EVERYONE AT AKAMAI knew that if they had one shot in life, they were looking right at it. If they stayed in the game, kept up the pace and trounced the competition, they could become the next dot-com dream. And they could become rich—absurdly rich. The speculative bubble was still on the rise, fueled by a steady influx of Internet IPOs with no revenue or profits and market values in the millions. Amazon.com, the Internet bookseller, had not reported a profitable quarter since its IPO in May 1997, but in the first week of trading in the new year, its share price soared by nearly fifty percent.{38}

On Wall Street, common sense had given way to irrational exuberance. In the first four months of 1999, the Dow Jones Internet Composite Index doubled. Dot-com stocks offered the fastest road to prosperity, and in their zeal to capitalize on them, investors took the typical three-year trajectory from business plan to incorporation and cut it as short as the markets would allow. In Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era, journalist John Cassidy wrote: “What started out as a novelty for computer science major and Silicon Valley mavericks was now a staple of the MBA curriculum. The University of Michigan Business School started a course, ‘From Idea to IPO in 14 weeks,’ in which students developed their own start-up proposals, and a venture capital firm paid twelve thousand dollars to sit in on the class.”{39}

Although they’d spent the better part of two years building Akamai, Leighton and Lewin still harbored similar, long-term life plans of a quiet, cerebral career in academia. Suddenly, though, they were at the helm of a breakout company moving at a breakneck pace. And both of them, despite the confidence they exuded, were in over their heads. “It’s kind of like when a lobster gets boiled,” explained Leighton. “You don’t realize what’s happening to you. You don’t look in from the outside and think, ‘Oh, my life has really changed.’ I was too immersed and drawn in by the task at hand.”

Lewin told The Jerusalem Report, “It’s frightening. I have this company of one hundred ten people, headed by one of the biggest businessmen around with lots of money in the bank, and I’m just a graduate student.”

For the professor and the student, it was a swift, unlikely journey from ivory tower obscurity to breakout star of the boom. But Leighton and Lewin were in it together, and the experience only cemented a friendship that began with an awe-struck student in pursuit of a preeminent professor. They were not just business partners; they were best friends.

Leighton’s wife, Bonnie Berger, recalled: “I remember Danny bringing a sparkle to Tom’s eyes. Danny brought out the best in everyone he touched.” Berger recalled her amazement when, on a trip with Danny, Anne and their sons to her mother’s home in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, the first thing Lewin did when they arrived was to borrow a motorbike from the garage and set off at top speed up a nearby mountain with no charted pathways. More than an hour later Lewin returned, brimming with enthusiasm despite the fact that he’d encountered an allergen that caused his face and hands to swell up and red blotches to appear on his skin. “It was so much like Danny to start a vacation by getting on this bike and riding off,” Berger said. “He was not going to come in the house and just sit there, no way. He had to charge away and see the terrain.”

Lewin and Leighton shared a desk at the office and spent more time together than they did apart. Despite their shared apprehension, many business skills came to both of them naturally, but in very different ways. Leighton was a quiet force, but always one to be reckoned with. Colleagues still say that, underneath his professorial airs and reserved nature, Leighton is a fiercely competitive spirit. Todd Dagres of Battery Ventures said Leighton’s greatest asset was, and still is, his brain. “He was always the smartest guy in the room,” remarked Dagres. “He and Danny were such a good compliment to each other because Tom was much more level-headed and less emotional. He was just as passionate and driven as Danny, but he was there to calm him down when he’d get all worked up about something.”

From the start, George Conrades, who first met Leighton and Lewin when he worked at Battery Ventures, noticed Leighton’s mathematical mind working in ways few people could understand—except maybe Lewin. “Business was foreign to him, but he got really good at [it] quickly because he used that prodigious intellect,” Conrades said. “He could keep the firm’s balance sheet in his head like an algorithm. If one change was made he’d say, ‘That’s going to cost you two cents a share,’ while it would take anyone else two weeks at their computers to figure it out.”

Lewin quickly assumed the role of Akamai’s rallying force: the indomitable, often fanatical chief technologist who approached his leadership with the intensity and determination of an army captain. Unable to contain his physical prowess, even in an office setting, Lewin rarely sat still. When he became excited or upset, he strode boldly up and down the rows of cubicles, swinging his large arms and reaching out at employees to tap them on the head, offer up a high-five, or encircle them in a hug. Sometimes his antics were sophomoric; he played office pranks, like tossing pieces of candy at people across the boardroom table and duct-taping a colleague to his desk chair. When he was mad, everyone knew. Not because he was mean, but because he so often put on theatrical displays of anger like slamming his head against the wall, putting someone in a head lock, or shouting out an exaggerated threat to the competition (a favorite was “We’ll rip their hearts out!”).

Beneath the histrionics, however, Lewin also possessed business savvy. Much of it came from his experience in the Israeli army, a place where he learned to function well as part of a team under even the most trying circumstances. “We all knew that when Danny [laid] down a certain direction, we were supposed to follow it, even if the timeline was incredibly short or challenging,” said Jeff Young, director of corporate communications for Akamai. “You wanted to get it done. You’d think about how much work it was going to be, but then you’d think about the fact that Danny hadn’t slept in three days and figure, if he hasn’t slept, the least I can do is work harder…You just had this feeling that, if you could just follow this guy, you were going to be set.”

