No Better Time

by Molly Knight Raskin

  Epilogue

  When they look back on those days, everyone at Akamai agrees they were some of the darkest of their lives. The loss was too searing, the irony too thick. The remainder of 2001, to most of them, was a blur. They came to work and continued to carry out the company’s new strategy. But they did it all weighted down by heartache. One of Lewin’s coworkers said it was like running in snow—they kept moving, but every step felt labored. When they tried to look forward, they did so through the thick haze of grief. They saw nothing but the abyss left by Danny’s absence.

  But months passed, and with time, emotional strength regenerated enough for everyone at Akamai to realize that they had one last fight left in them, one that had to be waged in Lewin’s honor. They knew it was going to be a fierce one. Although Akamai made it through the days and weeks immediately following the attacks, the company’s financial problems were mounting. The attacks sent the U.S. economy further into the black, eating into Akamai’s revenues and spawning widespread fears of a recession. Investors lost confidence in Akamai, fearing that Lewin’s death meant death for the company.

  Conrades recalled making rounds at the office to check in with staffers who “looked at me like deer in the headlights.” As Conrades explained, “This was not the exuberant Akamai they were used to.” Conrades became well versed at pep talks. “I’d say our stock is coming down, but we’re still about one big idea,” he recalled, also saying, “The technology still works. The business model works. Then I’d ask them: Do you still have bragging rights at the bar? The answer was yes, so I told them to have faith.” He also told them, repeatedly, to do it for Danny.

  Conrades made a pledge to Akamai’s board that he would not step down until the company achieved sustained profitability. But in the two years following 9/11, Akamai was written off as another casualty of the dot-com boom. “Everybody had left us for dead,” Leighton said. “We were gonna go broke. It was really that bad.” The fall was precipitous. Once the stuff of legend, Akamai’s stock was delisted by the NASDAQ after it fell below $1. The company’s customers were going out of business faster than the sales representatives could close accounts. More downsizing was necessary, including most of the sales force. Conrades, Sagan and Leighton began citing a metric they called “quarters to live,” guessing how many more quarters Akamai could stay in business.{88} But they kept pushing. Every time they thought about Lewin, they became resolute in their pledge never to give up. “The people were really good people, the technology was good, and you know, we were relentless,” said Leighton. “It was all about Danny. He had instilled such a culture through the powerfulness of his personality and the people that he vetted and selected that everyone wanted to double down and work extra hard to make Akamai successful. We wanted to make it happen for him, and it was very, very hard.”

  Fortunately, Lewin had left behind what Akamai called one “gift” for the company: EdgeSuite. Akamai positioned EdgeSuite as the ticket to its comeback, one that would take the company beyond content delivery to content assembly, presentation, and delivery. Akamai, Conrades said, used EdgeSuite to form a new strategy akin to what Federal Express accomplished when it moved beyond the shipment of packages into the additional services of packing and preparing them for shipment. With EdgeSuite as the centerpiece of a new business plan, Akamai offered customers technology that would accelerate the movement of dynamic content—things like stock quotes, airline prices, auction listings, and weather reports. Prior to EdgeSuite, Akamai was delivering static pages, which were assembled before delivery, meaning everyone who clicked on them saw the same thing. Dynamic Web sites, in contrast, are put together on the spot and change frequently, often with every click—and EdgeSuite could do this very, very well.{89}

  Lewin had pushed EdgeSuite onto the market in early 2001, putting his stamp on the new technology, which he predicted would be a winner. Lewin was right. The EdgeSuite service won over one hundred new customers by the end of 2001, and over half of them were entirely new to Akamai, including Novartis, Coca-Cola, and Saatchi & Saatchi. Existing customers like Apple also seized on EdgeSuite, adapting it for the 2003 launch of its hugely successful online music store, iTunes. By 2004, Akamai posted its first annual profit. The company has been profitable every year since, a leader not only in content delivery, but also in cyber-security. In 2003, Tom Leighton joined the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and has since become a vocal advocate for more research into the prevention of online attacks, which he says pose a grave threat to personal, corporate and national security.

