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In Memory of Daniel M. Lewin
Danny founded Akamai in September 1998, along with Tom Leighton and a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and business professionals. As chief technology officer, he was responsible for Akamai's research and development strategy, creating innovative Internet infrastructure services that would produce an entirely new industry segment and forever change the way people and companies distributed content, data, and applications worldwide. He was recently named one of the 25 most influential CTOs by InfoWorld.com, and ranked seventh in the Power 100 list of the Enterprise Systems Journal. Previously, Danny worked at IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, Israel, where he was a full-time research fellow and project leader while simultaneously completing two undergraduate degrees at the Technion, Israel's premier technology university. In 1995, Technion named him the year's Outstanding Student in Computer Engineering. At IBM, he was responsible for the development and support of the company's Genesys system, a processor verification tool that is used widely within IBM and in other companies such as AMD and SGS Thompson. First and foremost, Danny was known for his brilliance. He published and presented several breakthrough papers at top computer science conferences and received several awards, including the 1998 Morris Joseph Lewin Award for Best Masterworks Thesis Presentation at MIT. His master's thesis included some of the fundamental algorithms that make up the core of Akamai's services. He was a Ph.D. candidate in the Algorithms group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. On a personal note, he had a deep affinity for speed and freedom, maintaining an avid interest in motorcycles, fast cars, and skiing. Everyone who knew Danny knew a man who was always on the go, deeply driven, and incredibly competitive. He inspired everyone around him to work at their very best, never taking no for an answer, and calling anything that got in his way obstreperous, his most favorite word. Born in Denver, Colo., and raised in Jerusalem, Danny was an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, having served in the country's military for more than four years. He received a bachelor of arts and of science, summa cum laude, from Technion and a master's degree from MIT. He will be deeply and sadly missed. |
From the Boston Globe (now rolled into $$$ archives but copied in a popup at the Akamai page)...
Akamai looks to preserve legacy of cofounder Lewin To MIT math professor Tom Leighton, Daniel Lewin was the brilliant student who took on the challenges that others avoided. To executive Paul Sagan, Lewin was the relentless worker who merrily goaded Sagan with two-word e-mail messages reading, "You're behind." And for his customers, including the world's leading Internet news sites, Lewin was part of the team that founded Akamai Technologies Inc., whose systems allow the Internet to cope with the information demands of millions around the world. Lewin boarded American Airlines Flight 11, from Boston to Los Angeles, on Tuesday morning to visit some of those customers on the West Coast. He died that morning, along with 91 others, when terrorists slammed the aircraft into New York's World Trade Center. Suddenly, Akamai confronted the worst tragedy of its existence, even as overwhelmed news sites clamored for the services Lewin had helped to invent. Akamai's survivors now must look ahead to the challenge of preserving their company without the leadership of its cofounder. Yesterday, Lewin's colleagues spoke with pride of how his work had helped the Internet weather a level of demand unprecedented in its history. "It was part of Danny's vision for the Akamai network that it would be able to handle the greatest stresses imaginable," said Akamai president Paul Sagan. "I think yesterday it demonstrated that it could handle the unimaginable." Akamai specializes in the arcane but vital art of "content delivery." That's the business of dispersing popular Internet content to multiple locations throughout the world so that the data flows quickly even during periods of massive demands. The idea for Akamai was born in 1996, when Leighton realized that a major Web site like CNN would be ill-equipped to handle the pressure of millions of requests for news stories coming from around the world. So Leighton, a professor at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, went to work with Lewin. Lewin was born in Denver and raised in Israel where he served in the army and earned two degrees from that country's prestigious scientific university Technion. As a graduate teaching assistant in Cambridge, he became a star pupil even in the rarefied climate of MIT. "He wanted the problems no one else could do," says Leighton. "He'd go to work on them and tackle them and make good progress." Leighton and Lewin teamed up with other MIT researchers to design a network within the Internet, made up of hundreds of linked computers around the world. These computers would retain perfect copies of the most popular Web sites. A user in France who wished to visit CNN would actually get information stored at a computer in France rather than in the United States. As a result, users would download information much faster, and a single site could handle far more visitors. The tough part was making sure that all the servers in the network would have up-to-date copies of the data stored at the mother site. Leighton and Lewin worked up complex algorithms that enabled each server in the network to constantly update itself without slowing down the system. When their work was chosen as a finalist in MIT's annual entrepreneurship contest, Leighton and Lewin knew they were onto something. They began raising capital to launch Akamai, bringing in Sagan, former president of Time Inc.'s Internet operations, to serve as president. Akamai's initial public offering in October 1999 was one of the high points of the Internet boom. By December 1999, the stock price had reached as high as $344 a share. During the early months of 2000, it