Lewin was also candid about the fact that he still had a lot to learn. “He had the wisdom to know that he didn’t know everything,” said Laura Malo, longtime executive assistant at Akamai and the company’s third female employee. “As the business grew, rapidly, there was a lot of interaction with big CEOs of companies and Danny would have to meet with these people, so he learned over time to sort of calm down and listen to them and sort of wait for a response before really making his point.” Malo added: “But then, when he would come [out] of the meetings, he’d whisper something like, ‘We’re gonna kill ’em!’”

With the same energy he used to push the soldiers in his unit to scale a cliff or walk twenty-four hours through the desert, Lewin pushed the employees at Akamai. One of his favorite phrases, which he bellowed out to almost everyone in the office, was “You’re behind!” To anyone who knew Lewin, it was not an admonition. Instead, it was his way of reminding people of their potential. It also had the added benefit of keeping people in the office at all hours, every day of the week. No one at Akamai wanted to be behind—not even one step.

Lewin’s rowdy leadership style did, however, meet with some resistance. With his fervor and frankness, Lewin was entirely capable of offending people. Sef Kloninger, an engineer who joined Akamai before its official launch, described a standoff with Lewin, who ordered Kloninger to rush a project, no matter how “architecturally ugly” the result would be. “I did not want to do the ugly thing,” said Kloninger, “He forced me to do it; he basically said shut up and do it—he pissed me off a bit.” But Kloninger didn’t stay mad. The system ended up running well for a decade, and Kloninger took away a valuable lesson: “Sometimes you just need to get things done, even if they’re not pretty.”

Kloninger said that if there was one thing Lewin lacked, it was the ability to humor people he didn’t deem worthy of his time. “There were some people on my development team who felt like he didn’t want to be bothered with them and that he talked over or around them,” he explained. “He didn’t suffer fools. In that sense, he was not always the best manager.” Kloninger noted that he quickly grew habituated to Lewin returning from a business trip and charging up to Kloninger and his team with vigor: “He’d say, ‘We need to do this, and we need to do it by tomorrow.’” Kloninger added, “I didn’t like Danny at the time, because he’d often just order us to stop what we were doing and do something else. If you protested, he’d say we needed to do what was best for the company.”

Kloninger said Lewin was also notorious for making promises to deliver services to customers that Akamai had not yet built. “He’d put a customer on hold and yell out, ‘Can we do this by Thursday?’ But before anyone even answered he’d say, ‘Yes, we can do it by Thursday.’ It was tough, but we ended up getting most of what he promised done.” In part, this was an Israeli trait: “When you ask an Israeli if they can do something, they never hesitate and say, ‘Um, I don’t know how’ or “I can’t,’” said Marco Greenberg. “Israelis just say they can and figure it out.” 

 

For most employees, the around-the-clock commitment to the company came easily. In addition to the looming prospect of an IPO, the atmosphere in the office was often exhilarating. Every day seemed to mark another milestone. Most of Akamai’s employees spent more time at 201 Broadway than they did at home, staying until all hours of the night and returning early the next morning juiced up on coffee and the adrenaline of being at the center of the boom. “All of these amazing things were happening and you wanted to be there,” said John Sconyers. “You never knew what would happen, but you knew if you weren’t there you might miss it.”

The heart of Akamai’s headquarters was, and still is, the Network Operations Command Center, known internally as the NOCC. The NOCC still looks like something out of NASA command—a dimly lit room filled with banks of flickering computers. Larger screens line its walls, displaying what appear to be impressive numbers like “1,507,193 hits per second.” From the NOCC, Akamai boasts a bird’s-eye view of global Internet traffic; at the time, it was a perspective no one else in the world could boast. In that one room, the company has the capacity, using data from its global network, to gather information about congestion before most ISPs even know traffic is mounting. The center of the NOCC is a digitally rendered image of a spinning globe, which twinkles with thousands of tiny lights resembling stars, each one representing a city where Akamai has servers in one or more locations.

Outside the NOCC, Akamai’s home at 201 Broadway was nondescript—clusters of cubicles and offices—but it had all the trappings of the trendy startup. MIT whiz kids who were barely old enough to order a beer came to work on rollerblades and skateboards. Every Thursday, a delivery truck pulled up and stocked the kitchen with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, popcorn, soda, and frozen pizzas. A group of programmers, otherwise known as the “Java Weenies” for their caffeine-fueled all-nighters, spent their time producing the interface and graphics for the system and taking naps in a hammock suspended from the ceiling. Will Koffel, a student at MIT, was one of them. He recalled juggling the coursework for his dual degree at MIT with a part-time job at Akamai, where he worked the overnight shift overseeing operations in the NOCC. Koffel would attend class from 8:45 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., study from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., and work at Akamai from 9:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. “My rule was that if I fell asleep before the sun rose, then it wasn’t an all-nighter,” related Koffel. He said Lewin was in the office so often and at such odd hours that he finally began to wonder if he ever slept at all. One night, he recalled, Lewin was at the office at 3:00 a.m. in what Koffel called “Field Marshal mode,” coordinating all kinds of efforts and keeping everyone awake and on track. Koffel asked him, “Danny, how long have you been here?” Lewin replied: “Three days.” When Koffel expressed his surprise and asked him what his secret was, Lewin told him a story about his time in the army, when his commanders would make everyone in his unit stand in full gear and a backpack for twenty-four hours straight. Every time someone would flinch or collapse, they’d add another hour to everyone’s time.