  In July 2004, Lewin’s remains were identified in the wreckage of the World Trade Center. He was buried at Sharon Memorial Park outside Boston.

  That same year, the 9/11 Commission released its final report on the attacks. The section about Flight 11 clarified the release of fragmented and conflicting information in the wake of the attacks, some of it relating to Lewin’s actions that day. An executive summary mistakenly leaked by the Federal Aviation Administration to the press stated that terrorist Satam al-Suqami shot and killed Lewin with a single bullet around 9:20 a.m. (obviously a typo, as the plane crashed at 8:46 a.m.). But almost as soon as the memo was leaked, FAA officials claimed it was written in error, and that Lewin was more than likely stabbed, not shot. The 9/11 Commission concurred, offering a more detailed summary: based on dozens of interviews with those who spoke with flight attendants Sweeney and Ong, the commission determined that al-Suqami most likely killed Lewin by slashing him in the throat from behind as he attempted to stop the hijacking. The time of his death was reported to be somewhere between 8:15 and 8:20 a.m., which—if fact—would make Lewin the first victim of the 9/11 attacks.{90}

  The 9/11 Commission’s final report did not state with certainty that Lewin single-handedly fought the terrorists, saying: “Lewin may have tried to stop the attacks.” But no one who actually knew Lewin has a shred of doubt. In over one hundred interviews conducted with Lewin’s friends and family in the creation of this book, every subject interviewed said there was no way Lewin could have sat idly by and watched terrorists hurt flight attendants and attempt to hijack the plane. Most people said they knew he’d been heroic the moment they heard he was on the flight, and that they could write their own narrative based on what they knew of Lewin’s physical strength, counterterrorism training, and fighting spirit. Lior Netzer, who served with Lewin in the army and later worked with him at Akamai, said they had been trained to turn on their own aggressiveness like a light switch at the first sign of trouble. “The minute you hear a gunshot you go into aggressive mode,” explained Netzer. “Particularly in dealing with counterterrorism.”

  “I know Danny fought back,” said Greenberg. “Knowing his character and his training, we know that he got up and tried to do something, and I think he might have taken one of those thugs down with him. I know, beyond a doubt.” When Greenberg spoke at Lewin’s memorial, he called him “the first victim of the first war of the twenty-first century.”

  On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, several hundred friends and coworkers gathered at Akamai’s headquarters in Cambridge to remember Lewin. Dressed in black from head to toe, Leighton stood on a patch of grass in the courtyard outside the building and paid tribute to his friend. Voice wavering, he told the crowd that Lewin was a hero, and that his legacy continues to inspire him, and everyone at Akamai, to this day. Leighton dedicated a small apple tree in the courtyard to Lewin, formally unveiling a plaque in his memory at its base.

  That same day in Israel, the Jewish National Fund and the Jerusalem Municipality held a service at the country’s memorial—the largest to 9/11 outside the U.S.—honoring the five Israelis lost in the attacks, including Lewin. Peggy, Charles, Jonathan, and Michael attended. Situated at a scenic, peaceful spot tucked away in the Jerusalem Forest, the memorial can only be reached by a narrow, winding road through the trees. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke, in addition to Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. Barkat, who met
Lewin in the late ’90s at a meeting for tech entrepreneurs in Cambridge, said he considers Lewin an Israeli hero: “It took a while for us to learn that Danny had retaliated—he tried to save that plane,” Barkat said. “He excelled at everything he did; he was willing to take risks, and unfortunately, he lost his life when he took one.”

