No Better Time

by Molly Knight Raskin

  Together, they decided their business would sell boxes equipped with their technology, rooted in a set of algorithms, to Internet Service Providers. The ISPs would then sell it as a service—one to speed up the delivery content online—to their existing customers, the content providers. Consistent hashing would drive the software, but it only merited one line in the business plan, which said the technology would “apply a set of algorithms that allow the data storage and retrieval to occur quickly and efficiently without the need for a central directory.” They called the company Cachet Technologies, a play on “caching” and what they hoped would be their company’s winning reputation.

  The MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition has been called the “Granddaddy” of multiple business plan competitions that now exist at universities around the country. Its origins date back to 1989, when students from MIT’s engineering school and Sloan School decided to join forces for an annual entrepreneurship challenge that could give rise to new businesses. With the support of John Preston, the director of MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, the organizers raised enough money that opening year to offer a $10,000 prize to the winning team in order to file a patent.

  Over the next few years, the competition morphed into something much greater than its prize money. It became an opportunity to shake hands and exchange business cards with potential investors who scouted each year’s entry list in search of the next big thing. It was the chance to open doors and even gain a fast track to capital and media attention. Although it took place in an academic setting, the MIT competition was no longer an academic exercise. Five years earlier, Michael Cassidy, a student in MIT’s aerospace engineering program, took his first-place business plan for a software company and formed Stylus Innovation, Inc., in Cambridge. He then sold it for $12.9 million in cash, becoming a millionaire at age thirty-three. By 1998, the year Lewin and his team planned to enter, the contest had spawned the creation of thirty companies with an aggregate market value of over seventy million.{24} Veterans of the contest included Lexicus, which developed handwriting recognition software (bought by Motorola in 1993), Firefly Network, which created the first online music community (acquired by Microsoft in 1998), and Silicon Spice, which created semiconductors for telecommunications companies (acquired by Broadcom in 2000 in a deal worth $1 billion).{25}

  These success stories, combined with the gathering force of the technology boom, amplified the excitement about the contest in the months leading up to the application deadline. Its nickname had become the “Who wants to be a zillionaire?” competition, and the early buzz suggested the 50k was poised to launch a big hit that year. Meanwhile, Lewin was beginning to feel like Cachet’s idea had real traction.

  To add weight to the credentials of their team, Lewin turned to friend Jonathan Seelig. Seelig was in his first semester of business school at Sloan, and, like Lewin, he had moved to Cambridge directly from Israel where he had been working for the Israel-based ECI Telecom. A graduate of Stanford with a degree in physics, Seelig was well on his way to a high-tech career in Israel when he decided to apply to MIT for graduate school. “To me, MIT was the place where you had the greatest creation of technological innovation and the greatest opportunity to build things from it,” said Seelig, who has a lanky, tall frame and longish brown hair that he tucks behind his ears when he talks. “The idea of being in a place with such academic and intellectual ability was exciting to me.”

  Seelig had some money saved from his work in Israel, and was looking forward to a few more years of the student life. He rented a one-bedroom bachelor pad in Central Square, right between the campuses of MIT and Harvard. Lewin was one of dozens of new friends Seelig made that fall in Cambridge, but he and Lewin formed an instant kinship. “My first impression of him was of this forceful, passionate guy,” Seelig recalled. “I was struck by how ‘present’ he was. Whenever you were talking about something, Danny was really there, listening carefully.”

  Having worked in the telecomm industry, Seelig was well aware of the challenges to scaling the Internet. When he sat down for one of his first meetings with Lewin in Leighton’s office, he hadn’t read Lewin’s work on consistent hashing. All he knew was that the two of them had come up with some sets of algorithms they thought would be effective to store content on the Internet in the optimal way. “At the time, thinking about how to make the Internet work better seemed like a terrific idea,” noted Seelig.

