THE SUMMER OF 1998 marked the splintering of Akamai’s 50K team. There was no questioning the fact they had a great idea expressed in some beautiful theorems, but you can’t sell theorems. Their business plan was flawed, their technology unproven and to date, they had not one line of code. A few of the initial advisors to the company lost interest, some lost faith. Others simply couldn’t stay in Cambridge and wait for something to happen. Preetish Nijhawan, who first inspired the idea of forming a company for the competition, parted ways for a plum job at McKinsey & Co. in his hometown of Houston, Texas. Of the core team, however, Lewin, Leighton, and Seelig held fast to the idea that Akamai could be realized. In an act of faith—one aimed at protecting themselves against potential competitors—Lewin and Leighton submitted a patent application for Akamai’s technology. They knew they couldn’t stop anyone else from finding a way to speed up the Internet, but hoped that by making the mind-bending math underlying the Akamai software proprietary, they could prevent competitors from offering a better solution than their own.”{29} Despite going their separate ways for the summer, they decided they would each forge ahead on their own: Lewin in New Jersey, Seelig in California, and Leighton in Massachusetts. Sometime around Labor Day weekend, they agreed, they would regroup in Cambridge and make what they knew would be a difficult decision: abandon Akamai or go full steam ahead.

That summer, Leighton’s day job in Cambridge was to supervise a group of a dozen undergraduate students on a research project sponsored by LCS called Hacker Haven.{‡} Leighton was given free rein with the students, so he decided to enlist them to try building a prototype of the Akamai technology. If it worked, Akamai would be able to prove the technology could function—at least in the confines of LCS. To motivate the young, industrious hackers, Leighton had what he considered to be a powerful force of inspiration: Star Trek. During the course of the 50K competition, the Akamai team connected with some representatives from Paramount Digital Entertainment, which owned the rights to the original Star Trek TV shows. With a plan in the works to eventually distribute all the old shows online, Paramount took great interest in Akamai’s proposed technology. To demonstrate their enthusiasm, company executives sent a gigantic box filled with Star Trek paraphernalia to Leighton’s office at LCS. He wisely used it as bait: “I passed out all these goodies and said, ‘Look, if you guys build a prototype that actually works, we’ll be able to distribute Star Trek TV shows.’” The result? “They went nuts. They worked around the clock.”

Seelig spent the summer in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a consulting firm as a paid intern on a project for a Cambridge-based company called Cascade. With a few months to form West Coast connections that would be critical to Akamai’s success, Seelig began meeting with everyone he knew and everyone in their collective Rolodexes. Friends. Family. Friends of family. And friends of friends. Gorenberg, the 50K judge at Hummer Winblad in San Francisco, was impressed enough by Akamai after the contest that he agreed to orchestrate some key meetings, most importantly with a worldwide data center company, Global Center, which Seelig would approach as a potential host for Akamai’s servers. Through investors at Sequoia Capital, Seelig was able to connect with someone at Yahoo, who offered hope of an eventual meeting with the company’s founder, David Filo. Seelig also sought advice on a business model, which remained undecided. Marco Greenberg also came through with some big name connections, including a few potential investors in the world of media and entertainment.

 At Bell Labs, Lewin enjoyed a more relaxed, predictable pace compared with the frenetic energy of his first few semesters at MIT. Built in the 1920s by AT&T, the lab’s campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey, (later razed in 2002) was rich with prodigious intellect. The internationally renowned lab was the birthplace of some of the most innovative scientific advances of the century—radar, satellites, and the wireless network. In his book The Idea Factory, author Jon Gertner describes the atmosphere of the labs as both magical and eccentric. Scientists would crisscross the campus on unicycles and occasionally set off explosions.{30}

Despite the fact that he was tasked with several research projects for the algorithms group, Lewin spent a lot of the summer having fun. He shared a dorm at University of New Brunswick with three friends from LCS, including Yevgeniy Dodis and Anna Lysyanskaya. Together with a select group of students from all over the world, they caught a shuttle bus every morning for the one-hour drive to Berkeley Heights. In the spare time he had—evenings, or weekends when he didn’t travel back to Cambridge—Lewin hung out with his roommates playing tennis, hiking, and canoeing down the Delaware River. “That summer, it was an incredible time,” recalled Dodis. “There were so many of us there from MIT, and it was one of the happiest times of my life.”

