#fastly

Weird Old Book Finder - clive

A story of Sea Limited, Invitae, and Fastly

Ask an athlete how they got where they are now, and you’ll get a very generic “hard work and determination” response. This is not a bad thing, because the answer is someone’s life story. Each athlete got where they were in a unique way and each athlete’s way there was not better or worse than others… Many roads lead to the same place.

So, when I get asked about my approach to growth investing (not an expert < 1 year), I typically give a generic response. Usually not to hide any secrets, but because no one truly wants to see what goes into that. They usually just want a, “I look at blank and blank and invest in it until blank or….”, so I provide that and move on.

But if I am wrong, here’s three examples that illustrate my approach….

My new year’s resolution was to truly grab a path to financial freedom. I kicked around many ideas to make this a reality but settles on the stock market. So, I kept my 401(k) on autopilot and completely forgot about it. I wanted to open a brokerage account that could beat that retirement plan and eventually get to $1,000,00.00 before I retire from the military in 10 years. Bold plan, but I worked on mapping everything out… calculators, formulas, investment approaches, books, YouTube, etc. I was so certain this was possible, but I needed to budget heavily and make sure I could stick to my funding goals.

At the beginning of the year, I thought that focusing on dividend paying stocks would be solid. I would just use those quarterly dividends to buy more shares and over time those dividends would be larger and larger and at 4% average dividends per year, you would passively make $40k a year once a million is hit. I certainly could live with that, so I stacked the top performing dividend yielding stocks. It was a fine approach and once I get to that point dividend investing would be great. I learned quickly that dividend investing keeps you rich, while growth investing makes you rich (yes, debatable… blah blah).

The third week of January I sold every stock I had purchased, which was fine because it was essentially a break even and I would expect partial dividends at the end of the quarter. Now I was on the search to find the next Apple, Google, and Amazon, before anyone else.

January 16, 2020 – Fastly (FSLY) - 24.17 a share

In my search of the next big thing, I wanted to focus on the fastest growth stories I could find. I wanted a strictly technology company that was going to change the world. What I found was… Well, a shit ton of those companies. Like really… It was too simple… I thought I was missing something.  With limited money though, I also needed a way to really focus on choosing the best of these companies. I needed rules to follow, to multiply my money, the quickest way possible. It was in this moment I knew that I made the right choice and though this wasn’t going to be a get rich quick scheme, it certainly could be a get rich quicker plan.

My January “Matt’s Investing Rules” I created during many lunch hours in our conference room at work:

1. Relatively newer SaaS companies that focused on growth over earnings.

I wanted companies that focused on subscription-based customers. I wanted all money from these companies going into growing the company, instead of sitting on cash. I don’t care if a company is profitable if this is the reason.

2.  I wanted a small market cap company.

I like to look at every company as potentially growing ten times. If I can find a great company at $1 Billion market cap, I can assume that getting to $10B would be more likely than investing in Apple and thinking it will get to become 20 Trillion-dollar company. I felt Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft was too easy. They are all amazing and will keep growing and making you money, but I wanted to get the next wave of companies.

3. I simply had to believe in a future with them being important.

This is probably the most important and the reason I developed so many great skills in researching companies. It forced me to watch hours upon hours of videos and presentations of companies (granted 1.5x speed settings) I was interested in. I learned as much as I could about the company and the people in charge of it, for I really liked investing in companies that are founder led. Skin in the game was appealing to me.

With these rules set in place, on January 16th, I found Fastly, Datadog, Zoom, Livongo Health, and Crowdstrike. These have all multiplied many times since then, but I don’t think that’s going to stop anytime soon. With that said, Fastly was the first company that I truly felt connected to… you know, in a weird investing way.

I found these companies, specifically Fastly, by searching for most recent IPOs (Initial Public Offering) and searching for companies that met my three basic rules. Focusing on Fastly alone—

Fastly appeared to me as a gem. A golden ticket, winning lottery number, and a double rainbow all rolled into one stock symbol: FSLY.