  December 1997 marked the warm-up round of the 50K, a smaller competition leading up to the main event that would be held in the following spring. In the application materials, the organizers stated that the warm-up round, while not required, is the ideal opportunity to get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of your plan. The Cachet team—which included Lewin, Leighton and Nijhawan—entered with a three-page business plan titled “Scalable Caching and Replication Solutions for High Bandwidth Applications.”

  On December 10, the judges announced the most innovative business plans of the warm-up round in ten separate categories. Cachet took home the software and media prize, which came with a $100 check (the early round had a cash prize of $1,000, which was split among the ten category winners). The win offered the three of them great hope that they had a shot at taking the $50K. Unfortunately for Lewin, however, the warm-up round came with an unexpected realization: the winner of the main contest would not, in fact, take home $50K. Instead, the prize money would be split between the two top winners, and the bulk of it had to be spent on startup costs. Still, a win would mean money in the bank. What’s more, it could mean the launch of a successful startup. And in the late 1990s, the fastest road to riches was a dot-com sensation. So by the start of the New Year, Lewin began putting together a more formidable team for the official 50K competition, starting with Seelig, whom he convinced to come on board.

  In September, Lewin sent an e-mail to best friend Marco Greenberg, in which he wrote: “I have a great idea to talk to you about—one that could make us big $$$.” Born in Hollywood and raised in Brentwood and Beverly Hills, Greenberg, whose father was a prominent Los Angeles architect and self-made millionaire, was a natural born networker with a Rolodex of wealthy friends of the family to tap into. Greenberg wasn’t a mathematician, but he knew Lewin well enough to understand that whatever he was doing, there was a good chance it could be big. “I actually failed trigonometry at Beverly Hills High School in the twelfth grade, whereas Danny was probably mastering trig when he was in the fourth grade,” admitted Greenberg. “In that way, we were sort of an odd couple. When he’d show me his math textbooks, I’d say, ‘Danny, you know the only thing I understand in this is the first sentence of the foreword. Everything else, you lost me.’”

  Lewin and Greenberg’s friendship, formed in the crucible of Israel, had not flagged a bit since the summer of 1986 when the two first met. Although they were both tough guys with some Israeli machismo, Lewin and Greenberg connected on a profound level as friends, with a mutual trust and respect evident in their regular correspondence (by postal mail until the mid-1990s, when they began using e-mail). Greenberg said that Lewin knew him better than almost anyone. Lewin knew him well enough to understand—based on nothing more than a few straightforward words—when Greenberg needed a friend.

  A year after Lewin moved from Israel to Cambridge and Greenberg helped him through that tough transition, Greenberg made a tough move of his own from Israel to New York. And for the first time in his life, Greenberg experienced a fleeting, but frightening, bout of depression stemming from his departure from Israel. During this time, he called Lewin in Cambridge and let his guard down. “I didn’t get all into it or anything, I just let him know that I was depressed and having a hard time,” Greenberg later recounted. He didn’t have to say anything more. That weekend, Lewin traveled to New York and arrived at Greenberg’s apartment just to “hang out” for a few days. Greenberg said, “He did it to say, ‘Hey, I’m here for you.’” Although he was the son of a psychiatrist, Lewin typically shied awa
y from any kind of “psychobabble,” often poking fun at the question: “How does that make you feel?” Given this, Greenberg was particularly grateful that Lewin came calling on him at a low point. “Danny’s sensitive and empathetic side was surprisingly advanced for a commando turned computer scientist,” Greenberg noted wryly.

  Although Greenberg had his own business to grow, if there was a chance for Cachet to succeed, he wanted to be on board. “I always appreciated Danny’s keen mathematical mind, which obviously influenced his thinking in general. And I remember once, when he was in the early stages of the contest, he told me, ‘This is going to be so big that you’re going to have so many clients of your own because they will come to you knowing you worked with us. Your business is going to be huge!’”