stabilized at close to $300. Then, in March 2000, tech stocks started to tumble, and Akamai, labeled as an Internet "pure play," was hammered by investors. By April, the stock was below $100; in September, it slid below $50. On the day before the World Trade Center disaster, Akamai's stock price was under $3. But unlike many slumping Internet companies, Akamai's product remains in high demand. The company has more than 1,300 customers, and a network of 12,000 servers in 820 network centers in 63 countries. The Akamai network underwent its most severe test on that horrible Tuesday morning. But even as stunned employees learned of their loss, Akamai was faced with yet another crisis - the biggest surge of demand ever seen for Internet news services. Leighton said that usage of the Akamai network was five times higher than the previous peak, during the 2000 presidential election and recount. Most of that boost came from worldwide efforts to download video images of the burning skyscrapers. Akamai set up a situation room linking its engineers with its major news media customers. At Akamai's network operations center, technicians studied a giant projection map of the world, remotely activating extra servers where data demand was greatest. It was the system that Lewin had helped build with equations and his own hands, and at the moment of greatest trial, it all worked. According to Keynote Systems, a company that tracks performance of the Web's top sites, the leading news services were handling the vast flow of traffic comfortably by mid-afternoon. "[Tuesday] was the most challenging day for our company," said Leighton. "It was also the most successful day for our company." Now Akamai faces a future without one of its key leaders. Sagan and Leighton say the company is ready. Tuesday's tragedy spurred interest in the company's EdgeSuite service, designed to shoulder most of the load of running a high-capacity Web site. Though he won't name names, Leighton said, "there are very major news sites that crashed, and became EdgeSuite customers." And the company plans to keep on innovating. Of Akamai's 1,100 workers, 300 are employed in research and development, and more than 60 of these hold doctorate degrees. "[Lewin] helped recruit them and train them," said Leighton. "Danny is someone who, personally, there's no way to replace," added Sagan. "But his vision was to create a talented, motivated team. In Danny's memory, we're determined to make it successful." Hiawatha Bray can be reached by e-mail at bray@globe.com. D.C. Denison can be reached by e-mail at denison@globe.com. This story ran on page 1 of the Boston Globe on 9/13/2001. |
Akamai Technologies is deeply saddened by the passing of Danny Lewin, co-founder, chief technology officer, and board member of the Company. Danny was on board the American Airlines Flight that crashed in New York City on September 11. Danny was 31 years old and is survived by his wife and two sons. 
From InfoWorld...
| Akamai's president recalls the profound influence the late Daniel Lewin had on the Internet By Eve Epstein September 13, 2001 12:16 pm PT |
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THE DEATH OF Akamai Technologies Co-Founder and CTO Daniel Lewin was one of the tragic losses for the IT community in this week's terrorist attacks. Lewin, 31, was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11, one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, hijacked on its flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Lewin's leadership both as the founder of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai and within the IT community prompted InfoWorld's CTO magazine to name him one of the 25 most influential CTOs earlier this year. Akamai President Paul Sagan spoke to CTO Executive Editor Eve Epstein about Lewin's legacy as a technology developer and business leader. InfoWorld: Can you tell me a little about Daniel Lewin's history in founding the company?  Sagan: Danny came to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1990s as a graduate student in computer theory and mathematics to study with [Akamai Co-founder and Chief Scientist] Tom Leighton, a professor at MIT. They worked on a number of distributed-computing and network-theory problems. Tom and Danny and a group at Tom's lab worked on this project using Defense Department grants to look at network routing problems and traffic routing problems and whether mathematics could be used to solve network, or in this case, Internet, congestion problems. So in essence what they were doing was looking [into whether] you could do massive parallel processing and distributed computing using the Internet or IP as the fundamental connection, because if you could, they believed you could create a much less expensive and much more effective computer.I think what we see many years later is that Danny was one of the visionaries, proponents, and creators of what the entire computing industry is going toward. Danny's goal was not to build a Web site acceleration company. He figured out a way to do distributed computing on a massive basis in a reliable, fault-tolerant way. And we see other examples of that idea ... Not Danny's technology, but that idea is now generally accepted. When you hear about .NET at Microsoft, WebSphere at IBM, Sun ONE at Sun Microsystems, "Computing on Demand" from Compaq, those are all ideas around distributed computing. I think it's generally accepted in the industry that that's where we're all going. And Danny was one of the early people who understood how it could be done and that it could be done, actually created technology to do it, and then commercialized it. So I think one of the really great losses to the industry is the loss of a visionary who's helped influence a true sea change in the way people think about computing and not just the Internet or online. InfoWorld: What was his legacy for the Internet era that we're still in? Sagan: I think that as a communications medium the Internet had one of its defining moments this week, regrettably around this tragedy. It's taken its place as one of the most reliable forms of communication. In New York when TV