Koffel said the office was “hopping” at all hours, with people rolling around in office chairs from one desk to another, tossing footballs, and microwaving a seemingly endless supply of burritos. “We’d be microwaving all night,” he said. “There was just so much energy that you didn’t even realize how exhausted you were.” It was not uncommon to see two employees tossing a Frisbee across the room or playing miniature golf on a makeshift par-seven course set up between a few desks. The atmosphere at Akamai was so fun and so intoxicating that it became easy for people to lose track of time within its walls.

Melanie Wynkoop was one of the first few women to join Akamai’s sales group. At age twenty-six, she came to interview when the company had fewer than one hundred people after hearing about Akamai’s young founder who was being compared to the likes of Bill Gates, but with more charisma. She came from Price Waterhouse Coopers. “I read about the company and its background, and when I came to interview, I’d never seen anything like it,” she recalled. “It was small, booming, and fabulous.” Wynkoop arrived just as the sales craze began, the company securing contracts by the dozens. “It was almost like we were order takers,” she noted. Despite the rush, Wynkoop said Lewin always pushed the sales staff. “He’d come to sales meetings and say, ‘You people suck,’” she said. “But he wasn’t trying to be mean, he was just going for the jugular. That’s what he did.”

But if Akamai was lacking anything, it was a chief executive officer. The company was growing exponentially, gaining customers by the handfuls and generating buzz as the next big thing, but none of this guaranteed success. For any Internet company, the paradox of making it in the dot-com boom was that, in order to survive, businesses had to explode onto the scene and keep growing rapidly; but the very pace that brought them to the top could take them out in one fell swoop. Akamai needed a seasoned executive at the controls, one with enough experience and battle scars to maintain calm in the boardroom, keep an eye to the long-term forecasts, and steer them through the inevitable ups and downs. The median age of the company’s employees was thirty, and many, including three of the company’s top executives, had come straight from academia. Akamai needed an elder statesman.

Leighton recalled having a conversation with Lewin early on about the top role, which either of them could have easily assumed. Lewin didn’t want to be CEO, but said he’d work for Leighton if he wanted the job. Leighton said he didn’t want the job, but that he would work for Lewin if he did. This set off a formal search for a CEO that, by the spring of 1999, was well into its third month. A top executive search firm regularly sent candidates to Cambridge, but when it came time to decide on someone to fill the job, Lewin couldn’t commit. The reason, Leighton said, was that Lewin had already decided on the man for the job. In fact, he’d made up his mind before Akamai even incorporated, drafting a list of dream CEOs for his dream company. Topping the list was George Conrades.

At age sixty, Conrades was comfortably settled into a plumb job as a Venture Partner at Polaris. After four decades on the frontlines of two of the most successful computing companies—International Business Machine (IBM) and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (later BBN Technologies)—Conrades had retired from the career-climbing race. Or so he thought.

Conrades first laid eyes on a computer as a student in math and physics at Ohio Wesleyan University. Conrades, who graduated from the university in 1961, was then somewhat of a star on the university’s campus. Handsome and charismatic, he served as president of both his fraternity and the student body. He played the drums in a rock ‘n’ roll band, which he described as “full of testosterone,” and spent a lot of time in the physics lab trying to blow things up. But Conrades was also a standout student with a gift for both math and physics. So when the head of the school’s math department decided to offer a computing course, Conrades signed up. Before he knew it, he’d learned to program one of IBM’s earliest models, the 650. In his day, Conrades said, “No one had even heard of computers.” With a love for motorcycles, hot rod cars, and “anything that moved,” Conrades said that he took one look at the colossal machine—with its blinking red lights and rotating magnetic drum—and fell in love. With its relatively low cost and ease of programming, the 650 was marketed as a teaching computer to science and engineering schools across the country.{40} Conrades became so skilled at programming that, before he graduated, some of the faculty members at Wesleyan approached him with a list of computer companies, including IBM, Honeywell, and NCR (National Cash Register Company). “They told me that I should interview at every one of them, and that I should be in technical sales,” Conrades remembered. “I told them that I really wanted to make it as a rock star.”

Reason prevailed, however, and Conrades landed an entry-level job at IBM, which by the 1960s had burgeoned into a $1 billion business. Conrades began as a systems engineer, and at the same time earned an executive MBA from the University of Chicago School of Business. Over the course of 31 years, he rose up through the ranks at IBM to become senior vice president of IBM North America, a $24 million business. In 1992, after a dispute with then-chairman of IBM John Akers, Conrades left the company. By 1994, he had become president and CEO of BBN Technologies, formerly Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, the technology and research firm that helped build ARPANET. When Conrades joined BBN, the company was a think tank that survived on government contracts. Conrades leveraged the tremendous brainpower at BBN to transform the company into one of the world’s largest Internet Service Providers. In 1997, GTE Corporation{**} purchased BBN for $616 million, or $29 a share, more than double the stock’s value when Conrades came aboard. But the corporate culture of GTE didn’t agree with Conrades, and after a year spent as the president of GTE Internetworking, he left and took a year off work for the first time in his career. Conrades could have comfortably retired, but he soon realized that slowing down was not for him, or his wife, Patsy, whom he met in college. “One day, I opened the freezer and suddenly everything was falling out—chicken and steak all over the place,” recalled Conrades. “And Patsy looked at me and said, ‘George, stay out of my freezer. And get a job.’” The fact was, Conrades had spent too much time at the forefront of the digital age to sit on the sidelines of the dot-com craze. He wanted to play a part in the next big thing, so he looked to venture capital, which he said was raising its head in anticipation of the digital gold rush. In August 1998, he joined Polaris.

