#24 No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet

What I learnd by reading No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet by Molly Knight Raskin. --- When Danny was excited about something, you couldn't help but get excited too (3:00) Steve Jobs had one speed: GO! (6:00) Danny joins Israel's special forces (10:00) "Life is too short to be bored. Only boring people are bored." (19:00) The idea for Akamai (22:00) "If he didn't know something, he'd go learn it." (28:00) Building a company the right way (31:00) Finding a business model (35:00) Passion is worth $500,000 (38:30) The first product (42:00) "My goal was to express it in layman's terms so that your grandmother could understand it." (44:00) Finding the right price/model (45:00) The best salesperson (48:10) "Hi, this is Steve Jobs, and I want to buy your company." (54:00) "I have this company of one hundred ten people, headed by one of the biggest businessmen around with lots of money in the bank, and I'm just a graduate student." (57:00) "In less than one year, a tiny startup out of MIT had grown to a company with a market valuation than that of General Motors" (58:30) The last day of Danny's life (1:00:00) ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  In the spring of 2011, a friend asked if I was interested in a job co-producing an independent film tribute for the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The subject, he explained, was a passenger on the first plane to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. From there, the story took on a life of its own. It is the story of Danny Lewin, who was almost certainly the first victim of the 9/11 attacks. It's the story of an extraordinary gifted young man who believed anything was possible and that nothing stand in his way. Of an all-American kid who moved to Israel against his will, ended up falling hopelessly in love with the country, and served as an officer in the most elite unit of the Israeli army.

• 0:42David Senra?

  Of a young soldier who trained to hunt and kill terrorists, and who, in a tragic twist of irony, later died at their hands. Of a loud, irreverent computer science student who formed a beautiful friendship with a soft-spoken, reserved professor. Of a husband and a father who spent years struggling to make ends meet and became a billionaire almost overnight. Of a theoretical mathematician who wrote a set of algorithms that would change the internet forever. So that's from the preface of the book, "No Better Time: The Brief Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet," by Molly Knight Raskin.

• 1:24David Senra?

  That one paragraph is a great description, I guess, of why I think this book is important and why I wanted to cover it on the podcast. In his short 31-year life, he winds up becoming an elite officer, let's say in the Israeli version of, kind of like the Navy SEAL equivalent of what we have in America, and becomes an extremely talented computer science student, and then founds a company and becomes a billionaire. So, he got a lot done in his short time here. Okay, so let's jump into, right into the book. This is a part I found interesting where Danny's future co-founder, Professor Leighton, is describing Danny's personality.

• 2:07David Senra?

  So it says, "He," which is Danny, who they're referring to, "he was immediately assigned to Professor Leighton. First is his teaching assistant, then is his research assistant. Professor Leighton was at that time the head of the algorithms group at LCS." When they refer to LCS throughout the book, that's the laboratory, that's MIT's Laboratory of Computer Science. So Professor Leighton's heading that, the algorithms group at LCS, and he strikes up a, starts to build a relationship with Danny. And it says, "Leighton soon found himself looking forward to Lewin," that's Danny's last name, "to Lewin's visits, which punctuated his typically quiet, serious academic life with bursts of exuberance. And it wasn't just the student's gusto that intrigued Leighton. When he spoke about topics that energized him,

• 2:52David Senra?

  which seemed to include almost everything, Lewin became so animated, arms gesticulating, eyes ablaze, that his enthusiasm was infectious." We're going to come back to his enthusiasm, his passion, over and over again in the book, too. "What stood out to me was how engaging he was, almost like this live wire. When Danny was excited about something, you couldn't help but get excited too."

• 3:17David Senra?

  Few paragraphs down, it says, "In the cluttered, unkept halls of LCS, over desks piled high with papers and textbooks, are crossing the campus quads, Lewin and Leighton spent hours absorbed in mind-bending conversations about math and computer science. I felt like I was talking to an equal, we called Leighton. He'd think of clever ways to take an idea in some new direction. Lewin joined Leighton's algorithms group, which was grappling with a challenging set of problems centered on this new mode of communication, the internet, and some barriers to its growth." The reason this is important, well, let me give you some context first. If you listened to last week's podcast, the events in No Better Time take place around the same

• 4:02David Senra?

  time as the events in the new, new thing. So we're talking late 90s, early 2000s. And this sentence right here, it says, "The algorithm of the group is meeting and they're grappling with the challenging set of problems centered on this new mode of communication, the internet, and some of the barriers to its growth." That is the fundamental problem they're solving, and their solution is founding the company of Akamai. And we'll see how they get there in a second. So let's skip ahead a little bit.

• 4:32David Senra?

  Oh, and it's something I don't want to confuse you, but the book doesn't go in chronological order. Sometimes it goes back and forth. So even though I'm moving chronologically through the book with my notes and highlights, that part that I just read, this is after, so Danny's, he's already served time in the Israeli army, right? Then he graduated from college and now he got accepted to MIT to become a graduate student. So that's when he meets Layton. He read a book back in Israel that Layton wrote and Danny decided he had to work with this guy. And he didn't expect to found a company with him, which that's obviously what happened.

• 5:15David Senra?

  He just wanted to learn from him because Danny wanted to be an academic.

• 5:20David Senra?

  Okay, so let's skip ahead. Hopefully this is making sense to you. Oh, so I was listening to, this next note I left for me, for myself, was I was listening to the podcast. It's NPR's podcast, How I Built This. So if you're listening to this podcast, you should probably be interested in that one as well. Where they do interviews with people that built companies and as opposed to me reading books about people that build companies. But there was, the guy that founded Atari and also founded Chuck E. Cheese, I just did an episode on him. His name is Nolan Bruschnell? Bruschnell? I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce his last name. But I've been interested in him before and I've even researched and looked up some books that were written about Atari that I might include on the podcast in the future.

• 6:04David Senra?

  But he had this, one of the interesting stories, the reason I know about Nolan, going back to this idea that books are the original hyperlinks and they kind of lead us from one idea to another. I became aware of Nolan, I was obviously aware of the two brands he built. Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, but I didn't know who the founder was. Well, they, in the two jobs, two books I read and covered on this podcast about Steve Jobs, they mentioned that Jobs used to work for Nolan at Atari. And in the How I Built This podcast, there was a sentence, a quote that Nolan said that stuck out of my mind. And I wrote it down here when I got to this section in No Better Time. And it said, "Steve Jobs had one speed: go." So, we're going to see Danny has a little bit of that in him as well.

• 6:49David Senra?

  So, let's go to this book. "Oftentimes, ideas made their way into his dreams, jolting him out of sleep at odd hours. The same was true for Lewin, who was known to fire off lengthy, thoughtful email missives in the middle of the night. It's like working on a crossword puzzle. You get stuck and you put it away. Then you won't think about it for a while and suddenly, bang, you have the answer, because the brain works even when you're not aware of it." That's what happens with math. So, remember, they're still, at this point, they're still rooted in trying to find, trying to see if there's an algorithmic solution to the congestion issues of the early internet.

• 7:29David Senra?

  Any of you that are old enough that remember using the internet, maybe in the late 90s, remember terms like worldwide wait, because there's certain websites that would just, the more people tried to access them, they would just crash or just wouldn't work. This is largely something of the past, due in part to companies like Akamai. Alright, so let's go back into this quote. "With Lewin in lockstep, Layton's life began to move just a bit faster. Even Bonnie Berger," this is Layton's wife, so I hate introducing all these names, because I know even like when I'm reading a book and they have a bunch of names and then they reference the last name like a couple pages later, like, wait, who's that guy?

