people a louder voice on earnings calls than they have had before.

Getting hiring, pay and organisational design to pull with the product roadmap rather than against it is now Cathy's job. F5 is betting more than it usually would that she gets it right.