- Korn Ferry

IN REVIEW
No Better Time
The Brief, Remarkable Life of
Danny Lewin, the Genius Who
Transformed the Internet
W
h e n D a n n y L e w i n , the 31-year-old cofounder of Akamai Technologies,
settled into seat 9B on American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles, he was trying to find
a way to save his fledgling company. After a record-setting IPO in 1999, Akamai’s for-
tunes began to tumble soon after and the company was hanging on by a thread.
Lewin, the young American-Israeli math whiz with
a thousand-watt personality, had thrown his entire
being into building Akamai into an engine that
would drive the growth and capability of the Internet.
Unfortunately, Akamai, a real company with a sound
product and business model, was caught in the same
irrational bubble as the countless dot-com ventures
that had burst on the scene and proved as evanescent
as morning mist. When that bubble burst, those
startups went down in flames, and it looked like
Akamai might as well. On this morning, Sept. 11, 2001,
Lewin, despite his company’s foibles, believed his
future would be bright.
The world knows what happened next. Flight 11 was
the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center
in New York City. What few know, however, is that
Danny Lewin, a former member of the Israeli military’s
most elite special forces unit, tried to fight off the
terrorists that morning, and based on evidence from
transmissions from the plane, Lewin was the first passenger murdered on 9/11. Everyone who knew Lewin
was convinced that he leaped out of his seat and used
his training to try to take down one of the terrorists.
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In Molly Knight Raskin’s new biography of
Lewin, “No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life
of Danny Lewin, The Genius Who Transformed the
Internet” the incidents of 9/11 form a coda to a life
that was indeed remarkable.
Lewin, born in Colorado, was uprooted at age 14
by his parents so the family could make aliyah (to immigrate) to Israel. After a rough indoctrination to the
Israeli lifestyle, Lewin embraced his new country, and
though he was not obligated, joined its military. A bear
of a man who could bench press 300 pounds when he
was 16, Lewin had more than a stunning intellect. He
was a physically imposing man who was accepted after
a grueling selection process into Sayeret Matkal, the
most elite of Israel’s special forces.
“By the 1990s, the selection process for Sayeret
Matkal had expanded significantly,” Raskin writes,
“but for soldiers who were not Israeli-born, recruitment to Sayeret Matkal was almost unheard of. Still,
Lewin made the first of many decisions in his short
life to defy the odds.”
The two-year training period was daunting, but
Lewin had the right stuff and was assigned an array of
Globalization Morphs
The world has been in the process of
globalizing for years. Now, a new dimension
is emerging: How should firms treat
diversity and inclusion as they expand their
reach? Chief diversity officers and others are
in a position to rethink diversity as they take
into account the re-shoring of American jobs
and building multinational talent pipelines.
B R I E F I N G S
dangerous missions. He emerged as a leader of his unit.
On one visit home in Jerusalem, Lewin met a
young Belgian woman named Anne Pardes and
quickly fell in love. They were married when Lewin
was 21 years old. With a child on the way and a
yearning to continue his education, Lewin requested
a leave from the military to attend the Technion in
Haifa. While there, he came across
the work of a little-known M.I.T.
professor and math genius named
Tom Leighton. He knew immediately that he had to study with this
man. He chose to leave his wife
and two young sons in Israel and
head to M.I.T
Once at M.I.T. and under
Leighton’s wing, Lewin’s intellect
and matchless enthusiasm affected everyone he met. Though
they began as teacher and
student, the two men eventually
joined forces to start Akamai.
The company was based upon
an innovative algorithm conceived by Lewin and enhanced
by Leighton that aimed at
dramatically increasing the
speed and reliability of the Internet. The goal was to
abolish the “World Wide Wait” and allow servers to
host corporate Web sites.
By October 1999, though Akamai was less than
a year old and had not reached profitability, the
company joined the IPO frenzy and hit the jackpot.
Opening at $29 per share, the stock soared on its first
day of trading and closed at $145 a share. Lewin and
Leighton went home that night worth nearly
$2 billion each on paper. The stock closed out the year
at $327 a share. The fantasy didn’t last long, however.
The dot.com bubble began to burst in March 2000
and Akamai shares tanked. In 18 months, the shares
had dropped so far that the stock was delisted from
NASDAQ. Akamai’s obituaries were being written.
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7
The Impact
of Social Media
on Boards and
Directors Today
Though Raskin provides an excellent account
of the birth and early struggles of Akamai, she is
less successful in illuminating Lewin as a fully
developed character in his own story. Raskin relies
on countless interviews with friends and colleagues
but eventually comes up a tad short. We read again
and again a rehash of an early quote from M.I.T.
Professor Alfred Bruckstein, who
encountered Lewin in 1992, several years before Lewin enrolled
at M.I.T. as a student.
“His brightness was a given,
but it was his enthusiasm that
I remember the most,” said
Bruckstein. “His eyes were
scintillating. He was immersed,
interested and had this fantastic drive.”
Lewin, with an unmatched
understanding of algorithms,
an eclectic and little-understood subset of math, was able
to spark a fire inside Leighton
that lured the professor out of
the ivory tower into the world
of tech commerce. Akamai
today is a $7-billion company
with 3,500 employees around the world, and Leighton
was recently named CEO. Using its unique technology, Akamai regularly controls between 15 and
30 percent of all Internet traffic.
According to Raskin, “Leighton said he thinks
often about Lewin, but no longer in the context of
Akamai. Over time, he said, the feeling that Danny
might charge into the room — smiling and wild-eyed
with a big new idea — has faded. When he does think
of Lewin, Leighton often recalls the time when they
could talk for hours about their shared dream of
proving mathematical theorems for a living. It was
the moment in time before they took what they both
knew, as theoreticians, to be a rare chance.” 

www.facebook.com/NoBetterTimeBook
Only 27 percent of
corporate board directors
consider themselves
“very knowledgeable”
about the company’s
social media practices and
believe they can easily
discuss the topic
and ask probing
questions.
Define.
Distill. Deploy:
Adopting
21st-century
Competencies
For High-Impact
Talent
While job experience, personality
and other factors
matter, measurable
leadership competencies account for
45 percent of executive on-the-job
performance.
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