• 8:13David Senra?

  So, let's just say, this is Danny's co-founder's wife. Okay, her name is Bonnie. "Even Bonnie said she couldn't help but poke her head in her husband's office when she heard Lewin stop by. 'It was quite a circus when Danny arrived,' recalled Bonnie. 'He just was the most energetic force that you could imagine. It was hard to ignore. I'd come in and listen, and he would be jumping around the whiteboard with this muscular, physical power.'"

• 8:41David Senra?

  So, already we've seen a few references to Danny's energy. He was, he had basically one speed as well. And that was like a frantic energetic pace forward. She said something there at the end I want to bring up though because parts of this that she's referencing I skip over. More than a few people that meet Danny are surprised. She says, "He's jumping around the whiteboard with this muscular, physical power." So Danny kind of, if you ever see pictures of him, he doesn't, he doesn't look like the typical academic or the typical computer science student. Obviously, he was in supreme physical shape, really, really strong, kind of built like a stocky tank.

• 9:27David Senra?

  They talk about in the book how in, when he was in the army or when he was in the, what they called a unit, and we'll get there in a minute. They would have to do like 24-hour hucks, or excuse me, rucks, rather. Which is basically just 24-hour march with a heavy like pack on their back and gear. So he, he spent the majority of his adolescence, in addition to being really, really good at school, building up his physical endurance and his strength training. So he's a kind of a, an outlier there. Let's skip ahead again.

• 10:08David Senra?

  Okay, actually this worked out perfectly because this is the note that I left. It's called "The Unit." And it talks about...

• 10:18David Senra?

  Okay, so it's, "The Israeli army has a reputation for military strikes on some of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations. If there's one unit of the IDF, which is Israeli Defense Force, I think, responsible for these daring exploits, it's..." Okay, now you can see why I call this "The Unit" because...

• 10:37David Senra?

  It's Sayuret Matkau, also known as the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, or simply "The Unit." So we're ju- I'm just gonna, I'm not even trying to pronounce that word again. We're just gonna call it "The Unit."

• 10:52David Senra?

  Okay, so it says it's often, "The Unit is often compared to the American Navy SEALs and Britain's Special Air Service." Let's see. Skip, uh, it says, "Okay, the commanders of the unit were not looking for..." So, uh, the author here is quoting another book called "The Elite", which, um, the author of "The Elite" is defining the type of warrior that the early leaders of the unit recruited. A tradition that still holds true today. So this is the quote from the book. "The commanders of the unit were not looking for cold-blooded killers, nor did they seek robots who would follow orders blindly. They sought innovative men who could, like spies, work alone behind enemy lines and like guerrillas,

• 11:35David Senra?

  improvise with skill, determination, and well-directed firepower when operating in hostile surroundings. The soldiers in the brigade must also possess above-average intelligence and technological savvy." So, the reason I highlighted that is because if you take the, the combat and the war out of that, those are, uh, traits that I would say that mo- that would serve most, like, founders well. So, uh, not robots who'd follow orders blindly, okay? Check. Uh, "They sought innovative men who could, like spies, work alone behind enemy lines." Check. "Like guerrillas, improvise with skill, determination, and well-directed firepower

• 12:18David Senra?

  when operating in hostile surroundings." Check, check, check. "The soldiers in the brigade must also possess above-average intelligence and technological savvy." Uh, I don't think you need above-average intelligence to be a founder, although it's probably helpful, and technological savvy is, uh, probably also helpful, and at this point, almost necessary. So we're going to see kind of uncommon person that Danny was. "From the tens of thousands who try out, the IDF selects a few thousand recruits who are eligible to participate in a one-day test camp." This is the process at which they're whittling down the people that actually get to go to the unit. So from 10,000, they get a few thousand recruits who are eligible to participate in one-day test camp.

• 13:02David Senra?

  "Those who pass proceed to a five-day test camp. This camp is so grueling that doctors and psychologists constantly monitor the recruits throughout the process, which involves long stretches without sleep and repetitive, exhausting physical and mental tasks. The purpose of this test is to weed out those who lack the mental toughness to withstand the pressures and potential perils of a highly secretive mission. From this test, anywhere from 20 to 40 men are selected for the unit. Of those chosen, only one is promoted to the rank of officer."

• 13:42David Senra?

  So the funnel goes from 10,000 to a few thousand to 20 to 40 to one. Okay, so here, I'm not going to go too much into detail of their training. I think it's very similar to Bud's training for Navy SEALs, which if you're really interested, you can find tons of information on the Internet. You could listen to Jaco's podcast, or you could Google this guy named David Goggins. Both of those are former Navy SEALs. Both are really disciplined and driven people, kind of motivating if you like that kind of thing. So there is something that they have to do.

• 14:25David Senra?

  I'm not going to read all, I don't want to read all of this. But they do have to do this non-stop march of about 75 miles. It says, "The march is one of the most important accomplishments, both physically and psychologically, for soldiers in special forces." I don't know if it...

• 14:42David Senra?

  Okay, yeah, so it goes into more detail here, actually. I highlighted a passage on the next page. And I'm not gonna... His name's not important. He's a friend who served with Lewin in the unit, and later worked with him. "Remembered his surprise when he passed Lewin during a training session involving a ten-mile hilly walk, weighted down with full gear of about fifty pounds." Now, you're gonna see why I included this. This section tells us more about Lewin's personality. "Lewin was known as a strong walker in these types of exercises, rarely showing any visible signs of fatigue. On this particular walk, although he completed it on time, Lewin seemed to be struggling, often couching down to rest and catch his breath. When asked to explain,

• 15:27David Senra?

  Lewin confessed that he had voluntarily doubled his load of gear to prove to himself that he could still finish."

• 15:38David Senra?

  And he's doing this when he's in his early twenties. So we're clearly saying that he has almost what I would classify like a psychotic drive, which we're gonna see serves him very well when he's building Akamai.

• 15:54David Senra?

  So the chapter I'm still reading from...

• 15:59David Senra?

  Okay. So this is how Danny... This is what I mean when they go out of chronological order, but I don't... It's probably not important. Okay, so how... It's probably not important that it go out of chronological order, that is. "How Danny became a..." So this is how Danny becomes aware of his co-founder. So we're going back in time now. He's... He was in the unit, and then he requests leave because he wants to complete his college degree. So let me just read this. "Months later, Lewin requested leave from the IDF to attend the Israel Institute of Technology. He and Anne," that is his wife, he married early, "were expecting their first son, Ethan, and Anne was eager to relocate to the quiet scenic city of Haifa."

• 16:44David Senra?

  I don't know how to pronounce that. To begin their life together. But even Haifa couldn't slow Lewin down. About two years into his studies at the Israeli Institute of Technology, they're calling it by its name, but I don't know how to pronounce it. So, we're just gonna call it IIT. Lewin came across a textbook at the library on the topic of parallel algorithms. He was so moved by its depth and beauty that he brought it home, pulling it out of his backpack and telling Anne that he'd never seen such an incredible research. Lewin became fixated on the book and its author, MIT professor Tom Leighton. Inspired solely on what he'd learned from the pages of this massive tome, he told Anne that he was determined to meet Leighton.

• 17:25David Senra?

  At that time, Lewin's pursuit of the MIT professor must have sounded a bit outlandish to family or friends. For Lewin, however, it was nothing but sincere. He applied to and was accepted to MIT. And after less than four years in Haifa, the young family was packing for Cambridge. Anne was pregnant with their second son. So, the importance of books, which is how they can change your life. While he's studying, Denny just randomly finds his book. He becomes so enthralled with the ideas in it that he seeks out the person that wrote it. Turns out, the person that wrote it is a professor at MIT. So, Denny's like, alright, well, fuck it, I gotta go to MIT then.

