A lost spirit still inspires After its founder was killed on Sept. 11 and its business damaged in the aftermath, Akamai slid to the edge of failure. What it still had were Daniel Lewin's technology and vision.
By Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff / September 4, 2011 At about 9 a.m. on what would be a very bad day, Paul Sagan, then president of Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, was on the phone with a company attorney who had just been in touch with cofounder Daniel Lewin. Lewin, 31, who had invented technology to help the Internet handle huge amounts of traffic, was flying to Los Angeles to drum up new business, which the company desperately needed. Akamai's stock was trading at about $3 a share, a sliver of its peak of $328 in 1999, at the height of the Internet bubble. As Sagan and the lawyer chatted, another Akamai employee called on Sagan's second line. He had been watching the "Today'' show and saw that a jumbo jet had slammed into the North Tower of New York's World Trade Center. American Airlines Flight 11. Lewin's flight. For a moment, Sagan hoped Lewin had decided to fly a little later in the day. "The airlines would just let you change planes back then,'' he recalled. But the lawyer said Lewin had called from the plane, hanging up only when a flight attendant ordered him to switch off his phone. "So we knew shortly after 9 a.m.,'' said Sagan. "There was no hope that he was not on that plane.'' Daniel Lewin was dead, and nobody knew whether his company would survive. Yet Akamai's most tragic day would also prove its most important. On that day, and in the days that followed, the world turned to the Internet for information as never before. Web traffic for Akamai's global network of clients, including major news media sites, surged by a factor of five. ... http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/09/04/akamai_thrives_in_the_spirit_of_its_lost_founder/?page=full _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
