On September 10, 2001, Danny Lewin changed his plans.
Four of us were supposed to fly from Boston to Southern California: George Conrades, Akamai’s chief executive officer; Tim Weller, our chief financial officer; Danny, our co-founder and chief technology officer; and me. We had investor meetings at a Credit Suisse First Boston conference in Laguna Niguel and business to discuss around the emerging world of online music.
Danny needed to go back to the office. There were engineering matters that required his attention. He would catch a flight the next morning.
George didn’t want him traveling alone. He suggested that Tim or I stay behind and fly with him.
Danny told us to go ahead.
Twenty-five years later, I still return to that conversation. How ordinary it was. A change of schedule. Something to finish at work. The assumption, so complete that nobody needed to say it, that we would all see one another tomorrow.
I had joined Akamai in September 1999, when co-founder Jonathan Seelig hired me into the network infrastructure engineering group. After years in technology, media, and telecommunications investment banking and private equity, I was helping build the company’s network across Latin America and Southern Europe.
Until then, much of my professional life had involved analyzing what other people were building. At Akamai, I got to help build it.
The internet was still young enough that its promises routinely exceeded its capabilities. A website could become inaccessible precisely because people wanted to visit it. Popularity could overwhelm the servers delivering a page. The more urgently everyone wanted the same information, the harder it could become to get.
Danny and Tom Leighton, an MIT applied mathematics professor who headed the Algorithms Group in its Laboratory for Computer Science, helped develop a way around that problem. Their work distributed content across a network of servers, bringing it closer to the people requesting it and reducing congestion. They incorporated Akamai in 1998. Akamai’s company history traces that journey from mathematical research to a working business.
My job was to help extend that network into more places.
By 2000, finance had pulled me back. I went to work closely with George and Tim, alongside our president, Paul Sagan, Danny, and Tom. My responsibilities spanned corporate strategy, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and investor relations.
Those responsibilities gave me something I appreciate more with every passing year: time with the people building the company. Time in meetings, on trips, working through decisions whose outcomes none of us could know.
That was how I knew Danny.
He was a founder and a remarkable technologist. He was also my friend.
The energy, vision, and passion that people associate with him were things we experienced in the course of doing our jobs. He was part of the daily life of the company. We expected him to be there.
Early on September 11, the phone rang in my hotel room in Laguna Niguel.
It was Tim.
“Turn on CNBC.”
I was half asleep. I turned on the television and saw the coverage of the first tower.
Tim told me Danny was on that flight.
I remember the call vividly. The rest of the day is harder to put into a sequence. The catastrophe on the screen was happening to the country, to thousands of families, and to someone we had expected to meet in California.
Danny was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He was 31.
Later accounts would identify him as the person believed to have been the first killed in the attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report established that he was stabbed during the hijacking and said he may have tried to stop the hijackers. The precise circumstances of those final moments remain uncertain.
I cannot tell you what happened inside that airplane beyond the evidence that survives.
I can tell you that the day before, he had work to finish.
As the attacks unfolded, people turned to the internet for information. Major news sites buckled under the demand. Pages loaded slowly or could not be reached. The underlying network continued operating, but many of the destinations people needed were overwhelmed. Reporting documented both the strain and the efforts to keep information available.
Akamai’s technology helped news organizations respond to that surge. The infrastructure Danny had helped invent was doing the work he had believed it could do: distributing information when extraordinary numbers of people needed it at once.
That is the part of his story I have never been able to absorb completely.
While we were learning that Danny was gone, people were depending on what he had built.
Most would never know his name. They needed a page to load. They needed an update. They were trying to understand what had happened and what might happen next.
Inside Akamai, we had spent years explaining the value of speed, capacity, and reliability. That morning, those words acquired a terrible immediacy. Access to information had become part of how people endured the day.
There was no comfort in that at the time. There was work to do, and there was Danny’s absence.
We were stranded in Southern California for the rest of that week.
I spent much of that time with George. Of everything I witnessed in those days, his grief has stayed with me.
George had taken Danny under his wing. To me, their relationship had come to resemble that of a father and son. I had known George as the executive responsible for leading a company through extraordinary growth and then the turmoil that followed the technology boom. That week, I saw how deeply he loved someone he could no longer protect.
We were a young company and a close group. Danny’s death reached into every relationship around him.
There were also responsibilities that continued to demand attention. We had employees, customers, investors, and a network people depended on. We were a public company already operating in difficult circumstances. Now we had lost a co-founder whose intellect and conviction were central to how people understood Akamai.
Questions about the company’s future became inseparable from the loss we were trying to comprehend.
I had worked in finance long enough to understand why those questions would come. I had no preparation for answering them while grieving a friend.
We had to find enough composure to do the next thing. Then the next. People sometimes describe that as compartmentalizing. I remember how little separation there really was. The responsibilities and the pain occupied the same hours.
On Friday, we finally returned to Boston on a charter flight with other Boston-based executives.
We had left expecting a business trip.
We came back to a company that would have to learn how to continue without Danny.
Akamai did continue. In fact it has thrived and is now a $16 billion company.
That fact can sound inevitable from a distance of twenty-five years. It did not feel inevitable then.
Its survival and evolution represent decades of work by people who carried the company forward. Today, Dr. Tom Leighton leads a business that has expanded from content delivery into cybersecurity and cloud computing. The company he helped found with Danny continues to serve a world far more dependent on the internet than the one we knew in 1999.
As I build Alpha, I find myself thinking again about the problems that Akamai was trying to solve: how to make a powerful new capability dependable, how to build for demand that has not yet arrived, how to ensure that something works when people need it.
Artificial intelligence gives those questions another setting. Systems that act on our behalf will depend on computing, networks, and infrastructure that most of their users will never see. The promises will attract attention. Whether the underlying systems can fulfill them will shape people’s lives.
I wish I could talk to Danny about all of it.
I won’t pretend to know what he would have built, which problems would have captured his attention, or where his curiosity would have taken him. What I do know is that he would have been a "titan" of AI and would be at the cutting edge helping to solve these problems.
Anniversaries give a shared date to losses that remain intensely personal.
Today, we remember the people killed on September 11 and the families who have lived every day since with their absence. Danny was a husband and a father. Those who loved him most lost a lifetime together. No account of a company’s achievements can measure that loss.
For those of us who worked with him, there is also the strange experience of watching the future arrive without someone who helped make it possible.
I can point to what endured: a company, a network, ideas that became part of everyday life. I can explain why his work mattered. I can tell you that millions of people have benefited from it without ever knowing who he was.
But when I think of Danny today, I return to September 10.
We had a trip planned. He had something to finish. George wanted one of us to wait for him.
Danny told us to go ahead.
Twenty-five years later, I still wish we had arrived together.