That summer, Conrades first made the acquaintance of Lewin and Leighton, agreeing to meet them at the suggestion of Battery’s Todd Dagres. Conrades recalled sitting through the pitch session and thinking that, as much as he liked the idea, he was initially uncertain about Akamai’s business model. “I understood what they were saying—not at the level of the algorithms—but about making the Internet feasible for e-commerce and robust audio and visual interaction,” Conrades explained. “I lived the problem at BBN, even though we threw a lot of money at it. That’s when I learned that you can’t throw enough money at the Internet to make it work right.” By the end of the meeting, however Conrades was so impressed with Akamai’s solution that he felt Polaris had a potential gold mine. He helped convince Polaris to invest in Akamai, and decided to put in some money of his own, too. According to Conrades, his investment strategy was informed by four basic elements: the idea’s greatness, the technology’s potential impact, the business model’s strength and, most importantly, the employees’ overall caliber. For Conrades, the people always came first. As for Akamai, he had no concerns about the people. Then he considered the idea. To him, the concept of what he called an “agnostic” network—one that provided a synoptic view of the Internet—was brilliant. “It was a big idea,” Conrades said. “That’s a word I use for something that’s not incremental in its impact, but transformative. They were promising a better Internet.”

When Polaris put $4 million into Akamai’s first round of financing, Conrades agreed to sit on the company’s board. At the time, he had no idea that Lewin had a plan to lure him into the role of Akamai’s CEO. “It was a whole seduction to get George,” recalled Leighton. “Of course we knew he wouldn’t be our CEO on day one, so Danny worked to get him on our board. Then we got him on the board and kept working on getting him as CEO.” Conrades knew Akamai was actively searching for a CEO, but was unaware of Lewin’s subtle efforts to court him. So when Lewin and Leighton invited him for breakfast at Harvest restaurant in Cambridge in late March 1999, Conrades wasn’t expecting them to offer him Akamai’s top job. “We told him point blank, we need you to be CEO—what’s it going to take?” remembered Leighton.

Conrades laid out some terms, and Lewin said they’d get back to him later that day. On the way home from lunch, Leighton noted, instead of celebrating what was sure to be a win for Akamai, Lewin suggested they push back on Conrades’s terms. “I’m driving away from the restaurant, and Danny is saying how he wants to negotiate,” observed Leighton. “I said, ‘Danny, what are you doing? Just say yes!’” Leighton added: “That was Danny, always wanting to negotiate the best possible deal.”

In the end, there wasn’t much negotiating, and, on April 7, 1999, George Conrades became Akamai’s first CEO, a fitting position for a man who had long been associated with speed. “To me, Akamai is like Fed Ex,” explained Conrades. “Fed Ex changed the game on the postal service, and we changed the game on the Internet.” The media seized on Conrades’s move to Akamai as another example of many seasoned executives taking chances on Internet startups in exchange for equity. Reporting on this trend, the May 1999 issue of Forbes singled out Conrades, Richard Frank, the ex-chairman of Walt Disney Television who signed on to head Food.com, and James Cannavino, former CEO of Perot Systems who joined the small network security firm CyberSafe. The article posed this question: “Why are these elder statesmen, with little left to prove, now pulling twelve-hour days to run baby firms barely on their second round of venture funding?” While the story speculated that such moves were motivated largely by money, Conrades said he was genuinely thrilled to assume the role at Akamai.{41} “I was still full of energy, and I thought the people were just fantastic,” said Conrades.

Conrades came on board just in time for Akamai’s second round of financing, led by Baker Communications Fund LP of New York. On May 7, Akamai secured $35 million total from Polaris and Battery Ventures, bringing the company’s total venture funding raised to more than $43 million. Todd Dagres told the media it was more than the company needed, and a sizeable sum even for hot startup, which averaged about $20 million in a first round in the late 1990s. Yet Akamai was less than six months old, and its market value had already multiplied tenfold. The day the second round closed, Conrades issued a statement saying Akamai had sufficient capital and had no immediate plans for an additional round of equity or any private or public offering.{42} First, Conrades said he needed to step back and give order to what was the chaos of a startup company moving too fast to position itself clearly. “My job was not to understand the algorithms and technology but to build the framework of a business,” Conrades observed. “We had to hire and establish a culture; it had to be codified for everyone.” One of the first questions he posed to the small company was this: Akamai exists to do what? It seemed so simple, but, as Conrades still recalls, “there was a lot of uncertainty.” With the help of everyone at Akamai, Conrades conceived of the company’s list of guiding principles, which still stands true today. One of them, which he and Lewin agreed on, was never to dismiss an idea from any source without first giving it consideration. “There was a highly argumentative culture in place, which was either inspired by Danny’s Israeli traits or the atmosphere at MIT,” said Conrades. “That was good—we reveled in arguing assumptions. But when we did we made a point of listening to everyone.” At IBM, Conrades concluded: “there was no ability to do this.”