• 18:09David Senra?

  And he moves his entire family halfway around the world. So, I say the power of books, it's really the power of ideas, but in this case, it was just in book form. And I'm partial to books, I mean, I'm partial to books and reading. I mean, I am doing a podcast on books, right? Uh, let's see. Skipping ahead. And I know sometimes, I listen to these back, especially when I'm editing them, and there's some pauses, and then you can hear me kinda like rifling through the pages of the book. I don't really edit that out. I've said before on many podcasts, I really want this to be like an informal recording, almost like if we were sitting down together.

• 18:53David Senra?

  ...as friends and I was just telling you the ideas I liked in the book. So I try not to, I mean, I don't want to leave large pauses, but I do, I don't want it to see, seem like I just sit down and I could just rattle all this off. Like, there's a lot of pauses, there's a lot of me messing up, there's a lot of me trying to find notes. Most of the work of the podcast obviously happens in reading the books, because it takes hours, and then making the notes. So, once I'm done with that, I just try to immediately record while the ideas just refresh my mind. Uh, let's see. So, there's some interesting things. There's a quote I like, some, uh, some insights to how Danny parents and his potential, and this all happens on almost the same page. So, this quote, uh, he said,

• 19:38David Senra?

  "Life is too short to be bored. Only boring people are bored." That, I also don't understand when people are like, "I'm bored." It's like, you live in the information age, there's tons of stuff to occupy your, tons of stuff to work on. Uh, this is his, him in parenting. "In an interview for a documentary tribute to Danny, Ann," remember, that's his wife, "recalled the thrill the boys got out of Lewin's word games. Every week, he would comb the dictionary for the quirkiest, strangest sounding word he could find, write its definition on an index card, and pin it to the fridge. 'Obstreperous' became one of his favorite words. An ironic choice, considering it used to describe someone who was stubborn, resistant

• 20:18David Senra?

  to control, and noisy. Tongue-in-cheek, Lewin used it to describe others, not himself, namely, anyone who would got, who got in his way. Later, he transformed it into a catchphrase among his coworkers when referring to competitors or naysayers." This is the part on Danny's potential. "Despite the financial stress," so they're talking about the fact that they're a young couple, two kids, Danny's not making much money because he's a full-time academic, Ann is working as well, and taking care of the kids. So, they're struggling right now. "Despite the financial stress Danny and Ann faced, Ann never lost confidence in Danny's potential for success. She didn't know anything about algorithms..."

• 21:03David Senra?

  ...or computer science, but she did know her husband was brilliant and determined. In a documentary tribute to Danny, Anne recalled a conversation she once had him, she once had with him in their apartment in Haifa, where Danny kept a big, bulky, personal computer that he loved to program. At the time, the World Wide Web had just made its debut, and it was unclear to most people what the impact of this newfangled technology would be. But Anne said Danny had a clear idea of its potential, explaining excitedly that the Internet would allow her to use a computer in Israel to access information from a library at Harvard University.

• 21:45David Senra?

  Anne said she expressed her amazement, but added it sounded complicated. Danny replied, "It is complicated, but can you imagine the possibilities? Can you imagine what we'll be able to do if someone makes it easy?"

• 22:03David Senra?

  Okay, so the very next page, we're gonna see that Akamai, the idea for Akamai actually comes from a class project, because remember Danny's goal is to become an academic. He just wants to spend his time like doing math and computer science, and I guess envisioned a life of like a ten-year professor for himself. So, "Publish or Perish." "It is a well-known saying that the nation's best universities, ones that sum up the fear among research-oriented graduate students, that failure to publish in scholarly journals means academic doom." By late fall, so that's what he's working on, by late fall, Lewin was beginning to feel the pressure. Uh, there's two names here that are not important, they're his classmates.

• 22:46David Senra?

  These two guys had already produced and published an impressive paper. But Lewin and his three writing partners, Eric, Rena, and Matthew, were stuck. "We didn't feel like we were having much success." Their focus was still, and this is the important part, "Their focus was still on using math to relieve the congestion plaguing the complex architecture of the Internet. Specifically, they were still searching for a solution to the problem of the world-wide wait." I think the world-wide wait was like, uh, was, I think that term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, and it just refers, like I said earlier, to the congestion that a popular website could have, and then it causes to load slowly or not at all.

• 23:30David Senra?

  So we're continuing this, so they're like, "Hey, what the heck? How can we figure, how can we find a solution to the congestion of the complex architecture that is the Internet?" And Lewin, Danny's been thinking about it, and he's gonna share an idea he has, and he's not sure of the idea, though. So his, one of his writing, he's talking to one of his writing partners, Eric. So it says, "Eric distinctly recalled the day Lewin shared the new idea with him, and just how insecure he was about its potential. We were walking together across campus, and Danny was kind of down on his research. He told me about consistent hashing, and I'll never forget it, because he said, 'Consistent hashing is a pathetic idea, but it's my idea.'" According to Eric, Danny originally thought his idea of consistent hashing was simplistic

• 24:15David Senra?

  and impractical. He was worried it was small and worthless, just something cute. To clarify, in mathematical jargon, cute means the work looks good on the surface, but lacks utility and mathematical sophistication. Danny and Eric thought that they had a cute idea to work with, but they knew they needed to improve it somehow. Eric, though, was uncertain of this, Eric, though, was uncertain if this could be done. "Honestly," this is a quote from Eric, "Honestly, we didn't know very much about how the Internet worked at the time, and we were struggling with how to convert this real-world problem of file storage into a mathematical model. On paper, our mathematical model didn't seem that realistic, so the whole thing seemed

• 24:59David Senra?

  kind of shaky to me. However pathetic Danny himself felt it to be, however, he did believe consistent hashing might have some practical utility. In that same conversation in which he called it pathetic, I remember Danny saying he really, he really thought something like this could exist." Okay, so they're, they're, they have an idea, they're not sure about it, so they're like, "Hey, let's go meet with Tom." Which is the professor that Danny wanted to go to MIT to work with. By the time Danny and Eric arranged a meeting with Tom, they hadn't gained a great deal of confidence in consistent hashing. Layton, that's Tom's last name. Layton remembered the two of them appearing slightly embarrassed when they approached him for feedback.

• 25:44David Senra?

  "They presented it almost as an afterthought," Layton said. "They told me about the concept in what was an apologetic way." Almost instantly, however, Layton saw something significant. "I thought, oh my goodness, because they had a whole bunch of stuff. Proof of this, proof of that, all these things." "I said, wow, that's a gem, that's really cool, and you wouldn't expect you could do this." Layton had never thought about hashing the way Lewin and Lehman, that's Eric's last name, presented it. In fact, their approach seemed almost impossible. But there it was in front of him, stapled neatly and sitting on his desk. Lewin didn't yet have the deep proofs, but he had something, and to Layton, it was beautiful.

• 26:27David Senra?

  "I remember being struck," Layton confessed. "It wasn't a tour de force technically, in mathematics, you often want to have that kind of thing. But it was just, I thought it was elegant and fundamental, and I remember just appreciating the beauty, the elegance, of what I thought was going to be the importance of it." According to Layton, the potential power of consistent hashing was rooted in its simplicity. This is, I think, the most important sentence of this paragraph. Lewin had taken a succinct problem, one that was easy to state but seemingly impossible to solve, and created a solution so simple and elegant, it was almost obvious. Mathematics has a lot of examples like this, where you could take a thousand people and they wouldn't be able to solve the problem,

• 27:11David Senra?

  but they could all quickly agree when you show them the solution that it's easy. It's a weird thing to be convinced that a solution works is much different than coming up with one. At the time, Layton looked at Lewin and Lehman and exclaimed, "You've done it, this is really important, and you've got to give it a name and state the definition of the problem, because this sounds useful." It was the beginning of the end of the world wide waits.

