Fastly, Inc. Class A Common Stock Technology Leadership Forum 2026

Sure. Rich Wong here, the Chief Financial Officer at Fastly. I've been here for about a year, so this month is actually my one-year anniversary since joining Fastly. My background, this is my third time as a CFO. It's a great place to be, and I joined because I believe in the space we play in. For those who don't know us, we are an Edge Cloud company. Edge Cloud meaning that we basically provide edge services, which is around content delivery, security, and compute observability to our users, where we really partner with the central cloud and customers to speed up the internet and make it faster and more reliable and safe.

Hi, I'm Vern Essi. I run the IR practice at Fastly. My background, I started my career on the sell side, equity research analyst, very similar to Jackson here. Not as successful, but certainly.

Oh. You escaped. And went to the corporate side to run corp dev and IR functions across a couple of companies in the semiconductor industry for about a decade, maybe a little less, then joined Fastly about 5 years ago, and have seen it go through a lot of changes and certainly am excited about what's happened over the last 12 months as we've gotten, I think, a really good team in place and starting to see some good momentum around our fundamentals and our strategy.

Sure. And maybe I'll even step back a little bit. I chose to join Fastly because I believe in the product that we have and having the right edge products at the right time. There's a huge transition that's happening on the internet, and what's happening, and the need for an edge provider that has Fastly's capabilities, like we are known to have the better technology. So when you're looking for faster, safer, or more reliable internet, Fastly has the better product among our competitors. Having that better product is great, and then I think that when I think about the market share that we should be having versus what we do have, a lot of it was around execution. So what happened was when I got recruited, Kip Compton was our new CEO.

He had been around for about 18 months before that, where he was Chief Product Officer. Under his leadership, you see the breadth of products getting launched. When he joined, we had a single security product, which was our Web Application Firewall, our WAF, and by the time he got promoted to CEO, we had the full suite of security products. We went from one product to five key products, which kind of filled out the WAF portfolio.

Yeah. We did Signal Sciences acquisition in 2020, and it took us three, four years to really bring that onto our network.

What we do is we operate one network for all of our products. And once we were able to get the Signal Sciences acquisition, the WAF that we acquired into our products, into our network, we were able to leverage that and then build a DDoS product, a Bot Management product, an API Security product, a Client-Side Protection product. Just having that full suite enabled us to really be a true security player versus just a single security product. I was a believer in our new CEO, Kip Compton, who's now kind of been on board for three years. The last year as a CEO, two years prior as a Chief Product Officer. I was also very bullish with Scott Lovett.

Scott Lovett joined about, I want to say at the same time, mid-2024.

In mid-2024, he really elevated the go-to-market function. Our go-to-market function, because we only had one security product, was purely a CDN kind of sales organization. Didn't have a lot of experience selling security, didn't have a lot of experience around cross-selling. What Scott did was he really upleveled the team, brought in experienced sellers who knew how to sell security. Scott himself came from both. He had previously worked at Akamai, where he did content delivery, but he was at Imperva, where he did security sales. He really knew how to do the cross-selling and security. You see the kind of traction that he's done upleveling the team and bringing in the right leaders who knew how to do that. He changed comp plans. He just revamped the whole organization.

If you look at what he did, when he joined, all of 2024, we had a sales and marketing expense. When he ended 2025, he had a smaller sales and marketing expense, but he delivered incrementally $80 million-$90 million more of revenue on a year-over-year basis. Very impressive to have a go-to-market leader who I truly believed in. For me, looking at that transformation that he's done, and the leadership team that Kip has brought in as the leaders, I was just very bullish and just believed in that leadership evolution.