Some ideas, however, were not up for consideration, no matter how vehemently they were argued. Just after Conrades came on board, he asked Randall Kaplan—who was still working out of Los Angeles—to relocate to Boston. Kaplan pushed back. As the only employee based outside Boston, Kaplan argued that he had originally left his lucrative position at SunAmerica to join Akamai on two conditions: that he could remain on the West Coast, and that he would report to the company’s CEO. Conrades offered Kaplan a second option: remain on the West Coast, but report to Earl Galleher, the VP of Sales. Kaplan refused, and decided to resign. His decision didn’t go over well, particularly with Lewin. In the months leading up to Kaplan’s departure, tensions between the two were beginning to mount. Although he acknowledged Lewin as one of the most brilliant and talented people he has ever met, Kaplan said he disliked him on a personal level for being what he called too “abrasive.” Coworkers said Lewin came to dislike Kaplan, partly because he felt like Kaplan’s heart wasn’t in the company. Kaplan left the company with a very good deal for himself, one the Wall Street Journal referred to as “a boatload” of stock options—ones he could cash. “Even by the outrageous standards of Silicon Valley, Randall Kaplan is one lucky guy,” noted the newspaper. “Unlike his ex-colleagues at Akamai—who have to wait around for four years—Mr. Kaplan already owns all of his shares.” By the end of 1999, Kaplan’s 2.4 million shares were worth approximately $633 million. {43}

Akamai used some of its new funds for hiring, or, as Lewin told reporters, “a massive mind-suck from America’s top universities,” to create a sixty-person research and development group. In the process, Akamai fended off complaints from a few MIT professors for creating such a powerful incentive for truancy. Even before Akamai’s IPO, there were employees who requested a leave of absence from their undergraduate studies at MIT to work full-time at the company. They were not the first wunderkinds to prioritize computing over a conventional education: Microsoft’s Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, Apple’s Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College. And in the late ’90s, with soaring markets propelled largely by Internet stocks, the tech sector became even more alluring, particularly to financially-strapped students inspired by the overnight millionaires of the time. In the late ’90s, as MIT began to spawn more successful startups, Michael Dertouzos, then director of LCS, voiced his concern that faculty, or students, might “call in rich.” In response, Akamai decided to take a firm line on the issue, partly because key members of its management team were also professors at MIT. To discourage overzealous undergraduates from abandoning their studies, the company instituted a strict stay-in-school policy.

They also tried to encourage those who opted to join Akamai instead of a PhD or Master’s program to return to school and earn their higher degrees. But this became more of a challenge around the time of the IPO in the fall of 1999. Just months earlier, the Wall Street Journal ran a story by reporter Amy Marcus under the headline “Class Struggle: MIT Students, Lured To New Tech Firms, Get Caught in a Bind.” The story featured the dilemma faced by Will Koffel, who was working at Akamai when he was a junior at MIT. Koffel was handed an assignment for his computer systems engineering course from one of his professors: find a way to speed up the delivery of Web pages. Koffel had been working on the problem as one of the “Java Weenies” at Akamai, yet he was bound by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) not to reveal any specifics about the job, particularly surrounding the design and engineering of the company’s technology.

The story went on to highlight some of the perils of a university-born startup:

“On many campuses, student jobs have come a long way from the days of busing tables in the cafeteria or checking the footnotes in a professor’s research project. And as the payouts at Internet startups skyrocket, some of the conflicts these jobs present are as cutting-edge as the technology they develop.” Marcus then noted that, while students seemed like ideal talent for a company that requires long hours and fresh, innovative minds, the hiring of too many could have a negative impact on the academic community.

“Intense schedules on the job can keep students from doing their best academic work. And when both student and teacher share a huge financial incentive to make a company a success, some professors might be tempted to look the other way when studies slip or homework gets in the way.”

Koffel’s studies were slipping a bit, and he told the reporter it was because, in many ways, Akamai had become his “real” university. “I’ve learned more at Akamai than I would in a classroom,” he explained. He also noted that the possibility of becoming rich was “very cool.”

Koffel entered MIT in 1996, the same year as Lewin, for an undergraduate degree in computer science and musical composition. On a Saturday night three years later, Koffel recalled Lewin and Seelig showed up at his door. “My dorm was in the middle of a party,” he said. “The beer was flowing, and the lights were out, and they sat down on my futon and asked me to come work at Akamai.” Koffel said no, he didn’t want to get involved in anything that would take time away from earning his degree. Lewin looked at him with disbelief and said, “What are you talking about? We’re going to make you a millionaire.” As Koffel remembers it, “Danny said this like it was a fait accompli. Here I was, this college student just trying to get laid for the first time, and they were talking about millions of dollars.” Koffel had to approach his parents before making a decision, and said his father was displeased. “I tried to tell them that these guys were going to be big,” protested Koffel. “But I was not the least bit convincing, and my dad kept shaking his head and saying I’d have so many opportunities after finishing school.” Koffel signed on anyway. And he did, in fact, get very rich at Akamai. Not just after the IPO, but even from the start as a college student with a salary of more than $70,000 a year.