• 27:40David Senra?

  Skipping ahead a little bit, here's some quotes from Danny's co-founder about, well first about himself. So this is Tom talking. He said, "I might have been the most unlikely person in the world to start a company." I included a quote in there, and I've done this on many podcasts, just to kind of push against this idea that people, only young people can start companies. When he says, "I might have been the most unlikely person in the world to start a company," Tom is already in his 40s, and he loves his, he has a very successful career as an author and an academic. And he just didn't, had no idea that he'd ever go into business. And then this is a quote that Tom has on Danny, and then I want to tell you why I included this.

• 28:22David Senra?

  "It was through that process that I really got the impression that Danny had tremendous drive and no fear. If he didn't know something, he'd go to learn it." So he talks about his tremendous drive. Later in the book, there's a story, and I don't think it's going to be included in the podcast, but Akamai's already founded, and Danny's doing like, sales calls. And he goes to a company's office, and he winds up having to get physically escorted out of the office by security, because he refused to take "no" for an answer, and wouldn't, um, wouldn't leave. And so he gets kicked out by arms, by security, and shows up the next day, and does it all over again.

• 29:04David Senra?

  So I don't know if he, that he ever got that, these people as a client, but he's obviously psychotic? Maybe in a good way, I don't know. Um, okay, skipping ahead a little bit, so they, they, there's a bunch of the, the book, I'm going to skip ahead. Even though the book's relatively short, it's like 250 pages, probably takes like, maybe seven, eight hours to read. There's just, obviously for brevity's sake, I can't include all of it on the podcast. But, uh, they, Tom, Professor Tom, loves the idea, right? And so they're, they're like, thinking, "Hey, uh, there might be like, a commercial application to this idea."

• 29:50David Senra?

  And-

• 29:52David Senra?

  They start to assemble, but they don't know, so again, they're not thinking about starting a company yet. But at the same time, Danny's doing really poorly financially. He needs money. So he hears about this competition called like the 50K. And it's a business plan, like a, like a business plan competition, I guess you would call it. At, at MIT. And they decide, hey, why don't we assemble a group using like other MIT students? And we'll just act like we have, like, we're gonna do this company and we'll see like, basically, they're trying to give other external validation for their idea.

• 30:30David Senra?

  So like, well, why don't we take this, this, uh, enter this contest with the, with the desire to win, because if they win, they get $50,000. And Danny at the time thought they got the money and like they just keep it, but you're supposed to use it to start the company. So they find that out later.

• 30:47David Senra?

  So over the next few months, they wind up building an oppressive team. They practice like the, their pitch on what, like what their solution is for the problem of the worldwide weight. And they wind up losing the competition. I think they wind up coming in like fifth place. They, they win like a thousand dollars or something like that.

• 31:08David Senra?

  And a lot of the team after they lost kinda gave up on the idea. And Danny and Tom do not though. So this is an email, we're gonna get into an email that, uh, well, let me just read it. It's about building a company, the quote unquote, the right way. "A week after the 50K loss, on his 28th birthday, Lewin sent Greenberg a contemplative email from Toronto, where he was presenting research on probable, probable, probabilistically checkable proofs at an academic conference." And now here's the start of Danny's email to Greenberg. "Silicon Valley makes money on air." There are many in the business who've become horrendously wealthy and they don't even have a product or client.

• 31:53David Senra?

  You may say, "So what? That is great. You do nothing and become a zillionaire." Unfortunately, this is not the case. The main thing you have to do is to dedicate yourself to telling lies for a number of years and to spreading bullshit for many, many years. Some people are comfortable with this as long as the payoff at the end is high enough. I am not. The plan is to become a successful company in the right way. That is, have a product, have a market, and have customers who are buying your product. In order to do this well, we have to focus on building the technology and not on fundraising. Toward the close of the email, Lewin also expressed hope that once he got the company off the ground,

• 32:36David Senra?

  venture capitalists would take over the bulk of the work. Quote, "This will allow me to return to my family life and to see my wonderful kids and wife," he wrote. "That's something far more valuable than millions." Lewin didn't need millions, but he desperately needed some money in the bank. The financial woes he and Ann faced were only worsening. They were close to broke. Lewin had his long-term hopes pinned on Akamai, but the company still existed only on paper.

• 33:08David Senra?

  So, I'm gonna skip ahead. They wind up building, instead of, they realize, hey, we can't just, previously, keep in mind, this is during the dot-com bubble. They were, basically had like, you know, like a white paper, maybe a deck, and they had a theory on a technology that is proved like mathematically proficient, but they didn't have an actual product. So, as you can see from that email, Dan is like, "No, we need to build an actual product." So they build an actual product, they test the technology, they run like a, basically a beta test, and they're doing it in the...

• 33:47David Senra?

  In LCS at MIT. And, well, let me just read that part. So this is where they start testing technology to see if the math is actually going to work under, in real life.

• 34:01David Senra?

  So they test it, it winds up working, and it goes, "The biggest victory was demonstrating the system's fault tolerance. If they shut down one machine, the system would rebalance the data load and avert a crash. As the students increased the flow of traffic on the prototype, they were stunned to see it continue to run smoothly and efficiently. The more content they loaded into it, the better it performed, even under peak load." The students they're referencing there is Tom and Danny have a bunch of MIT computer science students helping them program and test and build their prototype. "The remaining critical question before Danny and Tom was their business model. How would they deliver this service? What would they charge?

• 34:46David Senra?

  Even by midsummer, it was clear that no internet service providers were willing to take a chance on Akamai. At first, they thought, okay, we're just, we won't sell this to consumer market. Our market is just selling directly to internet service providers." And they were saying no. "If they wanted to make the company work, they had only one choice: build the technology themselves. We ran out of options, explained Leighton, but a clear business plan was still eluding them. For help, they turned to Todd Dagris, a shrewd Boston-based venture capitalist at Battery Ventures. What Dagris knew well was how to take a great idea and turn it into a living, breathing business." So this is where they're coming up with a business model for Akamai.

• 35:32David Senra?

  Over time, they're talking about Todd Dagris. "Over time, Todd, over time, he began to convince..." Danny and Tom, that building and selling software wasn't going to work. Instead, Dogris was convinced they should offer a service on their own. I thought they had something special and something they could use to build a recurring business. To him, the company's real powerhouse could be found in its algorithms. They were proprietary and so sophisticated, they could almost be impossible for any competitor to replicate. Instead of giving other guys the software or Akamai's secret sauce and letting them skim the cream off the market, I thought Akamai should be the cream by building an annuity business with a big margin on this unique software.

• 36:16David Senra?

  So they stumbled onto the business model. Once they stumbled onto the business model, they decide, okay, let's just take the risk. Tom goes on sabbatical from his professorship. And in September of 1998, they ran OfficeSpace.

• 36:35David Senra?

  And Akamai Technologies was officially co-founded in, it looks like, yeah, that same month.

• 36:45David Senra?