  Peggy and Charles still live in Israel in French Hill, in the same neighborhood they settled in with their three young boys in 1984. In 2002, an agent from the FBI paid them a visit, sharing the chilling recordings and transcripts from the flight attendants as evidence that Danny had been killed in some sort of struggle with the terrorists. They said the meeting brought them comfort and closure; it was an official acknowledgement of what they already knew. Peggy is still a practicing pediatrician, one of the most popular in Jerusalem. Charles is retired and continues to write poetry, which he publishes under the pen name Yaakov Ben David. Much of it contains references to the loss of his son and the violence of 9/11. Michael and Jonathan are both successful technologists and businessmen, each with their own large families in which the legend of Danny lives large. The family gathers every anniversary of 9/11 to remember Danny. Charles said he prays for him every day, multiple times. To honor Danny’s memory, the family supports the work of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute.

  Anne Lewin eventually remarried and had another child—a girl. She still lives in Brookline. Anne has never spoken publicly about the loss of her husband. Today she can only say that she still misses him terribly, and wishes their love story had not come to such a tragic end. Eitan and Itamar—who were four and eight, respectively, at the time of Danny’s death—have grown into teenagers, and friends say they are, in many ways, spitting images of their father.

  Marco Greenberg said he thinks of Lewin every day. After 9/11, he realized Flight 11 had flown almost directly over his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, just before Lewin’s murder. In 2005, Greenberg moved with his wife, Stacey, and kids to Boston from New York to try and restart his career and settle somewhere new. Instead, he said, he ended up feeling emptier than ever. He moved back to New York, only then realizing he moved not for a change, but to look for his friend. It was then that it finally hit him that Lewin was gone. In a file cabinet, Greenberg keeps an envelope filled with snapshots that illustrate their friendship and a small patch from Lewin’s army uniform, an insignia with several blue bars that Lewin gave to him when he left Israel for MIT. “I wouldn’t have anything without Danny,” he said. “But I’d give it all back to see him again.” Greenberg has worked tirelessly to keep Danny’s memory alive, including the creation of an annual writing award—on the topic of technology and cyber-terrorism—in Danny’s name at the U.S Army War College in Carlisle, P.A.

  Those who knew Lewin personally are dwindling at Akamai, but the company keeps his legacy alive with its annual “Danny Lewin Award” for excellence, given out to employees considered “titans” as once defined by Lewin as the very best. Its first winner was Mike Afergan, the Harvard student to whom Lewin once turned for the entire Apple project. Afergan is now a senior vice president. In Lewin’s name, many friends and coworkers continue to support the Akamai Foundation, the company’s charitable organization promoting math education and the next generation of technology entrepreneurs.

  A block away from the office, near the MIT computer labs where Lewin and Leighton worked out their early algorithms, the intersection of Main Street and Vassar Street was named Danny Lewin Square by the City of Cambridge to mark the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

  At the time of this book’s publication, Akamai has offices around the world, more than 3,500 employees, and a market capitalization of $6.9 billion. In 2012, the company purchased the Israeli company Cotendo, one of its largest competitors, in a deal valued at approximately $268 million. With the acquisition, Akamai finally realized Lewin’s dream of a presence in Israel. That same year, Leighton visited the Technion in Haifa, Lewin’s alma mater. With the help of Professor Freddy Bruckstein, who first realized Lewin’s genius in an academic setting, Leighton gave a lecture at the Computer Engineering Center in Lewin’s honor. When one of the young students asked how, through tempestuous market swings and the breakneck pace of emerging technology, Akamai has managed to succeed, Leighton barely hesitated: “One word, really,” he said. “Danny.”

  Today, even as Akamai regularly controls between 15 and 30 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, the company is not a household name. And it may never be, in part because Akamai remains the invisible layer—what Leighton still calls “the magic”—underlying the speed and security of the Internet as we know it. “A lot of times, when you log on and visit a Web site, you’re actually visiting Akamai,” Leighton said. Stealthily, but powerfully, Akamai delivers content for Apple’s iTunes, Facebook, and Twitter, to name a few.

  Akamai’s core technology still relies on Lewin and Leighton’s original algorithms. For this reason, TOC (the theory group at MIT) enjoys a much higher profile today. The same is true for the theory departments at top research universities around the country. And the algorithm, though still elusive and abstract, is widely appreciated and admired as all-powerful in the world of technology. Algorithms are not only the driving force behind Akamai; they are the invisible force behind Apple’s music recommendations, Amazon’s pricing and Google’s search function.