 

Akamai’s remaining funds went to infrastructure and sales. Conrades knew that, to lead the company to incorporation, Akamai had to edge out the competition, which was posing an increasing threat to Akamai’s business. By 1999, the term “caching” had spread from the complex world of computer science into the commercial marketplace. Its new status made sense considering the rising demand for graphics-heavy content, the growth of cable Internet access, and the doubling of user traffic every one hundred days. In just one year (from 1998–1999), total investments in the caching industry reached $675 million. And the roster of businesses built around it grew, too, more than doubling in that same year from thirteen to twenty-seven.{44} These businesses varied greatly in the types of caching services and products they offered, which meant they weren’t all a concern to Akamai. But a few of them—including Sandpiper, Digital Island, and Speedera—were promising something similar enough to Akamai’s service, and at a lower cost, that they were taking a clear cut of its customer base.

Of them, the name that sparked the greatest fighting spirit at Akamai was a company out of Westlake Village, California, called Sandpiper. Founded by two software engineers, David Farber and Andrew Swart, Sandpiper launched Footprint, its debut service, in 1996. When Akamai entered the scene, Sandpiper was already flush with venture capital from backers like America Online, Inktomi, and Times Mirror Corp. Like Akamai, Sandpiper was a content delivery service, meaning that it, too, used its own network of global data centers to replicate Web content and bring it closer to end users.{45}

On April 29, 1999, the business section of The New York Times featured a story on “rival” startups Akamai and Sandpiper. The reporter, Andrew Pollack, did call Akamai the “most promising” of the two, crediting its “secret” software, meaning the proprietary algorithms developed by Lewin and Leighton.{46} Less than two months later (June 17), the contest between Akamai and Sandpiper was elevated to a “dead heat” by the Wall Street Journal, which reported, “Akamai boasts that its technology is better than Sandpiper’s and that it has more servers deployed around the Internet than its slightly older competitor. But analysts say it’s too early to call a winner among the two.”{47} In a similar Forbes article entitled “Speed Racer,” Adam L. Penenberg noted that, for whichever company came out ahead, the windfall was likely to be impressive: “The outposts will happily pay millions of dollars a year if it means the clickerati will stick around longer because they don’t have to sit, drumming their fingers in despair, as they wait for pages to unfurl on the screen.”{48}

Thus, Sandpiper stood as Akamai’s worthiest competitor because its business model bore several similarities to Akamai’s model. Both companies sold a service that ran on server networks spanning numerous ISPs, and both rewrote URLs to redirect traffic to their own systems. In the late 1990s, Sandpiper had servers in twenty network centers operated by AOL, Sprint, and Earthlink, and had a customer list that included E! Online and WebRadio.com. Both Akamai and Sandpiper were promising more than one thousand servers by the end of 1999.

The difference between the two startups were highly technical. Sandpiper’s Footprint, for example, allowed users to choose from numerous content distribution options—some simple, some advanced—for different parts of a Web site, while Akamai’s FreeFlow optimized everything automatically. While Sandpiper’s technology never proved itself as fast and efficient as Akamai’s, the company had some bragging rights of its own. For instance, it kept The Starr Report available on the Los Angeles Times site when many others buckled, and served the software company Intuit’s site reliably all through tax season. Also, Sandpiper’s sales team was fast-working enough to give Akamai more than a few scares. Sagan remembered a couple of sales calls to potential clients that were just days, maybe even hours, too late. “We’d arrive and the person we were meeting with would have a Sandpiper mug on their desk,” he said.

In some ways, Lewin loved the competition. He hated losing, yet he reveled in exploiting the rivalry with Sandpiper to motivate Akamai’s sales team. As Sandpiper’s fortune rose, Lewin grew increasingly obsessed with obliterating it. Dubbing the company “Sandpooper” or “Sandpecker,” he fired off interoffice e-mails filled with exaggerated threats to its existence like ripping out its heart. At one point, George Conrades felt Lewin had gone a little too far, asking him to cease the crude references to Sandpiper. But Lewin could never really bring himself to stop completely. For as long as Sandpiper posed a threat, he carried on in a slightly subtler manner in his e-mails, referring to the maiming and crushing of unnamed small birds.

 

It wasn’t just Akamai’s technology that won over some of the most enviable companies on the Internet; Akamai also had a distinct advantage when it came to customer service. It wasn’t unusual for a customer to call the NOCC at 3:00 a.m. about a slowdown in service only to get a call back from Lewin or Leighton. “If the customer had a problem, they were immediately available,” said Galleher. “That’s not like a lot of founders who get arrogant and don’t want to hear about anything going wrong.” What’s more, the customer calling wouldn’t just get an inexperienced hired hand on the line or a temp taking a message. Most of the time, a PhD candidate from MIT was monitoring the NOCC while perhaps reading about game theory.

By June 1999, Akamai had serious bragging rights. The company had twenty of the most popular Web sites as customers—including CNN Interactive, GO Network, About.com, Infoseek, Yahoo, The New York Times, and The Motley Fool—and more than six hundred servers on more than twenty networks. It also boasted a Board of Advisors of prominent names including Tim Berners-Lee of W3C, music and movie legend Gil Friesen, and CNN’s Sam Gassel.{49}

All of this made marketing Akamai a thrill for Jeff Young, who joined the company that month as its head of public relations. Until that time, the job had fallen on Marco Greenberg and Wendy Ziner, a smart, spirited young woman who was the first full-time hire for marketing. But Akamai’s profile was rising and with it the media requests were intensifying. Young had been working in PR for Nortel Networks when he first heard about Akamai. He interviewed at the company, and when he received an offer, Young leapt at the chance to live the dot-com life for a while like so many of his peers. On his first day of work, Young was at the office until 11:30 p.m. “I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’” Young recalled, describing his first impressions of the crazy hive of activity, where employees, after working long hours, were sleeping under their desks or riding scooters through the halls. But Young, too, fell under the spell of Akamai. Before he knew it, he was spending countless late nights at the office, juggling a whirlwind of press releases announcing partnerships, strategic alliances, new services, and customers. In addition, “I was getting dozens of calls a day from reporters,” Young said. “The story was incredible, and in a lot of ways, it sold itself.” Despite this, Lewin drove Young, too. “He wanted more press,” Young explained.