  So, real quick, and then I'm gonna wrap up this chapter before I move on. And it says, "Layton still recalled an afternoon that fall, when he and Lewin were walking from LCS to their new office. And Danny used the occasion for an impromptu pep talk, offering up all the reasons he believed Akamai would succeed. He told Layton that it wasn't just their great technology, smart staff, or exemplary business plan that would guarantee success. He said, 'We had all those things, of course, but that wasn't why we're going to succeed.' Instead, Lewin told him, 'We're going to succeed because we're tenacious as hell.' Despite Lewin's bravado, he and Layton felt some ambivalence. It didn't take rigorous math to understand that the odds were against them."

• 37:30David Senra?

  That might be the one time where being really skilled at mathematics is probably not good for you. Realizing, wants to do the math in her head. According to the rule of venture capital, only one out of every 60 new businesses succeeds. "It was scary," recalled Layton. "Danny was worried about it, and I was worried for him. But in 1998, if you didn't move fast, you'd miss the moment. You'd just be another smart entrepreneur with a great idea left standing in the wake of the dot-com boom." Danny charged forward at full speed.

• 38:13David Senra?

  Okay, so this part, I think, I'm gonna include, because it's really important. As logical, I think, as sometimes founders try to be, there is some kind of, there is value in abstract, human emotion. So, the note I left for myself is "Passion is worth half a million dollars." So, at this time, Akamai is found, already, they've already been founded, they're going around and meeting with angels and venture capitalists, and they're raising money, and we're gonna stumble upon one of Danny's greatest strengths.

• 38:52David Senra?

  "In that meeting with Akamai, Friesen," this is an angel investor, okay, so let me do that over again, "in that, in the, that meeting with Akamai, Friesen became one of the first members of what had become a de facto fan club of Lewin and his performance in front of a whiteboard. In many ways, it was his canvas. With a pen in hand, he could stand in front of it for hours at a time and cover it with academic ideas, strings of some, of sometimes incomprehensible math or business strategies. And when he did, his presentations could only be described as theatrical. The more he talked and scrawled, the more animated he became, he became, hopping around

• 39:34David Senra?

  and grinning from ear to ear as his ideas came to life on its smooth, white surface. As if on cue, he would intermittently turn and look out at his audience, gauging their interest and level of understanding. Friends liken Lewin's theatrics at the whiteboard to a freight train gathering steam until the stopping point, when nearly everyone in the room sat silently wondering what exactly had just hit them. It was one of Lewin's most effective weapons. Stunned by what he saw in Lewin at the whiteboard, Friesen, Friesen said he felt a familiar sensation, the same one he experienced when he watched some of his top musical talents at the start of their careers." So, Friesen's just this rich, successful...

• 40:21David Senra?

  Businessman in the entertainment industry. So that's what he's talking about. He's like, oh, I'm getting excited like I'm watching top musical talents at the start of their careers. Danny was like ambition and intellect on steroids, Friesen said. His belief in the thing was so profoundly convincing. This is the most important part, so let me start it over. His belief in this thing was so profoundly convincing that I believed too. On the spot, Friesen pulled out his checkbook and handed them a check for half a million dollars. This is a great part, though. I didn't highlight it, but I just read it in the second. I remember walking out of the building and thinking, what have you done? He said. When people ask me, what exactly does Akamai do? I say, I don't know.

• 41:04David Senra?

  But the thing I did know when I made that commitment was that Danny Lewin was a star.

• 41:12David Senra?

  Okay, so at the end of this chapter, they convince, they convince two venture capital firms to invest four million dollars each. One of them wires the four million. The other one backs out at the last minute. So let's use this paragraph as an entry into our reoccurring critics don't know shit

• 41:34David Senra?

  segment on the Founder's Podcast. After the deal was signed, everyone went home to celebrate for the holiday. As for Venrock, these are the people that backed out. As for Venrock's last minute decision, the true cause leaked later. The deal fell through not because Venrock lost faith in Akamai, but because a senior partner in the firm's New York office had butted heads with Lewin. He thought Danny was arrogant and didn't like his demeanor. Venrock's decision to pass on the deal proved costly. If the firm had taken a 10% stake in Akamai for $10 million, it would have been worth $2 billion less than a year later. Daggers said it went down as one of the dumbest venture moves in history.

• 42:18David Senra?

  Okay, so let's skip ahead. I still have a lot of notes to cover and I've been recording for quite a while. All right. Uh, this is their actual first product. So what does Akamai do? What are they going to sell? And it's this product they call FreeFlow. With FreeFlow, Akamai created its own private path across the public internet. Built entirely on software, it was a virtual road, one that took advantage of the internet's architecture without relying on it. This enabled Akamai to offer its customers a number of benefits, chiefly fault tolerance. If one of Akamai's servers went down, the others in the network automatically picked up its workload until its service was restored. Another benefit to Akamai was ease of installation.

• 43:00David Senra?

  To Akamai's quote-unquote, their website, content providers followed relatively simple step-by-step instructions to launch the FreeFlow software, which tagged the content or pages to be served by Akamai with an Akamai Resource Locator, an ARL, Akamai's version of a URL or web address. The value of FreeFlow went beyond the speed and efficiency of content delivery. Another benefit was maintenance. Customers didn't have to install or maintain any hardware, a major draw for the engineers who would otherwise have to spend time, money, and energy on finding a good fix when their sites reached peak traffic.

• 43:40David Senra?

  Akamai also offered what it called "proof of performance," the guarantee that if FreeFlow failed to deliver a customer content at any time, or failed to deliver it faster than customers' own service, Akamai's would issue a refund. So that is FreeFlow. Oh, I like this. This is random, but um, it's the no-er left, just keep it simple. They have to hire, at this time, they're hiring public relations firms because they're trying to get the word out about the technology. And I love, um, that the guy they hired, uh, which is that Greenberg guy that, that...

• 44:24David Senra?

  That Danny was emailing from Toronto a few minutes ago on the podcast. He figured out, I just like the sentence from him because it's really smart. Especially when you're talking about how confusing Akamai's technology could be. He goes, "My goal was to express it in layman's terms so that your grandmother could understand it, and my grandmother could." He was skilled at translating what Akamai did into something that sounded simple and impressive to a Main Street audience. That's probably valuable to anybody offering any kind of product or service. This is also interesting. So we went into like what the, we understood where, how, like what business model they're using, right? But they can't figure out pricing.

• 45:07David Senra?

  Somebody else, something everybody I think struggles with when they're creating something. And so this is how they find the right price and model. So they hired this guy, Gallagher. Okay, so it says, "At age 39, Gallagher became Akamai's Vice President of Sales. One of Gallagher's first tasks was to help Akamai set a pricing plan. At the time, the Content Delivery Network, the CDN..." That doesn't sound, okay, let me read that sentence again. "At the time, the Content Delivery Network business..." Oh my goodness, let's do this again. "At the time, the Content Delivery Network business model was so new that there was no industry standard.

• 45:51David Senra?

  Akamai had a rough plan in place, one that would charge customers around $800 per megabit of data delivered per second. Gallagher insisted the price was far too low. 'They were looking at it mathematically,' said Gallagher, 'but I was looking at it in terms of what the market would bear.' Gallagher suggested that more than doubling the price to what he believed was the magic number, the magic number, $1,995 per megabit per second. 'Everyone scoffed at me,' recalled Gallagher, 'and I told them, "You know what? I'll fucking prove to you that I can sell it at this price.'" And he did. When the company finally landed a full-price contract with Discovery Channel, it came

• 46:36David Senra?

  in at $1,995. From that moment on, Akamai had in place a straightforward, serviced-based revenue plan, charging clients an even $2,000 per megabit per second per month."

• 46:52David Senra?