  One of the first connections Greenberg made for the Cachet team was a young businessman named Randall Kaplan. Kaplan graduated from law school, but then jumped to the business world when he landed a job at the asset management firm SunAmerica, now a subsidiary of American International Group (AIG). By age twenty-seven, Kaplan was reporting directly to Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist who was then the company’s CEO. But Kaplan was eager to rise upward and considering investing in a business of his own. When he heard about Cachet Technologies from Greenberg, he was intrigued enough to contact Lewin directly, and before he knew it he was working with the Cachet team—putting his legal and business background to use in negotiations with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to get the best possible deal in the event the company took off. Lewin was happy to have Kaplan on board. On January 8, 1998, Lewin wrote an e-mail to Greenberg thanking him for the connections to potential funders, including Kaplan. “You’re a fuckin’ stud!” he wrote, adding that they would soon be “home free to zillionaire land.”

  Lewin loved the word “zillionaire.” To him, it was just another expression of the kind of magnitude with which he worked to define his life. But the fact was, the business plan was just one of the many things Lewin was juggling at the time. With no guarantee that Cachet would go beyond a few pieces of paper, let alone bring him great wealth, Lewin continued to focus on his master’s thesis and coursework with Leighton. On January 18, he e-mailed Greenberg to share his hopes for Cachet:

  I am really not worried about getting money for Cachet. The main issue on my mind is how to set up Cachet so I don’t have to leave MIT. This is very important to me. If I cannot see a way, I’m going to sell the patent and make off with as much as I can. The point is that, 20 years from now—even if I am a zillionaire—I would not forgive myself for leaving the PhD [program].

  Then there were his obligations at home, where Anne was doing double time caring for Eitan and Itamar during Danny’s long days on campus and late nights at LCS. Even when he was home, Lewin was often occupied. On January 26, 1998, he had to stay home with Eitan, who was sick, so Anne could go to work. Still, he managed to fire off an e-mail to Greenberg with an update on the 50K competition:

  Our main advantage (which has not been proven yet) over the competition is that our product is suitable for deployment over a wide network, and not at a single point in the network. Without going into details, this is what BOTH the telephone and cable companies may want to do. I still don’t have all the data, but Tom is pushing ahead strongly. We will see what happens.

  In March of 1998, Lewin asked Greenberg to come to Cambridge so he could introduce him to Leighton, the smartest man he’d ever met. Greenberg went willingly and became awed by the obvious chemistry between the two. “Danny called me and told me he’d met this great professor and they had this idea, and it was clear after I schlepped up to Cambridge for this meeting that Tom was at the pinnacle of Danny’s professional and personal worldview,” said Greenberg. “I completely believed in the two of them.”

  Greenberg took charge of publicity for the fledgling business, and his first task was to rename it. Although Greenberg had come up with the name Cachet Technologies, he thought it lacked punch—particularly compared with the much sexier dot-com monikers that defined the times, like Amazon.com and eBay. Besides, they weren’t promising cachet; they were promising something fast and intelligent. Greenberg spent countless hours thinking up potential names, even on napkins over dinner with his girlfriend: Bonzai? Fast Lane? Out of Bounds?

  Nothing seemed to stick. And nothing had the exotic allure of, say, the hot new startup Inktomi. The California software company created a new standard of cool when they chose Inktomi (pronounced “INK-tuh-me”), derived from a Native American legend about a crafty spider. Lewin suggested Hawaiian words, which resonated with Greenberg, who had a family connection to the island state. He drafted a few lists of potential monikers, and, before sending them to Lewin and Leighton, Greenberg called a Hawaiian travel and media contact to make sure he had the most accurate definition for each word—and that none of them had any “unpleasant” connotations or double meanings that he should be aware of. After hearing back, he sent his top choices to Lewin and Leighton. They included: Ao (world), Kulako (island style), Owiwi (fast), and Akamai. Leighton sent a reply to Greenberg with a unanimous decision: Akamai.

  Akamai. Hawaiian term.

  Smart, clever, expert; smartness, skill.