wasn't reliable, when phones weren't reliable, people turned to the Internet, and it was reliable. That's part of Danny's legacy and, of course, the tragic irony is that he didn't see it happen, because he lost his life in the tragedy. His vision has helped the Internet get to a level people thought it might, but weren't sure it could. In the early days when we went around trying to get early customer support and partner support for Akamai and we described what we were doing, people didn't say that that wouldn't be helpful, they mostly said it wouldn't be possible. It wasn't that they didn't like the price or something else, it was simply they said that can't be done. And part of Danny was his attitude, which wasn't arrogance but was "Yes, it can; here's the logical answer and the proof, and we're going to demonstrate it." He pushed us all to take on this big challenge and make it work. I think that's a big piece of his legacy, that through almost sheer will on top of his intelligence he saw the vision come together. InfoWorld: How long had you known him? Sagan: I had known him a little more than three years. I was asked to do some of the original due diligence work on the company by somebody who wound up being one of the original investors. So I got to know Danny and Tom and the other founders and early members of the team when they were still working in the lab at MIT. [I] wound up being one of the people who recommended that the company get an investment, so those people wound up being the early investors. I'd gotten to know Danny and Tom in particular and liked them a great deal; in fact I was so infected by Danny's enthusiasm that when they asked me to drop everything else I was doing and join them, the only answer I could give them was "yes." So I'm one of the very lucky people who have been able to work with Danny for the last three years. InfoWorld: He was so young, which isn't always unusual in this business. But what are the qualities you think that propelled him at such a young age to have been so successful? Sagan: Danny was one of the smartest people I've ever met, but beyond that he was motivated, driven to succeed, unwilling to ever do anything less than his best, and expecting no less from other people. He was extremely competitive and simply would not accept a "no" answer. InfoWorld: What was he going to do in Los Angeles? Sagan: He was on his way to speak at a conference and visit prospective customers. He was doing what Danny often does, which is get on a plane, go visit people to talk about his vision for Akamai and what we do, and then get on a red-eye and fly somewhere else to do it all over again. InfoWorld: How is his loss going to impact the company, obviously emotionally, but also in business terms? Sagan: It's a great loss for us, and nothing can replace him, especially as a friend. But one of his visions was to create a great company that could scale, and to now have 12,000 servers over 60 countries and thousands of customers meant we had built a company that was of great scale and could operate without any one person doing any one thing. And one of Danny's other great legacies and great skills was his ability to attract and motivate people. He helped recruit most of the more than 300 engineers, who include more than 60 Ph.Ds, in the company. So we believe that there is on the engineering side, on the management side, and in every other part of the company a deep bench of people who Danny believed in and who can carry out the mission of Akamai in his honor. InfoWorld: You all seemed to know rather quickly that he was on that plane. How did you find out? Sagan: We knew where he was going, we knew what flight he usually takes. We knew through his office assistant what flight he was booked on, and a member of management had been speaking to Danny on his cell phone at the airport when he was getting on the airplane, so we didn't see much room for a miracle. InfoWorld: We picked him as one of the most influential CTOs in the country. I wonder how he influenced you and others at Akamai? Sagan: He influenced us personally and professionally in very strong ways. Professionally he was one of the people, particularly along with Tom, who had the vision for what Akamai would do. He clearly influenced us and then [he influenced] the industry on what was possible with Internet technology and distributed computing. I think that particularly on the engineering side he was a great lesson to people here and has inspired them to do great work and I'm sure continuing into the future throughout the industry. Personally, he was a born leader. He knew how to motivate people and get us to more when we already thought we were doing our best. He always knew we were never doing anywhere near what we were capable of and he got us all to understand that and to do more. InfoWorld: How did he do that? Sagan: One was by example: He just worked tirelessly; when he asked you to do more you knew he was doing even more, so you owed it to the effort to try harder. Danny had the saying "You're behind." It wasn't ridicule; it was a way of saying you haven't set a high enough standard because you can always set one higher, you can always do more, which means you haven't done it yet, [so] let's get to it. And I hear that voice always in the back of my head because Danny would just walk by the door and bark it out and keep going. And he didn't even need to know what you were doing, he just knew that you could do better. We would see that in everything he did and I think it got us all to try harder all the time, which is something we can take not just through our work life but through everything else we do. I think the other thing people should know is that he was a person of great humor and warmth and compassion. The things I will remember most about him are more personal moments. My youngest daughter was having a problem with a special math problem one night, so I told her to call Danny, and he helped her solve the problem. He thought it was fun, because he liked those kinds of challenges. Eve Epstein is executive editor of InfoWorld's CTO magazine. |
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