Even outside of MIT’s earnest atmosphere, Lewin and his roommates didn’t party. Every once and a while they’d enjoy a few beers, but most of their entertainment came from late nights challenging each other with math puzzles. In one e-mail, dated July 21, 1998, Lewin sent a joking reply to fellow interns when it was suggested that he was slacking off.

 

FROM: Lewin Daniel <danl@research.bell-labs.com>

I object to your insinuation that people do work here. If you are trying to subtly suggest that we are not trying to get work done, then I can save you the perturbation: WE ARE NOT TRYING TO GET WORK DONE!

—Danny

 

In fact, Lewin was working hard, focusing his research on problems related to Akamai. At the end of the summer, all interns at Bell Labs were required to present their work to the fellows and researchers. According to Dodis, these talks didn’t usually draw a big audience, but the day Lewin presented, people packed into the large room to hear about his work to speed up the Internet. “When we walked in, he was already the center of attention. People were bombarding him with questions, but he was very confident. In that moment I saw him as this super ambitious guy,” recalled Dodis.

By summer’s end, Leighton had a promising development for Akamai from LCS. The prototype constructed by his Hacker Haven students was a success. To simulate a global network of servers, the students used separate floors of the Tech Square building: Paris was the seventh floor, and London sat on the sixth. They spent most of the summer cranking out the code to program the servers. With a batch of machines in place, they set up the mock network and created a functioning prototype. The biggest victory was demonstrating, inside the walls of LCS, the system’s fault-tolerance: if they shut down one machine, the system would rebalance the data load and avert a crash. As the students increased the flow of traffic on the prototype, they were stunned to see it continued to run smoothly and efficiently. The more content they loaded into it, the better it performed, even under peak load.

The remaining critical question before Lewin, Leighton, and Seelig was their business model. How would they deliver this service? What would they charge? Even by midsummer, it was clear that no Internet Service Providers were willing to take a chance on Akamai. If they wanted to make the company work, they had only one choice: build the technology themselves. “We ran out of options,” explained Leighton. But a clear business plan was still eluding them. For help, they turned to Todd Dagres, a shrewd, Boston-based venture capitalist at Battery Ventures.

Dagres had been introduced to Akamai before the 50K by a colleague at Battery, Scott Tobin, when the company was still Cachet, and Lewin, Leighton, Seelig, and Nijhawan were seeking out the support of investors. Initially, Dagres admitted he wasn’t that impressed. “I remember thinking that they didn’t really look like much,” said Dagres. “Tom was nice and older and scholarly, and Danny—well, he did not look at all like a genius. He looked like a big kid, stocky but not overly imposing. They were academics and kind of nerdy.” But the more Dagres got to know them, the more he grew to respect them. “These guys were very smart and if they didn’t know something they would find someone who did,” he concluded. What Dagres knew well, with his eyes on the trends in the high-tech sector, was how to take a great idea and turn it into a living, breathing business.

Favoring designer denim over finely tailored suits, and with a closely shaved head and athletic physique, Dagres looked more like a rock star than a financier. At Montgomery Securities and Solomon Smith Barney, Dagres had made millions as a technology analyst covering communications and the Internet, still in its infancy, later taking a job with Battery Ventures in 1994. Over time, he began to convince Lewin, Leighton, and Seelig that building and selling software wasn’t going to work. Instead, Dagres was convinced they should offer a service on their own. “I thought they had something special and something they could use to build a recurring business,” said Dagres. To him, the company’s real powerhouse could be found in its algorithms—they were proprietary and so sophisticated they would be almost impossible for any competitor to replicate. “Instead of giving other guys the software or Akamai’s ‘secret sauce’ and letting them skim the cream off the market, I thought Akamai should be the cream by building an annuity business with a big margin on this unique software,” Dagres explained.