  The pricing was based on each client's peak usage, which meant that if it reached 5 megabits per second at any time during one month, Akamai would receive $10,000 for that month.

• 47:09David Senra?

  Going back to the importance of passion. So I was listening to a podcast and this guy who I think is really interesting, has a lot of interesting philosophies in life. It's the founder of Angelus. His name's Naval Ravikant. He was talking to somebody, and unfortunately, I don't remember who or what podcast, but they talked about, if you were like, what do you think are the skills that are essential? Like, what skills would you teach your kids if you could be in charge of like schooling? And he said, "Sales and coding." And there's other things you could add on to that and other things that maybe you could take away, but I think sales, everybody should learn. I do think it is a, has universal value in almost anything

• 47:53David Senra?

  that you could possibly do. And this note is about Danny was the best salesperson. So we've already seen kind of hints in this when, when he was able, just in one meeting, to convince this guy to hand over $500,000. So that's obviously sale, because he's fundraising. But let's go, let's go into this part of the book. "It quickly became apparent that when it came to sales, Lewin was the company's most powerful weapon, capable of turning skeptics into true believers. A lot of meetings would begin with some decision maker saying, 'Thanks for coming to Seattle, but I've only got 20 minutes. My boss told me I had to take this meeting, so sit down and tell me what you have to say.' Two hours later, Danny would still be at the whiteboard in full throttle

• 48:37David Senra?

  with a room full of technology staff in rapt attention. Danny was so focused on getting everyone in the room to experience this euphoric passion, one that made them believe, 'I don't know exactly what this is, but I need to have this and I need to have it now.' Once he got the customer to this frothy pitch, once he got the customer to this frothy pitch level of excitement, he'd basically leave the room and I'd close the deal." Gallagher, that was a quote from Gallagher, the VP of Sales. The, uh, Gallagher continues. "The fact was, these customers had a need and they weren't aware that it was possible to solve it our way because nothing else like Akamai existed. Their persona of Danny rapidly created a market perception that we were intensely smart

• 49:21David Senra?

  and what we were doing was highly relevant."

• 49:31David Senra?

  Oh, so this is interesting here.

• 49:36David Senra?

  So they have a bunch of companies, at this time they have a bunch of companies signed up.

• 49:41David Senra?

  Um, and they're running trials and then the trial, if it works, uh, over the term of the trial, then the companies have agreed to, to, um, like they'll become paying customers, right? So they needed some kind of, well, let me just read this. "Akamai needed to prove itself. The trial tests were running better than expected, but the company was still selling a vision. The promise of a service so powerful it could keep the most popular websites online during unprecedented crush of traffic. For Akamai to fulfill that promise in real time, live on the internet, they needed to test their software during a naturally occurring high-traffic surge. And as good luck would have it, two traffic surges happened soon thereafter."

• 50:26David Senra?

  So the first one was March Madness. They're doing, uh, they're hosting ESPN's website and I think Sports Illustrated and our sports line. And they wind up doing, uh, really well. And then the second part I found really interesting. So he said, "That night Akamai was hosting a small gathering of investors for the screening of a trailer for the highly anticipated Star Wars film, Episode One, The Phantom Menace, which was premiering in theaters nationwide a week later. Earlier in the month, someone at Paramount's Entertainment Tonight Show had contacted Akamai asking if the company could deliver the trailer for its website on the night of its release. An agreement was signed. Umba knows to anyone at Akamai, Star Wars producer and director George Lucas

• 51:11David Senra?

  had struck a deal with Steve Jobs, interim CEO at Apple, for a blockbuster release of the trailer on apple.com and Lucas's starwars.com."

• 51:21David Senra?

  They were using Apple's new QuickTime 3 video player technology. Around 9:00 PM that night, a room full of Akamai employees and investors tuned into the livestream of the trailer on the FreeFlow-enabled website of Entertainment Tonight, which went out, which, oh my goodness, I cannot speak today, sorry guys. Which went off without a hitch. Okay, so a lot of people are watching the Entertainment Tonight website. It's using FreeFlow, it works. So check this out, though. Shortly after the screening, someone in Akamai burst in the room with breaking news. Apple's website had crashed. So had a handful of other websites that had attempted to stream bootleg copies of the Star Wars trailer

• 52:04David Senra?

  to more than 20 million viewers worldwide. The only sites that remained live, streaming the trailer without any outages or delays, were paramount.com and Entertainment Tonight. Akamai's FreeFlow handled up to 3,000 hits per second for the two sites, 250 million hits in total, and the system never exceeded even 1% of its capacity. In fact, as the download frenzy overwhelmed other sites, Akamai picked up the slack. Before long, Akamai became the exclusive distributor of all Phantom Menace QuickTimes, serving both starwars.com and apple.com.

• 52:45David Senra?

  It was another victory for Akamai, one so significant that news of it quickly made its way through the industry, allowing the company to approach more choice customers with greater credibility. The first of these names were a crazy-sounding business out of Stanford called Yahoo.

• 53:03David Senra?

  So I have to skip over, for time's sake, a bunch of stuff about Akamai, its building its business, but I do want to include this one anecdote. It's a Steve Jobs anecdote, how could you not include it on the Founder's Podcast? He's the only person that created the most successful consumer product of all time, and he's hilarious, and we're gonna see this here.

• 53:25David Senra?

  On April 1st, 1999, Sagan, this is a guy working at Akamai, who's running the company part of it, I think he's a COO at the time. On April 1st, 1999, Sagan arrived to work early to meet with advisory board member Art Bilger. Just as he sat down at his desk, the phone rang. Sagan answered, and the voice on the other... Come on, here we go, David, you can do this, you can talk. Sagan answered, and the voice on the other end said, "Hi, this is Steve Jobs, and I want to buy your company." For a second, Sagan was speechless. His first thought was that the caller was his brother, Alex, playing a prank on him for April Fool's Day.

• 54:08David Senra?

  I almost said, "Fuck you, Alex," and hung up the phone. Instead, he replied, "Steve, nice to meet you. Our company is not for sale, but we'd love to be partners." The call began three months of tough negotiations with Jobs, who initially offered up $16 million in cash to purchase Akamai. They wound up not selling to him, obviously, especially not for 16 million. But the reason I put that in there is because one of the biggest things, ethos of, like the Apple way of doing things, is to keep things incredibly simple, right? Which in consumer markets is incredibly important. And I've read a lot of other correspondence when it talks about, like in the Snapchat

• 54:50David Senra?

  book, "How Do I Turn Down a Billion Dollars?", they show emails of like Mark Zuckerberg trying to meet up, like, we know what he wants, like, why is he meeting with Snapchat? He wants to buy them. But he doesn't ever say that until like they meet in person, then there's a couple of offers. But reading through those emails and seeing other documentation in other books, I've never seen somebody so... Like, Steve Jobs just cuts right to the point. I love that. "Hi, this is Steve Jobs, and I want to buy your company." One, two sentences, instead of going back and emailing and just bullshitting and doing all the other stuff, like, he just didn't waste time. So, I don't know, I just find it fascinating. I've been also watching, so, if you're listening to this, I'm recording this in early 2018,

• 55:35David Senra?

  and it's all this...

• 55:38David Senra?

  Public attention right now, having to do with, like, what are technology companies' responsibilities in terms of privacy, is that even something consumers want, etc., etc. And that led me down a rabbit hole of watching old Steve Jobs videos. Some, including the last interview he ever did publicly, but more so ones where it was after he was kicked out of Apple, before he went back. I don't know, he just, he just has a, especially when he wasn't like, you know, he has a reputation for being like a dick, but I would say that based on what I've read and seen, it's like that was, you know, he was 22 years old, worth 400, what, 300 million dollars, something like that, like, it's gonna be really hard to stay humble.

