His name was Danny Lewin
It’s one of these strange associations that happen once in a while. A chat yesterday at Wambo about the future of video content delivery. A quick phone conversation with my buddy Steve O’Brien, now in Boston working for Unica. And some research papers I read from the MIT last night. It all triangulated to Danny Lewin, the founder and CTO of Akamai, whom I met for the first time early 2000, at a dot-com conference/tradeshow.
Seven years after, I still remember the tradeshow and how I met Danny. The Fireclick booth was located a few aisles away from the Akamai area. I use the word area, because it was huge: there was an area for the sales reps, with small podiums and LCD plasma screens featuring a video about Akamai - there was a presentation area, with about 30 chairs for people to attend their hourly presentation - and there was a more quiet area inside for more “private discussions”.
“Are you technical?” (yeah, I know, that was a cheap drop line but I really wanted to get his attention and discourage all the sales people around).
“Yes, actually I am”, said Danny with a gentle smile.
This started a really fun and interesting discussion about Content Delivery Networks, technology, the future of streaming video - Akamai’s and Fireclick’s roadmaps.
A few weeks later, Danny invited me to visit Akamai at their offices in Boston - and we had another great discussion with him and Steve. A few months later, we signed a huge partnership with them - they deployed Fireclick on their site, ran an ad for us in the Wall Street journal, and pushed Fireclick on to their customers. Then, the morning of September 11th 2001, hours after the planes hit the towers, Steve sent me a terrible email titled “Danny Lewin feared dead in the attacks”. Which got confirmed in the evening by Akamai. Obviously these weren’t the only bad news for the day - but it hit both Steve and I deep inside. In a way that’s hard to describe even 5 1/2 years after.
[…]
It’s 2007 and I still very much remember Danny. I am impressed his vision and the technology he created are still around and incredibly relevant. Most social networks use Akamai for delivering video content and photos - Akamai’s competition (Speedera and others) were either acquired by Akamai or never made it.
I learned a few things from Danny in my short interactions - which I think are essential qualities for an entrepreneur. First, Danny proved that you can be smart, rich and famous yet approchable and human. He was good at building relationships, which made him a distinctively likable person. Second, not only Danny had vision, but he also was a great evangelist. That’s why you’d see him so frequently on the road visiting customers or on tradeshows meeting new people. The best evangelists are founders - and Danny proved that every day. Third and last (and terrible), that life’s short and you must appreciate every single moment of it.
Still remembering you Danny.
