What a Distributed Computing Veteran Can Teach Student Founders
A Discussion with Paul Sagan, former CEO of Akamai Technologies
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This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Paul Sagan, former CEO of Akamai Technologies, and current XIR at General Catalyst, where he advises founders and entrepreneurs based on his more than 15 years of experience leading one of the world’s largest Internet technology companies.
Paul transitioned from being a journalist at the time the web and browser first came along in the early- to mid-90s. He was first involved in an intrapreneurial setting at Time Warner, helping to create Pathfinder, the first portal with Internet advertising. From there, he was a co-founder of Road Runner, the first consumer broadband service, and that launched him into the startup world.
- What was your first experience of working with startups in Boston?
“When I moved to Boston in 1998, I was consulting for a variety of tech startups. I met two scientists at MIT (Prof. Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin, his student) who had been working under DARPA funding to make computer networks scale and handle surges in traffic essentially through intelligent routing, caching, and load balancing. Tim Berners-Lee was at MIT at the time and challenged them to see if their research could help fix the problem of crashes taking place on popular sites. It turned out they really could.
These two scientists thought they could apply the technology they had been working on to meet a commercial need, and they asked me to join because of my business experience. Initially, I agreed to work with them for 6 months. I joined as employee #15 and to my surprise, I ended up staying there for over 15 years! It was me and an office manager, the first two of the 15 employees that were not students or professors.” 2. What has been a major barrier or hardship you’ve faced in your work and what are some peices of advice for those facing something similar?
“In the midst of the dot com bubble burst, one of our co-founders, Danny Lewin, was killed on 9/11. We were already struggling so when we had this ultimate tragedy, people thought ‘I guess your company is done for. The guy with the vision is gone.’ But we buckled down and through our anger and determination didn’t give up. We turned the company around in a dramatic way: Today Akamai enjoys about $2 billion in annual revenue with 5,000 employees and delivers 20–30% of all web traffic worldwide.
The thing is, you just have to expect that life has set backs, and you will face adversity. The ingredients you need are a big idea that will disrupt a big market and a great team. With those two, you don’t give up and you can overcome any challenge at hand with your team by your side.”
3. What are some of your favorite books, blogs, media/news channels, for keeping up with the industry?
“I gave everyone in the company “Built to Last” by Jim Collins. He lays out many of the crucial components of a team that lead to success. I also like reading fiction because a good novel often make you question your real-life priorities and values, and it’s always good to do that.
For news, I usually turn first to nytimes.com, and I rely on friends for recommendations (on what to read), as well as Twitter to sort out rapidly-changing happenings on a daily basis.”
4. If you could meet one person in the industry for coffee, who would it be and why? What would you ask them?
“I’d like to meet the three guys who invented the transistor: William Shockley, Walter Houser Brattain, and John Bardeen. It would be so interesting and fun to show them what happened as a result of their work and see their reaction. They surely couldn’t have envisioned it all, but I’d want to understand their thought process and reaction to what actually became reality, and what other ideas they had in mind.” 5. If you could be a student again, what would you do differently or the same?
“I wouldn’t have taken it quite so seriously. I think there is too much pressure on one test or one grade. I would have taken more courses that had nothing to do with what I was interested in as a career.
My advice to students is to push against the conventional wisdom as hard as you can. Break the rules. Most students who do this do end up getting permission anyway. I know a student who made up her own engineering degree. She was worried that no one would understand her competencies after graduation. But in the end, employers are simply interested in if you are an inquisitive person. It speaks volumes about who someone is when he or she is adventuresome and takes risk. No one will criticize you later in life for doing this.” 6. Who is one person that has had a strong influence on your success? What did you learn from them?
“Danny Lewin, our co-founder who was killed in 9/11, taught me how to be a leader when things get hard (even though he was much younger).
I remember one night vividly. We had flown across the country for sales meetings and there were a lot of Akamai servers broken in the area. We could have tried finding a service provider to fix it eventually, but, no, Danny had us get down on our hands and knees and fix them ourselves in the middle of the night. This was an example of doing whatever it takes to get the job done. You never say it’s not your job, and you don’t wait for someone else to do it. If you set the right example, the team will follow you, they’ll perform.”
7. What’s something your currently excited about?
“I think what I’m excited about is that we’re at a time of so much instability in the tech world. There are often periods of stability, and now we’re facing instability similar to that of the digital revolution. This time it’s being created by ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet and mobility. The first real shift was from main frames to PCs. The new shift from PC to cloud computing is even bigger. Every aspect of technology is being reinvented or could be. It’s great fun to try to find the people who are inventing the new and to get to work with them on it.
The convergence of all of mobility and ubiquity is really different. This is really why I wanted to stop running a large company and work with a variety of entrepreneurs instead.”
We’re incredibly fortunate to have Paul in our Boston startup community, to learn from his incredible wisdom time and time again. From technical expertise in web content delivery to properly leading a team through unforeseeable challenges, he is an immense resource to our student teams at Rough Draft Ventures.
Thanks for chatting with us, Paul!