In late June, Young and his coworkers delivered and executed a big idea—one that was expensive but also one they wagered could end up paying for itself. In an unusual move for a startup, Akamai purchased two entire pages of ad space in the Wall Street Journal. On the left side, the ad read, “THERE’S ONLY ONE THING FASTER THAN OUR INTERNET CONTENT DELIVERY SERVICE.” And on the right, it followed with this: “THE SPEED AT WHICH COMPANIES ARE SIGNING UP FOR IT.” Above the text was a cluster of twenty customer logos including Yahoo, CNN, Apple, and The New York Times. “It just hit you in the face when you opened the paper,” noted Young. “It had tremendous impact, and said, we’re open for business, and we’re loud and proud.” Conrades called it the ad “that took the oxygen out of the competitor’s boardrooms.”

There was plenty of good news in the go-go days of the boom, but no one at Akamai had much time to stop and sing their own praises. June also marked the start of a feverish sales campaign initiated by Galleher called “100 in 100.” The goal was straightforward: sign one hundred customers in a one hundred–day period. Galleher pasted a list of the most desirable companies to the office wall, and designed T-shirts with the campaign slogan. The sales team hit the road. “There was so much excitement about it,” said Sconyers. Every time Akamai cemented a deal, someone would ring a bell in the office. People would jump on their chairs and hoot and holler like they were ringside at a boxing match.

Akamai was growing so fast it even became challenging to staff it. With the ongoing sales race and improvements to the technology, the company was hiring like crazy—as many as fifty new people a week. Even though Akamai had taken over a whole new floor of the office building, there weren’t enough cubicles to accommodate the newcomers. Some of the engineers made makeshift desks out of cardboard boxes. Akamai was so hot that it was poaching recruits from big-name consulting firms like McKinsky & Co., and most of them were accustomed to their own corner office and executive assistant. But like most startups of the time, Akamai was moving too quickly for the typical perks of huge corporations. The stark fact of startup life was that those who joined had to be willing to do everything from writing code and pitching clients to taking out the garbage. Julia Austin, one of Akamai’s first female managers, remembered arriving for her first day on the job to find that her new “office” was a small table positioned by the door of a “conference” room that was packed with employees, crammed shoulder to shoulder, furiously clattering on keyboards at a shared table. Austin expressed some surprise, and, in response, someone looked at her and exclaimed, “You got your own table! What are you complaining about?”

Austin was an art major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a Master’s in Management Information Systems from Boston University. As the daughter of an engineer, she grew up with a love for science and anything high-tech. By the age of eight, she was learning to program computers. Austin came to Akamai from a leading healthcare company where she worked as a consultant and led an information technology team. She later described the experience of walking into Akamai on her first day as “pandemonium.” Austin managed a team of young engineers who were brilliant, but at times, their youth and inexperience made them cocky and hard to manage. “At the time, I felt like I was the adult,” said Austin, who was quickly promoted to the job of VP of Engineering. Austin said Lewin was also prone to outbursts when things went wrong: “He would yell at me, and I’d just tell him to call me when he was ready to have a grown-up conversation.” Austin said she’d often see an eraser or some office object fly past her head as she marched out of Lewin’s office. Austin was one of just a few full-time working mothers at Akamai. With two young kids at home, Austin found it difficult to keep Akamai’s crazy work hours. But like most of her co-workers, she was somehow inspired enough to keep pace. “I felt like I’d sold my soul,” she remarked. “But the truth was that I wanted to be there. That’s what it was like at Akamai; there was just nowhere else you wanted to be.”

That same summer in 1999, a whiz kid named Mike Afergan joined Akamai. Afergan was a student at Harvard, where he was studying the application of game theory to network systems. On his first day, Afergan arrived with the expectation that he’d spend a few hours getting situated, setting up a desk and an e-mail account or filling out paperwork. Instead, Lewin called him into a meeting that included some of Akamai’s top brass. It was slightly unnerving, but also exciting, so Afergan took a seat and listened eagerly as Lewin addressed the room. In July, Lewin said, Akamai would be participating in the largest streaming media event in the history of the Internet. Akamai’s partner in this event was Apple, and the featured speaker would be Steve Jobs. Jobs was using the event as a platform to launch the company’s QuickTime TV. The meeting quickly turned into a discussion about how the technology of Akamai and Apple would work together, and how Akamai would build it. Afergan remembered thinking he was in way over his head. Toward the end of the meeting, Lewin raised the question of who would take charge of the event, but there were no takers—no one had the time. Lewin looked over at Afergan. “How about the new guy?” he asked. Stunned, Afergan stammered something like, “I’m happy to help in any way I can, but I know nothing about your technology or anything about the company. I don’t know anything.” Lewin stared right back at him, and replied: “You will know.”