  Cf. akeakamai. Na ‘olelo akamai a Kolomana

  The proverbs of Solomon

  (pronounced Ah-kuh-mi)

  It wasn’t easy to pronounce, but it was hip, pithy, and unique.

  By April of 1998, with a business plan in the works and their sights set on the 50K competition, the Akamai team was moving so fast that Lewin was in a state of disbelief. Early hype was building around some of the 50K teams, some of which were rumored to have already secured venture capital support. Lewin was starting to think they had a real shot at winning, or at least getting some funding. In an e-mail to Greenberg, Lewin expressed his hope that Akamai would have seed money by the start of the summer, adding, “I can’t believe this is happening!”

  And it wasn’t—yet. The 50K competition was still a month away, and Akamai needed to finalize its business plan. By this time, the Akamai team had collectively recruited enough prestigious supporters that, on paper, they appeared credible. On the technical side, in addition to Lewin and Leighton, the team now included MIT Professor David Karger (with whom Lewin had made peace), Bill Bogstad, a veteran network developer, Robert Thau from Apache, programming protégés Alex Sherman and Yoav Yerushalmi, and ten students from LCS. On the business side, in addition to Jonathan Seelig, Preetish Nijhawan, and Marco Greenberg, they added David Crosbie, from Sitara Networks, and Steve Papa, a Harvard Business School graduate from Inktomi. Their advisors included the legendary Michael Dertouzos, director of LCS, Albert Vezza, the founder and chairman of W3C, former Sun America businessman Randall Kaplan, Todd Dagres and Scott Tobin, shrewd investors with Battery Ventures, Sean Dalton of Harvard Business School, and Steve Bochner, attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. It was, in Lewin’s mind, a winning team.

  At the end of April, Lewin submitted a thirty-eight-page entry to the 50K, with the cover: “Akamai, Global Hosting Servers, Changing the Way Content is Distributed Through the Internet.” Akamai, according to the plan, would enable ISPs to host content at thousands of locations worldwide with the flip of a switch, allowing their Web sites to withstand flash crowds, serve up fresh content including graphics and multimedia, and reduce the cost of bandwidth. It was a plan on paper; far from a reality. But at a time when top engineers at supersites were working around the clock to improve the performance of the Internet, it was a promising one.

  At MIT, the month of the 50K competition was called May Madness because it garnered the intensity and tension of a professional sports draft. Investors and business executives were already circling the Sloan School like buzzards, collecting early intelligence about the most anticipated teams of the year. At final count, the 50K had eighty-four entries—the largest number since the first contest in 1990—in categories including biotech, media and software, computer
hardware, and services and consumer products. The twenty-four-person panel of judges was formidable, with big names such as Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp., J. William Poduska Sr., founder of both Prime Computer and Apollo Computer, and Mark Gorenberg, an MIT graduate and managing director of the San Francisco firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.{26}

  The official 50K presentations took place on May 5, 1998 in a small forum that included only the judges and the competing teams. Akamai took to the stage, but much to the surprise of everyone familiar with the team, Lewin was absent. Everyone knew Professor Leighton would hang back—he often did, preferring to let Lewin do the talking. But no one understood, in that moment, why Lewin was not presenting his grand idea. Instead, Lewin, Leighton, Kaplan, and Seelig were standing in the back of the auditorium. In their place was advisor David Crosbie, an Oxford-educated engineer who had only recently joined the team. “Danny thought it was better to have the business guy up there,” said Seelig. Crosbie, who worked at the lofty Sitara Networks, had the stage. Yet members of the audience said it was clear from the start that he lacked the passion to put on the hard sell. Crosbie also made some unfortunate choices, like the decision to use a ball as a prop, which he tossed into the audience to demonstrate the pattern of data through routers. Noticeably perspiring and ill at ease, Crosbie presented a series of Power Point slides that formed Akamai’s elevator pitch. They contained the following highlights: