Fastly, Inc. Class A Common Stock Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Well, thank you for remembering my 13 months. It has been a whirlwind. It's been a lot of fun. For those of you who don't know Fastly, I can just start with a real quick introduction on what Fastly is and what we do. We are an edge cloud provider. We break our revenues down into three main revenue lines where we do delivery services, which is really accelerating the internet. Really, we have 166 points of presence around the world that helps cache and speed up data flow throughout the world. We also have a security business. Our security business is multi-product, and security really is making sure that as we deliver the traffic around the world, we secure it. We make it very safe for users. We have a Web Application Firewall. We have a DDoS product. We also do bot management.

We have a number of security products that support that. Then we have an other business, which is kind of our growing business, and that consists of a lot of observability and compute. As the world transitions and the internet transitions, this is becoming a bigger portion of our business. I joined 13 months ago because I believe that the internet infrastructure business is really changing rapidly, and I just think that Fastly is very well-positioned. We are kind of a technical powerhouse here. Our products are faster, better, more programmable, and easier to use. I would say over the last 13 months since I've joined, we've really hit a reset on the business, a lot of transformation. We've accelerated revenue growth. In our most recent quarter, we had $183 million of revenues, growing that 23.3% year over year.

All three lines of businesses are growing pretty fast. We have our delivery business growing 17%, we have our security business growing 43%, and we have our other business growing 69% year-on-year. We've also done a really good job managing the business from a financial profile perspective. We hit record gross margins. Our gross margins are 65.8% in the most recent quarter. We've had four quarters consecutively of profitability, with the most recent quarter about 15% operating margins. We've also had six consecutive quarters of free cash flow positivity. We've really shifted the business from a growth rate perspective, we've shifted it from a gross margin perspective, and we've also hit profitability and free cash flow positive. A lot of trajectory. I think, you asked me, what kind of impact have I made on the business in those 13 months?

I would say it's been a very fun job because you get to wear the CFO hat, and as a CFO, you get to get involved in all aspects of the business. Really getting involved with the sales organization, helping them think about how to structure deals. We have a lot of the biggest customers that you know, and getting involved in deal desk, deal pricing, deal strategy is a lot of fun. Working with our product engineering organizations, thinking about product strategy and direction, that's a lot of fun. I think just building the robustness around how do we partner with the business and how do we enable the business to move faster. But at the same time, making sure that the resources that we deploy have the right capital ROI.

Great question. I would say that for me, partnering with the business has been one of the most fun parts of the job. Really like getting in there, working with the leaders, and that really helps a lot when you start doing guidance and expectations, right? The closer you are to the business and the closer you are to the deals, you have a better sense of what's happening in the business. I think that the most important thing when you actually do guidance is actually how strongly and how much do you feel that you're going to hit the numbers that you say you're going to hit. I think that always starts with partnering with the business to really understand that.

I would say that we are a consumption-based business on the delivery services side, and so it's always hard to predict where consumption's going to be and where internet trends are going to be. But you do a lot of modeling from multiple angles, right? You'll do tops down, bottoms up. We do a lot of customer-by-customer modeling, looking at specific deals. The more comfortable you are with that, the better you can be with your guidance. From a philosophy perspective, I like to make sure that I feel confident with my forecast. I give a number where it's closest to the pin, but there's some upside potential because you want to make sure that you have a number that you feel really good about. I think forecasting and guidance always starts with the best forecast possible.

I would say that we've also built a very strong discipline around even OPEX management and headcount management. I think that partnering with the business, you have to really be in there and understand what heads are coming in and how it translates into operating income. Yes, we have had a number of management changes. Part of the reason why I joined was because of the management changes. I joined 13 months ago. Kip was our new CEO. He was actually running chief product officer before that at Fastly, and I just felt like he and I were very aligned with the way we want to run the business and the way we think about things. We had Scott Lovett, who joined two and a half, three years ago now, as our chief revenue officer, and now he's president go-to-market, and he's been amazing.

Working with a really good sales leader who is very experienced, who knows this space and also knows security very well. That was a really good piece of it. We promoted internally Kip's replacement, who's our new chief product officer, Kelly Shortridge, and we also internally promoted our head of engineering with Hossein. So we've had a number of management changes. Some are internal, some are external. But I just think that the rapport that we have and the way we work together has just been amazing.