• 56:23David Senra?

  But I think what happened is, yeah, he was certainly a dick, but a lot of those stories took place when he was way earlier in his career, as opposed to like the last 10, 10 years of his life. And I would say the last 10, 12 years of his life is when he did the most important work. But anyways, I don't know, I'm just fascinated by the way his mind thinks and the way he communicates, and he communicates extremely, extremely clearly. Something I would love to be able to do on this podcast, but I'm working on it. Okay. We're skipping ahead, and then we're gonna get, I'm gonna cover a couple more personality thing, personality traits with Danny, because I think understanding the personalities of the founders that we're covering on the podcast is extremely important. But then I wanna get, there's a serious part at the end that's, you know, almost like

• 57:07David Senra?

  tear-inducing. Okay, so this part is just a graduate student, and I just included this part because I thought it was an amazing sentence, given exactly where he found himself in his life at this time. Although they spent the better part of two years building Akamai, Leighton and Lewin still harbored, they've already IPO'd, by the way. Hold on, is that true? Yes. Although they'd spent the better part of two years building Akamai, Leighton and Lewin still harbored similar long-term life plans of a quiet cerebral career in academia. Suddenly, though, they were at the helm of a breakout company moving at a breakneck pace.

• 57:49David Senra?

  And both of them, despite the confidence they exuded, were in over their heads. "It's kind of like when a lobster gets boiled," explained Leighton. "You don't realize what's happening to you. You don't look in from the outside and think, 'Oh, my life has really changed.' I was too immersed and drawn in by the task at hand." Lewin told the Jerusalem po-

• 58:14David Senra?

  Guys, I have to record this today because I don't have much time in my schedule, but I cannot talk today. All right. Lewin told the Jerusalem Report, "It's frightening. I have this company of 110 people headed by one of the biggest businessmen around with lots of money in the bank, and I'm just a graduate student."

• 58:37David Senra?

  This is my post-IPO quote. "In less than one year, a tiny startup out of MIT had grown to a company with a market valuation greater than that of General Motors."

• 58:54David Senra?

  So the IPO makes them, obviously, really, really, really wealthy.

• 58:59David Senra?

  But it also, let me read another sentence to you, I'm trying to find it right now, where it talks about the craziness of this time. So they're wealthy, but check this out, okay, here it is.

• 59:10David Senra?

  So they're doing really well after the IPO, but remember, Danny dies on September 11, 2001, right? So the last, unfortunately, the last like year and a half of his life, it's not good.

• 59:22David Senra?

  Let's check this out. "With Akamai's stock down from $327 just 18 months ago to $7.60." Okay, so Akamai shot up like a rocket. Then the bubble starts bursting, a lot of their customers are other startups, and what happens when the startups go bust? They lose their customers. So now they went from $327 down to $7, okay? So not only is, and we're about to get to the end, and this is going to be the longest section I read, and- I don't know, it's, it's just, it's tough, man, it sucks.

• 1:00:04David Senra?

  Where was I going with that? So, okay, so not only is his company went from $327, uh, 300, you know, multi-billion dollar market cap. I think now they're down to like a $200 million market cap, something like that.

• 1:00:17David Senra?

  And they're doing layoffs, they're just not doing well. Danny and his wife get divorced, or, excuse me, separated, they're never divorced. But Danny's living in a house, uh, his own, he buys his own house.

• 1:00:31David Senra?

  So, he's dealing with the, the breakup of his family and his business is on the verge of collapse.

• 1:00:39David Senra?

  And we're gonna see how he spends his last day.

• 1:00:49David Senra?

  And that's what, this is, this is now, we're gonna get to the, the, I mean, the reason probably the book is written. Definitely the reason the book was written, given on the introduction that the author wrote. So I think this is gonna be the last section I include on the podcast, so let's go ahead and, um, let's go into this and see if I can make this make sense for you.

• 1:01:10David Senra?

  Okay. "It might have been the fight to keep Akamai alive, or maybe it was just some strange, inexplicable combination of circumstances that collided sometime late that summer. But Lewin gained a much greater perspective on his life outside Akamai. First came a visit from his mother and father. The first one Charles had made since Danny, Ann, and the boys left Israel five years earlier." Okay. Charles is his dad, give you some background. Uh, they're living in Denver, Danny's 14 years old. Uh, Charles gets into, uh, something called Zionism, which I guess is, like, uh, part of his religious beliefs means that he should go back to the Holy Land and live there.

• 1:01:52David Senra?

  So he, he just picks up his entire family, his wife and three kids, and forces them to live in Israel. And he gets like really pissed at his son for leaving Israel.

• 1:02:03David Senra?

  Which again is really weird, like I know it's something like something I was up, I told you like as you know, I have a daughter and I try to think of like, when I'm parenting, I'm like, listen, there's certain things that I may want for you. Or I may want for her life, but it's her life. And at the end of the day, she's gotta do it. Charles didn't really look at it that way. Charles looked at it like Danny was disrespecting him and like, he should have stayed in Israel. So,

• 1:02:28David Senra?

  this is really important because this is happening the week before September 11th. So hopefully this gives you a little more context. So let's go back to that. So Charles is Danny's dad. First came a visit from his mother and father, the first one Charles had made since Danny and the boys had left Israel five years earlier. When asked why he didn't visit more often, Charles Lewin said very little, noting his decision was rooted in quote unquote principle. Gross. Friends of Danny speculated that to leave, it's not gross to have principles, that's not what I'm saying, but that's your son. Get over your religion, get over your other stuff and go spend time with him, man. It's like, okay.

• 1:03:07David Senra?

  Friends of Danny speculated that to leave Israel to him would be to leave the life he created for his family when he made the bold decision to make, is I think this is a Hebrew word, it looks like Aliyah, the singer, but it's Aliha, Aliyah? Which I think is the Holy Pilgrimage back home, maybe? Hopefully, I don't know. He didn't, and this is the part that really bothers me. He didn't want to endorse a life for Danny of some big money businessman trapped in the culture of wealth that exploded in the dot com boom. But what if Danny wants that for his own life? Shouldn't Danny get to choose?

• 1:03:45David Senra?

  Right?

• 1:03:48David Senra?

  Okay, so of course Peggy Lewin, Danny's mom, who often visited Cambridge disagreed, calling Charles's decision one made out of stubbornness.

• 1:04:00David Senra?

  Danny had made several trips to Israel that year to see his family, but friends says he desperately, friends say he desperately wanted his father to come to Cam- this is important, this is what I'm talking about, why his dad was kind of a dick for doing this. But friends say he desperately wanted his father to come to Cambridge and see what he had built. He wanted him to be proud. Peggy didn't know exactly why Charles changed his mind, nor for that matter, did Charles. In the first week of September 2001, Charles and Peggy arrived in Boston for a long weekend. They toured Akamai, walked around Cambridge, and talked over a lot of what life had thrown at them over the course of five years. Looking back on the visit, Charles said, this is his dad talking now,

• 1:04:45David Senra?

  "Things occur that we don't understand in the usual frame of our, of our understandings, and my going there was one of them. It was something," and then he says this, uh, this Hebrew word and it translates to, "it was something with the help of heaven."

• 1:05:03David Senra?

