No Better Time

  The chief technologist at The Motley Fool was a graduate student at Georgetown University, Dwight Gibbs. Gibbs began messing around with computers in the fifth grade and learned to program and write software. In September of 1994, while working toward an MBA, Gibbs was hired to help Fool.com. In his role as “Chief Techie Geek,” Gibbs explained that he was charged with “pretty much anything and everything,” including database design, user support, and programming. By 1998, the site was nearing one million visitors per month, and it was crashing—a lot. Gibbs’s quest, as he recalled, was not to find the best hosting provider. It was to find the one that “sucked the least.” The courtships were fast and ended furiously. The Motley Fool moved its Web site six times in seven years. By the fall of 1998, the site was flooded by peak traffic of more than ten million users, and it buckled under the pressure. Gibbs noted that the last, and by far the worst, hosting provider was DIGEX, where Earl Galleher was formerly president of the Web division. Gibbs was losing faith that the Motley Fool could find a solution, and he was getting assailed with posts on the site’s message board like “Your site sucks.” The Motley Fool ended its contract with DIGEX three months early.

  A few months after Fool.com severed ties with DIGEX, Earl Galleher, who had left the company for Akamai, called Gibbs at home and asked for a meeting. “We want to know what went wrong,” he said. Gibbs met Galleher and a few others and “let them have it.” Galleher didn’t flinch—he listened and left. Several months later, Gibbs got another call from Galleher. “I have an answer to your problems,” he said. To Gibbs and his team, Akamai’s technology sounded more like snake oil than a practical solution. To them, the idea that a bunch of MIT guys had an answer out of their ivory tower was nothing short of preposterous. “A couple of geeks at MIT are going to fix the Internet,” Gibbs remembered thinking. “How cute.” But Galleher had taken the time to listen to Gibbs, and now, Gibbs agreed to return the favor and meet with one emissary from Akamai.

  On an inferno-like day in Washington, DC in late August of 1998, Lewin flew into Reagan Airport and took a taxi to the Motley Fool headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Gibbs was still shrugging off the meeting. His tech team, he recalled, was ready to rip into Lewin, the nerd from MIT, for his audacity. Gibbs kept Lewin waiting for close to fifteen minutes before heading to the lobby to meet him. Lewin was unfazed. And Gibbs was surprised by Lewin from the moment he met him. Lewin practically bounced off the couch and darted over to Gibbs to shake his hand—“I’m Danny,” he said, disarming Gibbs from then on. Lewin was nothing like the PhD scientist Gibbs expected; he was friendly, animated and full of pep. Gibbs ushered Lewin to the basement floor of the building, an unfinished room with no ventilation that served as a makeshift conference area. Lewin’s audience, a ticked-off tech team of over twenty guys, was lying in wait like a bunch of hungry seagulls. The heat made things worse. Lounging disrespectfully in their chairs, they waited for Lewin to start his show.

  Lewin turned to the whiteboard and began. An hour into the presentation, Gibbs remembered a palpable shift in the room. His guys moved forward in their chairs, training their eyes squarely on Lewin as he grew more engaging. Another hour passed; by this time, Lewin had covered the whiteboard and, without hesitation, began to write on the unfinished wall. When he stopped, they began firing questions at Lewin. Lewin fired right back. Not even the smartest of Gibbs’s tech guys could poke holes in Lewin’s ideas. More than three hours later, Lewin packed up and left. Gibbs reported a collective feeling of awe. My guys looked at me and said, “He’s scary smart, and this might actually work.”

  Still, the question of whether to go with Akamai was fraught with skepticism. Lewin had wooed them with his intellect and magic at the whiteboard, but would the technology really hold up? They spent two weeks deliberating. Meanwhile, The Fool was getting crushed with traffic, and they needed a solution—fast. They couldn’t keep buying servers or spending days on end in the office at the ready when one crashed.

  By early 1999, The Motley Fool entered into a contract with Akamai, first on a trial basis and then, once the company ironed out a few glitches, as paying customers. Gibbs became one of Akamai’s most ardent advocates, often posting comments on The Fool’s message boards singing its praises, always with the candid disclaimer that he was a customer.

  There was plenty to cheer about; customers were still calling on Akamai. One of the first during that feverish spring sales period was Sean Moriarity, then-president and COO of Ticketmaster. At the time, event ticketing was still largely an offline business, but Moriarity, a self-taught technologist, saw the potential in e-ticketing. One of the greatest barriers to growing the business, however, was how to handle the flash crowds that would swamp Ticketmaster’s site the very minute tickets to a popular event went on sale. At some point, Moriarity said he read about Akamai and was intrigued (and frustrated) enough to contact the company and request a meeting, which took place in June 1999 in Pasadena, California. “Engineers are skeptical by nature, and the ones I worked with were no different,” Moriarity said. “But Danny came along and operated at such a high level that you could feel the skepticism in the room just melt away.” After investing massive amounts of resources into Ticketmaster’s Web operations, the company had a solution in FreeFlow. Moriarity recalled: “When I look back I think a lot of my belief in Akamai came from Danny’s vitality. Most people who are that intelligent are defined by their intelligence, but he was defined by his passion; it was infectious.”

  The next call was from Apple. At the time, the company based in Cupertino, California didn’t have a lot of content on the Web. But, as a pioneer in the personal computer business with Steve Jobs at its helm, Apple had grand plans to expand vastly into several segments of Internet-based technology. Of these, streaming audio and visual media were two priorities that Apple was struggling with. Akamai had been pursuing Apple for some time, with the knowledge that the opportunity to enter into any partnership with the company would mean instant credibility and an unrivaled cool factor. At some point, Lewin and a few others from Akamai met with Eddie Cue, who was creating Apple’s first online store, and Frank Cassanova, director of marketing for the company’s new multimedia site, QuickTime TV. Lewin delivered a passionate pitch to them on the whiteboard promising a partnership between Akamai and Apple that would revolutionize television. They thanked everyone and left. But nothing came of it.

  Regardless, the contracts from paying customers were beginning to arrive, and at 10:00 p.m. on the night of March 31, 1999, the office received a momentous fax from Randy Dragon at Disney Online in Burbank. It was Akamai’s first long-term service order for the billing period beginning April 1st, with a monthly commitment of $4,760. John Sconyers framed it, and hung it proudly on the wall of his office. About the same time, the official service agreement from Yahoo arrived. David Filo and Farzod Nazem had signed it and sent it to Akamai along with a one-dollar bill, on which Nazem wrote “Good Luck.” Sagan framed it and hung it in his office. Akamai had received its first dollar.

  The next day, on April 1, 1999, Sagan arrived to work early to meet with advisory board member Art Bilger. Just as he sat down at his desk, the phone rang. Sagan answered, and the voice on the other end said, “Hi, this is Steve Jobs, and I want to buy your company.”

  For a second, Sagan was speechless. His first thought was that the caller was his brother, Alex, playing a prank on him for April Fool’s Day. “I almost said, ‘Fuck you, Alex,’ and hung up the phone,” said Sagan. Instead, he replied, “Steve, nice to meet you. Our company is not for sale, but we’d love to be partners.” The call began three months of tough negotiations with Jobs, who initially offered up $16 million in cash to purchase Akamai. Because Akamai really wasn’t for sale, Jobs began pushing aggressively for a strategic partnership.

  In its first month of commercial service, Akamai’s FreeFlow delivered more than ten billion hits for some of the biggest players on the Internet. The company’s fax machine was busy
receiving customer invoices and service agreements, and Steve Jobs had come a courting. Akamai was officially on the map.

  Chapter 8

  The Go-Go Days

  “It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.”

  —STEVE JOBS

  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.”