I knew little about what the hell they did, besides them being a less than $2 Billion dollar SaaS company, that made the internet run faster. Therefore, rule number three was crucial in developing a bond with each company I invested in. I went to The Motley Fool to read their free articles. Investopedia, Seeking Alpha, and so many other sites. I wanted to know more about this company, but it really seemed like no one really knew what they did. I remember getting exciting and losing sleep, thinking I was some genius and all I wanted was to learn more. I didn’t want to think I was seeing something people were missing to later find out I was the one missing something and lose all my money.

To learn more, I took a very interesting approach. Kidding. I just went their webpage, YouTube account, and Twitter. And out of these three, YouTube was all I needed to validate my belief in this company. Their founder and at the time CEO, Artur Berman was unlike any CEO I’ve ever seen before. Take the time and watch this sub 4-minute video of him years ago talking about how SSDs are important…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7PJ1oeEyGg

He did not come across as someone who wanted to just grow rich from owning a mediocre company.  PowerPoint slides littered with swearing and a total lack of professionalism. He certainly didn’t fit the CEO mold either when it came to looks. He reminded me (still does) of Jobs and Woz combined as one person. I was sold already, foolishly, but I wanted more so I searched all videos featuring the company and Artur.

Artur Bergman IPO Day CNBC on Cloud Computing and Competition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M57NtJeDKLU

Why Fastly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0wbl9GlG-E

Obviously, I watched at least 10 more hours of videos from conferences and use cases of their company, but this is just laying out my process--

I could not see how a company that seemed so authentic was so undervalued, though, I had no idea at the time how to value a company. I just knew at the time Snapchat was considered a $13B company and Fastly basically made everything run faster. I felt the use case of Fastly, though underappreciated, was worth far more than the sub $2B market valuation.

I invested in this, along with those other gems found on the 16th of January. Over time, Fastly hardly moved, it was not performing at all. I was expecting quick money and grew frustrated with Fastly. I had seen the likes of Crowdstrike and Zoom grow in share price and for a brief period in time thought I was going to just sell Fastly and put all the money into Zoom at like 75 dollars a share (now obviously above $408 a share now lol). I decided against selling my shares and focused on the long-term goal. What I thought this company could be was still possible. Everything was going according to plan, aside from the price skyrocketing. Fastly taught me patience.- 

February 27th, I told a close friend that Fastly would essentially make him rich… then the stock market collapsed.

March happened and for some reason the crash made Fastly’s stock price collapse. I remember one day it was at or close to $8 dollars a share. Clearly, I was not going to sell the shares at this much of a loss. Instead, I doubled downed. This company had enough cash on hand to make it through a year of expenses. They were a SaaS company so most of their customers had already paid for the year in January. I kept thinking, more like reassuring myself, that Fastly should benefit from work at home. The more people had to rely on the internet, the more Fastly profits. So, at $11 a share, or more than a 50% discount, I purchased 50 more shares. Now I just needed to wait…During the year, Artur Bergman stepped aside from being the CEO of Fastly. He remains with the company but stepped down to focus on the technology and growing the best company. He made the CFO the CEO and it worked out as planned.

Fastly hit $116 dollars a share in August, which made it, at that time, my fist 10x stock. It now sits are $82 dollars a share, which I can live with.

“27 year old man with very fastly deteriorating vision”

保護 TLS 的 Hostname

看到「Encrypted Server Name Indication for TLS 1.3」這個，由 Fastly、Cloudflare、Apple 的人聯手推出的 draft，想要保護 TLS 連線一開始明文傳輸的 hostname 部分。看起來是透過 DNS 發佈 public key，然後使用者用這把 public key 保護 hostname 的部分…

而 DNS 的部分可以透過 DNS over TLS 或是 DNS over HTTPS 來保護，這樣讓 ISP 沒有任何資訊可以看到 hostname，把暴露的資訊再降低…

來繼續關注這個技術…

MANILA, PHILIPPINES – April 16, 2026 – VSTECS Phils., Inc., the country’s leading ICT distributor, today announced its official appointment as the Philippine country distributor for Fastly, Inc. (NASDAQ: FSLY). This partnership serves to transform how local enterprises handle digital traffic by reducing latency, improving reliability, and responding to sophisticated cyber threats in real…