  Um, I'm gonna skip over this part, but, uh, one evening that same week, Lewin stops by his friend's house, he hadn't seen his friend in a while. They, at 10:00 PM, they play a game of pool and have a beer, and he's just saying, "Hey, I've been a bad friend, I've been busy." And he's telling his friend that he's, he's working, he's been working things out with Ann. They've been seeing each other again, and, uh, he wants to like, basically go back to it. He wants to make his marriage work and spend more time with his sons, okay?

• 1:05:29David Senra?

  Um, with more layoffs ahead, it was a terrible week for Akamai, but Lewin approached the Tummo with his usual cheer and buoyancy. He was scared, the stock had plummeted, and a few of Akamai's customers were on the verge of collapse. On September 10th, okay, so this is his last full day alive. On September 10th, Lewin called a meeting at Akamai for more than a dozen employees. In a conference room, Lewin offered up a new vision for the company. One was that, one was that, one that was clear and well-planned. "Danny was very focused," observed Julia Austin, who was still in charge of the engineering team. "He told us that we were going to shift direction and talked about where we go, where we were going next as a company."

• 1:06:14David Senra?

  At the end of the meeting, which lasted well over eight hours, Austin and her coworkers, somewhat daunted by the task at hand, tried to convince Lewin to change his plan to travel to Los Angeles the next day and stay in Cambridge to shepherd the layoffs and restructuring. This is a really crazy part. Lewin opened his BlackBerry and for a moment seemed to consider it, but then said he couldn't, adding, "You guys will be fine." Such is life, such is the craziness of life, that that one decision, and he could still very well be alive. Later that evening, Leighton and Lewin got together for the grim task

• 1:06:58David Senra?

  of eliminating approximately 500 of the company's 1,500 employees. Both of them knew it was just the first round. By their estimates, Akamai would have to downsize at least 500 more for any chance of survival. Then they'd have to handle the issue of morale. They'd have to convince those who remained that the ship wasn't sinking. "I remember that night distinctly. It was a horrible, horrible night," Leighton said. "We recruited these people. They were our friends, and we all worked so hard together." Leighton said Lewin was emotionally drained by the layoffs. He had personally hired so many staffers, and he'd agonize over the decisions of whom to let go.

• 1:07:42David Senra?

  Leighton and Lewin worked through the night, and as the hours ticked by, they talked not just as business partners, but also as friends. It was not until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. on September 10th that Lewin and Leighton wrapped up their work. Lewin had a flight to catch in California in just a few hours. So actually, the book's wrong. It's 2:00 a.m. September 11th. So it says Lewin and Leighton wrapped up their work. Lewin had a flight to catch to California in just a few hours, so he said goodbye to Leighton. Late that night, Lewin chose to return to the home he shared with Ann and the boys.

• 1:08:26David Senra?

  In the weeks prior to this, he and Ann had begun to reconcile and just recently decided to give their marriage another chance. "The two of them hoped," Ann said, "to remain together for the rest of their lives."

• 1:08:42David Senra?

  Okay, here we go. Early on the morning of September 11th, 2001, Lewin kissed Ann goodbye and drove from his home to Boston's Logan International Airport. He arrived just in time to catch American Airlines Flight 11, scheduled for departure at 8 a.m. and bound non-stop for Los Angeles. It was a trip he had taken so many times, more than 30 in the past year, that he knew the flight crew by name, the numbers of the most comfortable seats, and the makes and models of the aircraft. The plane was partially full, 81 passengers, 9 crew members, and 2 pilots.

• 1:09:25David Senra?

  Like Lewin, many of the passengers seated in business class were traveling for work on their daily scheduled flight, a television producer, actress, photographer, and several businessmen. But Lewin was a standout among them, dressed more like a college kid in his gap-blue jeans, t-shirt, and gray Nike sneakers. Lewin settled into his seat, 9B, and pulled out his BlackBerry to make a phone call before departure. Coworkers say Lewin almost always made calls up until the moment one of the flight attendants reprimanded him for failing to shut down his device. Around 7:30 a.m., with the plane still sitting on the runway,

• 1:10:10David Senra?

  he called Akamai's in-house attorney, David Jutson. Lewin knew Jutson was an early riser and often one of the first to arrive at the office. He wanted to check on some paperwork Jutson had been preparing for an upcoming deal. Jutson said Lewin sounded full of energy despite the sleepless night and looming layoffs. They spoke for about 15 minutes until Lewin abruptly ended the call in preparation for takeoff. "I've gotta go," Lewin told Jutson, "to tell me I have to hang up my phone."

• 1:10:44David Senra?

  American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Logan on schedule at 7:59 a.m. The plane headed due west and held on course for 16 minutes until it passed Worcester, Massachusetts. Then, instead of taking a southerly turn, it suddenly swung up to the north. Just before 8:14 a.m., the plane failed to climb to its assigned cruising altitude of 29,000 feet. At this point, it's possible Lewin suspected, perhaps before anyone else on the flight, that something terrible was about to happen. Having trained in the IDF's most elite counterterrorism unit, he had learned to identify signs of attacks well before they were carried out.

• 1:11:27David Senra?

  He also knew conversational Arabic, enough to have picked up on verbal cues if the five Middle Eastern passengers gave any. At around 8:15 a.m., a bloody hijacking began onboard. Five terrorists, all of them wielding box cutters and knives, rose from their seats in business class and began to threaten passengers and the crew. Most of what we know about the hijacking comes from reports by two flight attendants in the coach cabin, Betty Ong and Madeline Sweeney, who calmly and courageously relayed details of the hijacking as it unfolded to authorities on the ground. At 8:19 a.m., Ong told flight control, "The cockpit is not answering.

• 1:12:09David Senra?

  Somebody stabbed in business class, and I think there's mace. We can't breathe. I don't know. I think we're getting hijacked." In a separate call, Sweeney reported the plane had been hijacked and two flight attendants had been stabbed. Sweeney also confirmed that a passenger in business class had been stabbed to death, his throat slashed by one of the terrorists. That passenger, he said, was sitting in 9B, the seat assigned to Danny Lewin.

• 1:12:45David Senra?

  Based on the evidence gathered from the phone calls and authorities on the ground, the 9/11 Commissioner Report concluded that in those first 20 minutes of the flight, Mohammed Atta, the only terrorist on board train to fly a jet, probably moved to the cockpit from his business class seat, located within arm's reach of Lewin's seat. Possibly accompanied by Abdullah, I don't care about his name. Fuck him. As this was happening, according to the report, Lewin, who was seated in the row just behind Atta and Amari, was stabbed in the neck by one of the hijackers, who was seated directly behind Lewin, out of view.

• 1:13:27David Senra?

  Between 8:25 and 8:32, in accordance with the FAA protocol, Boston Center managers started notifying their chain of command that Flight 11 had been hijacked and was heading towards New York Centers airspace. At 8:44, Sweeney made her last call to ground control. "Something is wrong. We are in rapid descent. We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." Seconds later, Sweeney said, "Oh my god, we are way too low." Silence. At 8:46, the Boeing 767 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center,

• 1:14:10David Senra?

  killing everyone onboard.

• 1:14:28David Senra?

  Usually not, and I usually don't end these notes on a somber, there's not a somber ending, but uh, I don't know, this is a really emotional book. That part especially, when I read it for the first time, just... I just say, he's 31 years old, he's got two kids. I mean, do you think about it, when he hung up the phone at 7:59, when he was talking to the in-house counsel, do you think he'd be dead 15 minutes later? And if you did think he had a chance to die, you wouldn't think it, maybe a plane from, you wouldn't think it's from getting, having your throat slashed. Um, so...

• 1:15:09David Senra?

  If you want the full story, buy the book.