On July 7, 1999, Steve Jobs debuted Apple’s QuickTime TV (QTV)—at the MacWorld Expo in New York. It was a blockbuster event, and the architecture for its live stream, which Afergan helped design, ran perfectly. To a crowd of approximately five thousand, Jobs, then Apple’s interim CEO, said, “On the Internet, there is so much traffic now that if you’re trying to receive a broadcast in New York that’s being broadcast in California, (with) live streaming on the Internet, it doesn’t work so well . . . It gets interrupted quite a bit . . . The quality is quite low . . . There’s no guaranteed transmission rates . . . So the experience is not so terrific.” To make it terrific, Jobs said, Apple had a new partner. “Apple and Akamai are working together to build a global network that will deliver the highest quality streaming video and audio over the Internet.” Jobs explained that Apple would integrate its QuickTime player and streaming server technology with Akamai’s global Internet content delivery service, and that Akamai would be the company’s exclusive network provider for QTV. For Akamai’s part, Conrades issued a statement promising the partnership would elevate streaming media “to a new level of performance not yet realized on today’s Internet.”{50}

The market for streaming media was in full swing. It was still a new medium, and one that typically functioned poorly—online video was then characterized by constant freezes, blurriness, or distorted sound. This made it open territory for domination in a new digital market. Rivaling Apple’s QTV was RealNetwork’s Real Player, which also worked on both Macs and Windows PCs. Apple was banking on the hope that, eventually, content providers would make the switch to QuickTime because it would position the company as a leader in the streaming category.{51}

Now in a high-profile partnership with Apple, Akamai’s public profile was growing well beyond the U.S. On July 5, The Jerusalem Report ran a splashy feature on Lewin titled “The Brain that Beat the World Wide Wait.” The story began with a nod to Lewin’s physical strength, but quickly shifted focus. It read: “Danny Lewin works out three times a week, and you can see the results: He’s built like a linebacker. But it’s in high-tech that the former Jerusalemite is an up-and-coming all-star. In fact, he’s the brain behind a company that experts say is set to change the face of the Internet forever.”

The story marked the first and only time Lewin agreed to participate in any significant media coverage of himself, or Akamai, and the reporter noted his discomfort: “Lewin’s role in all this, and his unexpected entry into the upper echelons of American business, embarrasses him, makes him giggle and poke fun at himself. A year ago, he confesses, he didn’t know the difference between a chief financial officer and a chief operating officer.”{52} The story made its way to Lewin’s family in Jerusalem, who modestly tucked it away with what would later become a hefty stack of stories about Danny, Akamai, and his contribution to the Internet. Charles and Peggy Lewin still insist that, to them, Danny’s success came as no surprise. “From the very beginning, Danny thought he was going to take over the world,” said Peggy Lewin. “As soon as they got their funding, we didn’t think about whether Danny was going to be a success or not. Danny knew he was going to be a success, and he transmitted that confidence to everyone around him.”

 

By late summer, Akamai had reached the one hundred sales in one hundred days goal set by Earl Galleher with new customers including Bluefly, CBS, eBags, GO Network, Martha Stewart Living, and Monster.com. But August—typically a quiet month—brought even better news.

Akamai was featured in a flattering article in WIRED magazine under the headline “The New Cool.” Journalist Paul Spinard began the story with the lines “Paul Sagan said that Danny could leave the company to finish his PhD and publish his thesis, but then they’d have to kill him. Everyone else at Akamai is encouraged to complete their academic work, a slew of them at MIT, but Danny—they’d have to off him. He knows too much.” Spinard went on to liken Akamai’s technology to great historic shifts like the invention of Arabic numerals or the development of seafaring. Spinard wrote, “Tom and Danny knew with total certainty that, given their descriptions of the hot spot problem and the workings of the Net, the larger the network grew, the better their solution would perform. They not only had a solution, they had a solution that was literally—demonstrably—unbeatable.” Spinard then outlined Akamai’s competition, most notably Sandpiper, and ended the piece on the following note: “Either way you look at it, the stakes are high. The winner, if there is one, will have its hand in the major revenue-generating sites on the Web. More than any other company in the medium’s short history, the winner will own the Net—or at least the parts of it that pay.”{53}

 

Akamai made headlines again when it entered into a strategic partnership with Cisco Systems, a worldwide leader in Internet networks, to optimize its content delivery service. Weeks later, Microsoft invested approximately $15 million in Akamai and partnered with the company to integrate its new software technologies into Akamai’s network. It had been less than a year since Lewin visited the Seattle headquarters of Microsoft to try to secure a meeting with an executive there. He was turned away, and when he refused to leave the building, he had to be physically escorted out. The next day, undeterred, Lewin returned. “Some people did try to say no to Danny,” recalled Leighton. “It just never lasted very long.”

On August 20, Marco Greenberg sent an e-mail to Lewin: “Let me congratulate you on a most significant and exciting week in Akamai’s history. The announcement of deals with Cisco and Microsoft are incredible, and you deserve an enormous amount of credit in making it all happen.”

Boosted by Akamai’s recent string of victories, Earl Galleher set a new, bolder sales goal: two hundred new customers by December 31. Galleher was fired up, but Paul Sagan was doubtful that the company could continue to grow its customer base at such a frenzied rate. “Sagan said to me, ‘No way,’” Galleher recalled. “So I told him, ‘I’ll prove it to you, and if I make it, then you will have to get up and dance in a hula outfit before the management team.’” Sagan shook on it.