  Those who knew Lewin well, over a decade later, still marvel at the life of the friend they knew. When they imagine hearing Lewin’s voice, he is almost always telling them “You’re behind!” They agree, and they work harder because of it. When they ask themselves what could have been, they become overwhelmed with possibilities. Lewin, they say, could have easily become a tenured professor. His dream was to return to MIT, and he had plans to re-enroll for his PhD. Before his death, he became interested in the subject of infinity, which was fitting for someone who seemed to know no bounds. His family is certain he would have returned to Israel, where he could have been Prime Minister someday, another dream he harbored. But Lewin wanted to do so much, and had what it took to do it all, that there never would have been enough time for him.

  In December 2012, Leighton became Akamai’s new CEO, replacing Paul Sagan, who had been CEO since 2005. On whether he thinks Danny would be proud, Leighton is quick to credit his co-founder and best friend. “I think Danny would have been CEO,” he said. Leighton sometimes marvels at Lewin’s legacy, which he’s seen as far as Bangalore, India, where a giant, smiling photograph of Lewin and Leighton covers a wall of Akamai’s office there. “No one there knew Danny, but the work attitude and spirit they embody there is so much like his,” Leighton said.

  Leighton said he thinks often about Lewin, but no longer in the context of Akamai. Over time, he said, the feeling that Danny might charge into the room—smiling and wild-eyed with a big new idea—has faded. When he does think of Lewin, Leighton often recalls the time when they could talk for hours about their shared dream of proving mathematical theorems for a living. It was the moment in time before they took what they both knew, as theoreticians, to be a rare chance.

  Leighton is no longer teaching at MIT; he’s currently on leave, and said that for the foreseeable future he will be too busy running Akamai to return to the classroom.

  One day, however, Leighton said he’s likely to retire and become Professor Emeritus, allowing him to teach again. Academia is his lifeblood, after all, and it’s where he first fanned the spark of the bright, indomitable young student who became his business partner and his best friend.

  Acknowledgments

  The reporting and writing of this book would not have been possible without the guidance, encouragement, and trust of many people—from those who patiently walked me through the complex worlds of theoretical computer science, content delivery networks, and the Israeli Special Forces, to my talented editors and the friends and family who offered me their unfailing support.

  For entrusting me with the story of his lifelong
best friend, I thank Marco Greenberg. Marco has undertaken numerous efforts to keep Danny’s legacy alive, and when I set out to write this book he cheered me on at every turn, always repeating his conviction that Danny would want his story to be told. Marco also spent countless hours sharing memories and mementos of his friendship, details that no amount of reporting could have unearthed.

  My sincere thanks also goes to Tom Leighton, Danny’s best friend, mentor at MIT, and Akamai co-founder, for generously making the time for several lengthy interviews. Although he was promoted to CEO of Akamai during the writing of this book, Tom proved ever the gracious professor in his willingness to walk a journalist with limited schooling in the sciences through basic concepts in theory and computing. Tom’s wife, Bonnie Berger, was also giving of her time, drawing on her recollections of Danny and Tom’s extraordinary journey from MIT to Akamai.

  To the Lewin family—Peggy, Charles, Michael, and Jonathan—I am most grateful. When I first contacted them in late 2011 (after an introduction by Marco Greenberg) to explain that I planned to write a book about Danny, the Lewins kindly agreed to a meeting with me. I traveled from New Jersey to Jerusalem without knowing what, exactly, they would be comfortable sharing. But they warmly welcomed me into their home, and spent a long evening reminiscing about the life, and loss, of their son and brother.

  Thank you also to Anne Lewin Arundale. Although she did not make herself available for interviews for this book, Anne was willing to contribute a few significant details to the story, and generously allowed for the publication of several family photographs.