This made perfect sense, but it was a daunting proposition. It required capital, and lots of it, to build out a global infrastructure and buy and program all the servers. Installing Akamai servers in data centers around the world would cost hundreds of millions. But the most daunting aspect of the service model was not the cost; it was the customer expectations. To service these Web content companies, Akamai would have to provide service 24/7, 365 days a year. And it would have to do so with nearly 100 percent reliability.

Labor Day came quickly. And before they knew it, Leighton, Lewin, and Seelig were back at LCS with the decision before them. They each brought with them good news. Leighton had a functioning prototype. Lewin had fine-tuned the business plan. And Seelig had secured the support—both tentative and firm—of potential partners including data centers, content providers and hosting companies. “I spent a lot of time asking: ‘If we can prove to you that your site will not crash and people all over the world will have a better experience, then would you be a customer?’” Seelig recalled. “In a sense we had to promise stuff that wasn’t quite there yet—we were selling a vision and the challenge was that we needed both constituents—the content providers and the data centers—to nibble to make it work. It was like tap dancing.”

The decision to go forward did not come easily. As Seelig put it, “I remember feeling like we’d proven enough that we could succeed; we vetted the technology and the market and had what I thought was a real prospect for success. But at the same time, I had no illusions that a prototype on the fifth floor of MIT’s lab for computer science would guarantee it.”

Then there was the competition already beginning to creep into the market. While no one was doing exactly what Akamai proposed, a handful of companies were pushing services that were similar enough to pose a threat. One of them was Adero, Inc., formed by David Crosbie, Akamai’s ill-fated presenter at the 50K. Adero’s business plan, which offered “infrastructure services” to content providers, was disconcertingly similar to Akamai’s.

Logistically, the decision to start the business was easiest for Seelig; he could move back to his Cambridge apartment whereupon his parents would loan him some funds as a stopgap until Akamai could pay him a salary. For Lewin, however, the decision was weighty. For as much as he believed in Akamai, he also knew he had a lot to lose if it didn’t succeed. He would have to continue taking at least one course to remain in MIT housing with Anne and the boys, but he’d lose his stipend, his only earnings. He’d also have to put his PhD candidacy on hold. Leighton knew that could be a perilous move for a student like Lewin, who was on the fast track towards a professorship. “He had a lot of doubts,” said Leighton. “Once he committed to something he would plow forward, but this was not an obvious decision, and he agonized over it.” It wasn’t a totally effortless choice for Leighton, either. He was content where he was, with a steady income and job. But he had never taken a sabbatical. So maybe, he thought, it was time to take a chance.

In September 1998, Lewin and Leighton moved out of their offices at MIT and into a rented space at One Kendall Square, just down the block from LCS. Akamai Technologies was officially co-founded by Lewin and Leighton, Seelig and Randall Kaplan, the California businessman. Leighton still recalled an afternoon that fall when he and Lewin were walking from LCS to their new office at One Kendall. Lewin used the occasion for an impromptu pep talk, offering up all the reasons he believed Akamai would succeed. He told Leighton that it wasn’t just their great technology, smart staff, or exemplary business plan that would guarantee success. “He said we had all those things, of course, but that wasn’t why we were going to succeed,” said Leighton. Instead, Lewin told him, “We’re going to succeed because we’re tenacious as hell.”

Despite Lewin’s bravado, he and Leighton felt some ambivalence. It didn’t take rigorous math to understand that the odds were against them. According to the rule of venture capital, only one out of every sixty new businesses succeeds. “It was scary,” recalled Leighton. “Danny was worried about it, and I was worried for him.”

But in 1998, if you didn’t move fast, you’d miss the moment. You’d be just another smart entrepreneur with a great idea left standing in the wake of the dot-com boom. Lewin charged forward at full speed.