No Better Time

by Molly Knight Raskin

  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.”